With
the big news that Leno is moving back out to late night percolating through the wires this weekend, the bigger picture came out of CES, buried amid gizmos and smart-Fords and tablets: Regardless of
when or where Leno, Conan and Fallon air, it might be your phone that's delivering them to your TV sooner than you think.
If mobile is changing everything, then the next evolution, the rise of
4G networks, will change everything for mobile. So says Josh Lovison, mobile practice lead at IPG's Emerging Media Lab. "It's promising
home broadband speeds to mobile computing experience," he told Ad Adge. And what that is going to bring consumers is "a ubiquity of experience between your home -- even a television viewing experience
-- and your mobile phone. In fact, looking a few years down the road, your mobile phone might actually be what's your powering your TV in terms of your connection."
Verizon announced at CES that
it is rolling out LTE -- which stands for Long Term Evolution -- in 30 cities by the end of 2010, which Lovison puts into perspective by comparing it to the leap home computing took when it went from
dial-up to broadband access.
And so begins the race for dominance, with the questions of iPhones, Nexuses, and Droids far overshadowed by what will be powering them and telecoms could become
the new gatekeepers. Verizon will be hot off the line, with its LTE network already being tested in certain areas. And AT&T is also developing an LTE network. Sprint Nextel demoed its own leap
forward, the Overdrive mobile WiMax hotspot, at CES, which operates at about 10 times the speed of 3G networks.
However, Lovison reports that the LG LTE network demonstrated at CES was pulling
down data about 8 times faster than broadband speeds, so forget about how much faster than 3G it is. The LTE networks will be the new standard, he says.