Ever since the days of Noah, and particularly in modern times through the Industrial Revolution, Field of Dreams and the Internet, the concept of “If you build it, they (Actually, in the movie, it was “he,” but I’ll take a little poetic license here.) will come” has been fairly dominant in business and society.
And in the world of hi-tech, the rule of thumb has always been – build a prototype, take it through field/beta testing, prove the concept, and then – if it works – mass produce.
But for some reason, the world of LTE doesn’t seem to be following this axiomatic process.
Rather, the industry prefers to hang its hat on the old chicken-egg question, as applied to LTE:
Which comes first, the devices or the demand?
Presented even more simply, it seems the carriers are not placing orders for devices because they insist such devices don’t exist. Meanwhile, the device vendors aren’t investing in new, LTE-enabled devices because they are not seeing the demand.
Well, that’s all well and good, but it’s also a recipe for the industry moving ahead much more slowly than we’d like.
So Altair is doing things differently, and focusing on the strong track record of the classical hi-tech rule of thumb. We are doing our share by building LTE devices and getting them out to the market.
Just the other day, we announced that we have a 3.5GHz tablet. We expect that, even though the market sees 3.5GHZ as a niche, there will be increased demand, now that a solution is available.
We’ll see if we are right about it, but one thing’s for sure. We have history on our side.
We intend to continue pushing new products and solutions out there, and we strongly believe that the more vendors “build it,” the more carriers “will come” and buy.