CES Trend #2: Is 2008 finally the year for 4G mobile?

Scott Fulton, BetaNews: Well, Jackie, we have the argument that the platform is finally evolving, coupled with the notion that the applications haven't evolved enough yet. Sort it out for me, would you, please? Is 2008 finally the big year for 4G?

Jacqueline Emigh, BetaNews: No, Scott, 2008 will assuredly not be "the year of 4G" -- not in the US, anyway. It's January 2008 now, and most major wireless carriers in the US still haven't even figured out what they're 4G networks are going to look like year.

Only now is Sprint Nextel making it clear that it's proceeding with a soft launch of its Xohm WiMAX service. But just last month, the company was still pondering "what's going to be the extent of deployment" of Xohm, the 4G WiMAX network it's been developing with Clearwire. That's according the company's then-acting CEO Paul Saleh, speaking at the UBS Global Media Conference in New York.

Saleh had acknowledged that the financially struggling telco is pondering various ways of using its 4G network to haul in investment money, including the possibility of spinning off its 4G network to investors and then purchasing back broadband capacity from the unit. So it's only been weeks since we thought Sprint might have written off WiMAX altogether.

Now, just the month before that, Verizon President Denny Strigl made the big announcement that Verizon's existing CDMA 3G network will be opened up to the customer's choice of devices and applications. But since the "opening up" of Verizon's 3G network isn't expected to happen until the last half of 2008, it seems a sure bet that we won't see a 4G network from Verizon or its Verizon Wireless division any time this year.

AT&T seems on the solidest ground of all with its 4G network. After first eyeing WiMAX as its 4G architecture, AT&T had pretty much decided to go to LTE instead by the middle of last year, and was setting about to upgrade its HSDPA network to HSUPA capability.

But even the most optimistic analysts don't expect AT&T's 4G network to be avaiable to the general public until 2009 -- and meanwhile, before AT&T's 4G network is all that useable, CE manufacturers will also need to update their phones and other devices with support for the new 4G protocols.

Scott: Okay, bummer. I'm starting to get depressed about this again. I would've sworn I'd seen signs of progress this week.

Like all rational people, I measure the relative state of our everyday technology against that of Star Trek. I have lost count of the communications conferences I've visited in person or via webcast where the presenter says how amazing it is that we have Star Trek's 23rd century flip-top communicators today.

And when I have a chance, I stand up and say, no we don't. And the reason why we don't is blatantly obvious, at least to any rational person who watches Star Trek: Captain Kirk's communicator could talk to anyone else's communicator on the surface of a desolate planet, even if he was stranded in its ancient history without the Enterprise to relay for him, and without Scotty having to build a multi-billion-dollar telecom network infrastructure first.

The reason we don't have 4G in this country -- heck the reason we don't have 12-G in this country -- is because we haven't invested in an evolutionary infrastructure but instead a stagnate one. We're waiting for the Enterprise to fly by and build the next one for us. Or actually, it's more like this: Our telecom industry has yet to completely amortize its investment in 3G, or even 2G. We haven't squeezed every last drop of customer value out of the half-built patchwork network we already have in place. In short, it's not dead yet, Jim.

Analysts who take a handset-centric view of the mobile communications market -- in other words, who see the evolution of this market as a factor of customer adoption of handsets -- are stuck at the wrong end of the proverbial horse. The reason that Apple's iPhone is pretty much 3G is because there is no nationwide 4G, and probably won't be one for another four years, by the most liberal estimates. Meanwhile, Sharon -- a veteran analyst who lives in Idaho -- makes do with about 1.8G.

But there's one glimmer of hope: This week, we talked more about the platforms than we did the phones, and after all this talk about "the rush to render the iPhone obsolete" -- the topic of our #6 trend. And while Apple has shown us how fabulous those devices in our hands can become, what we need now is to devote some serious attention to the foundation of our new telecommunications system. It's not going to just beam itself down.