A few news items passed my eyes this morning, and it got me thinking about a conversation that Truphone Founder and CTO James Tagg and I had last week during IT Expo in Las Vegas. James, who invented mobile VoIP and the touch screen technology we all use at airports and other kiosks, remarked that while we are seeing faster speeds, we're not seeing services coming along that can really take advantage of them, except to download a movie or upload massive databases. His comment reminded me of the Wendy's TV commercial of a distant time, "Where's the Beef?"
But that's not stopping the carriers, information service providers and mobile operators from entering into the race to be first and fastests.
Over in Singapore we're seeing uber operator SingTel roll out 300 mbps mobile service based on the LTE-A (A= Advanced) or as James puts it, "real LTE" into the market. Here in the USA Google and AT&T are waging a space race towards the Gigabit Internet with salvos being fired across the bow on where fiber is being laid and which cities and town across the USA get "lit" up.
To me, until such time as the "beef" is there, all these speed claims are more about "mine being bigger than yours" but we will start to see new companies come along who are indeed developing the next big thing, and those companies will be the "Wendy's" while everyone else will still be "McDonalds."