@ LA Broadband Summit: The opportunity and dilemma of mobile broadband

LOS ANGELES — “However you think about it, you’re not thinking big enough or going fast enough,” Kelly King, AT&T Mobility’s SVP of consumer and mobility, said at the LA Broadband Summit.
Perhaps that best sums up how every player in the ecosystem should be approaching the opportunity and dilemma of mobile broadband.
“If you think about it, our society is evolving … because of our innovative wireless technology,” said Lucy Hood, executive director of the Institute for Communication Technology and Management at the University of Southern California.
“We are finding that consumers are actually equally happy with an optimal bundle of goods,” she said, pointing to CTM’s latest research. “They’re not telling us they need everything and I think that’s a good point for our society and certainly with bandwidth constraints.”
City budgets are incredibly constrained and yet technology managers are looking to innovate and increasingly see wireless as a path to drive use and capacity, she added. “It’s the best of times. It’s the worst of times.”
Randi Levin, chief technology manager and IT general manager for the City of Los Angeles, said 20% of the people living here are below the poverty line.
“Access to broadband is not the problem in the City of Los Angeles, it’s can people afford the broadband and can they afford a $300 device,” she said.
The city has it’s own set of financial problems as well and that’s made for a more collaborative approach to technology on many fronts.
“The city model has always been we design it, we build it, we run it on our own. We can’t afford to do that anymore,” she said.
Los Angeles recently contracted with Google Inc. and is now implementing Google Apps to “provide more up-to-date tools for our workforce,” Levin added, while pointing to the many areas that technology can address.
“We don’t have things integrated to tell you if someone is filming at that point or if there’s construction going on … or if police have closed the street … they’re not all integrated into one source,” she said. Even though traffic systems are better, they could be much better. “There’s opportunities out there for a lot of applications, but we need to have enough capacity to deliver that.”
Most city workers are mobile and giving them resources to be more productive in the field will also save costs, Levin added.
On the topic of broadband capacity, AT&T’s King was later asked if 4G networks could handle enough capacity for everyone in Los Angeles to have an iPhone or iPad, for example.
“I think that’d be difficult to say with great confidence,” he said. “Everyone is limited by bandwidth.”
It’s clear that much more has to be done.
“Getting more spectrum is key. We also have to do spectrum conservation,” King said. “We have to find ways that applications get more efficient. It’s very similar to the energy management discussion going on.”