The Road to 4G: an Interview with Mathew Oommen, VP of Technology at Sprint

This interview was conducted live at CES in the Sprint Lounge on January 7, 2010. I had intended to create a 3 minute podcast but due to sound quality issues , I am converting it into a blog post. I’d welcome your comments on connected devices, M2M and the move to 4G.

Maribel: Mathew,  There has been a lot discussion about the moving of the 4G environment and some of the challenges that operators are facing. One of them perhaps being back-haul and another being supporting users in denser environments.  What do you see as the main technical challenges in moving to 4G?

Mathew: I concur with you in that there are many challenges.  One of them indeed, like you said, is back-haul, the other is spectrum to provide the customer with the right experience.  And the third one would be session continuity between your 3G and 4G environments. And the fourth one would be device availability.  I think that all of these are challenges that need to be addressed to make sure that you can provide the customers with the right experience at an affordable cost structure.

Maribel: Mathew, that is a broad list of challenges.  Can you spend a few minutes discussing how we fix some of those. For example, session continuity, what are the things we need to address there?

Mathew: When I look at all of the four challenges – I believe all of them are important. Indeed session continuity is one of the most critical ones, because when a user goes on a 4G network, a 4G network is initially not everywhere. So you will have to get down to a 3G level in between as you move from region to region.  We have engineered our network between Clear-wire and Sprint, in such a way that we leverage our 3G infrastructure with their 4G infrastructure, because the beauty of the 4G infrastructure that we have is, it’s an all IP infrastructure.  This is the first time an all IP national infrastructure has ever been built.  And this is an end-to-end IP infrastructure including the RAN.  The other component that I would  like to add here is the back haul.  One of our biggest challenges is back haul. AT&T and Verizon and the other incumbents control 90% or more of the access market in the US. And we obviously don’t want to be in the  position where the cost of back haul is hurting our business.  We would like to have a level playing field, and we would like to work with the regulators, so that we can meet some of the expectations of uniform mobile broadband connectivity in the US. However, for now we have addressed the back haul differently, since we are leveraging microwave.

Maribel: Interesting.  There have been many discussions of open access for both for Internet access in general as well as in the mobile space. There clearly are challenges that we will face going forward in that.

Mathew: Absolutely, I totally agree with you on that.

Maribel: Mathew, there is a great deal of excitement about machine to machine (M2M), and the movement to internet of things.  One of the questions that is frequently asked is, what is the benefit to having 4G as we move to the internet of things, what’s Sprint’s perspective on that?

Mathew: Sincerely, we at Sprint believe, that machine to machine is going to be the biggest transformation that is going to happen in this decade.  We obviously are expecting hundreds of millions, in fact billions of connected devices for the next ten to fifteen years globally in the M2M space. 4G is very unique in enabling certain components of machine to machine, because anytime you get a device connected to the internet, the internet has always fostered innovation and we believe connectivity to the internet will spawn more innovation in the machine to machine space.  For example, look at the considerable amount of time, effort and money that is being spent on the energy smart grid.

Maribel: Right.

Mathew: We believe that we will require multiple smart grids as our nation transitions into the new digital economy.  As an example, a health smart grid, a transportation smart grid, and a national defense smart grid.  It is not just one energy smart grid.  Today, all of our emphasis has been on energy smart grid.  As machines become more connected, machines become more pervasive.  The smart grids will become a hierarchical smart grid that will include –and actually become –the national smart grid backbone.  Now look at the baby boomers who are becoming older. The families of the baby boomers want to take care of them using remote health monitoring. And transportation is not just about security, ticketing or logistics, but,  it is also about enriched multimedia services across the mass transit system.  So, machine to machine, is the fundamental building block and 4G is the enabler to making the smart grids happen as we transition into a digital economy.

Maribel: Wonderful, so we should expect more smart grids and also video. Lopez Research believes there is a great market opportunity in the numerous connected devices we will see here at CES and in the future to come.  I want to thank you for your time today.  It has been wonderful speaking to you, and I look forward to speaking to you again, and hearing your progress on the move to 4G.

Question to the readers: What do you think the connected device market opportunity is? Who wins? Who loses?