Cost of 4G mobile data

08 Feb 2009 | 14.24 Europe/London

At a recent LTE summit Hank Kafka, vice president of network architecture for AT&T, said that "an LTE network running at full capacity on a 5 x 5 MHz channel could deliver 1 megabyte of capacity to a user at the cost of 0.10 euros" in other words just under 10p per MByte or £100 per GByte. This reduction in cost compared to current technologies is largely due to the increased data capacity of 4G which means the fixed costs of the mast and network gets divided by a larger amount of data carried.

That cost is about 100 times greater than the current typical retail charge for additional fixed line broadband data (£1/GB) or ten times more than Three charge for 1 GByte topups to their mobile broadband service. At least it is less than Three charge for exceeding the pre-paid amount - "you will be charged £1 per MB" - so there may be some hope for future reductions on excess charges.

If these are the costs of a fully loaded network, in other words the minimum cost in optimum circumstances, then the real world cost of delivering a broadband USO service using mobile technology could be a bigger problem than the capacity limitations we highlighted recently.

Kafka's presentation can be downloaded from 3gamericas.org and it also includes some data on sector throughput and other aspects of 4G / LTE.