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I buy this. When a good friend helped build UPS' automated air hub in Louisville, Kentucky, he told me this was coming. Automated package routers communicate autonomously. This model extends to ATM machines that manage our financial transactions, red light cameras that issue citations automatically, security cameras logging our every move, GPS devices that report trucks' locations on their own, and of course robotic drones that chase terrorists in Afghanistan. Orwellian indeed. Well, I won't rest easier with these thoughts in mind, but I'll believe carriers want to profit from these capabilities and are willing to invest in smarter 4G networks to make it happen. On that note, Sharpley says that "standards-based PCRF-Policy Control and Rating Function - is a mandatory piece..." I'm sure real 4G won't happen without much smarter billing, so this makes sense to me.

If Big Brother is Watching, I Want to Smile on Camera
As a libertarian who fears big government, I'm conflicted. Surveillance and tracking may be important drivers for the 4G service environment, but I still want my paranoid mind numbed by some awfully entertaining content. Manish Gupta, vice president of global marketing for Kabira puts my mind at ease. He writes, "4G should be about communications lifestyle enhancement for the end users." I try to read these words with Manish's refined, British-educated accent in mind. It's soothing, comforting, and confident. I like the idea of having my lifestyle enhanced.

Gupta adds, "We can expect consumption of services by the end user to be on many device types (net books, tablets, smart phones, game consoles, set top boxes), paid for in a multitude of pricing formats (location based, time based, volume based, value based)." A stroller-mounted 4G device with

same, or 4G is about a higher capacity network while LTE is about service-layer integration, but still somewhere in the shadowy future.

"The popular usage of 4G is more general than LTE and refers to order of magnitude improvements in bandwidth (1Gb/s fixed and 100Mb/s mobile) whether achieved through LTE, WiMAX, or upgrades to existing technology," Wilmes says. He adds that "QoS including performance management becomes a more real-time concern" and that the new and very large investments in infrastructure necessary to make 4G happen are driving CSPs to "insist on interface standardization, e.g. MTOSI, and data standardization, e.g. SID, much more strongly than in past technology rollouts as evidenced in recent RFPs." Now there's something tangible. If the requirements are in the RFPs, then we are more likely to see smarter functions actually implemented in the network (rather than just discussed in conference sessions).