Defining the 4G app

(This story is part of Connected Planet’s Mobile Data Paradox microsite – an ongoing collection of features, blogs and opinions on the key question facing mobile operators today: how do you make a business of 4G and mobile data?

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Verizon Wireless' (NYSE:VZ, NYSE:VOD) Lindsay Notwell wants developers to build 4G apps. Speaking at the VZW Developer Conference earlier this week, Notwell highlighted the new capabilities of Verizon’s forthcoming long-term evolution network, which will offer speeds, capacity and latency unheard of on today’s 3G world. Notwell implored developers to utilize that next-generation technology to create the next generation of applications and services.

But what exactly are those applications and services? What constitutes a 4G app versus a 3G app? The industry is still struggling for answers. Take Sprint’s (NYSE:S) recent announcement of a new developer contest to create the best 4G app. Sprint laid out some sizable prizes, created different application categories and listed off detailed criteria, but not one of those criteria or categories was in an area that distinguishes a 4G service from a 3G service.

Sprint and its partners probably have a wide degree of latitude to factor a developer’s creative use of WiMax’s capabilities into its decision, but from a developer’s point of view it’s easy to perceive the goal of the contest as building a faster 3G app.

Back at the VZW dev event, Notwell seemed to offer similar definitions for 4G apps. He pointed to mobile video as being the most immediate beneficiary of LTE’s fast speeds, but as Verizon has demonstrated with the launch of increasingly more sophisticated video apps and phones, mobile video streaming is by no means confined to the 4G network. As the latest installment of the Mobile Data Paradox shows, Verizon Wireless views 4G not as the enabling platform for video streaming, but as the technology that will make mobile video of better quality and more ubiquitous. “We have constraints in the network today,” Notwell told the developer audience. “I’m telling you we’re here to release those constraints.”

So does this make 4G just a souped-up version of 3G, enabling the same apps, just boosting them on steroids? Not exactly, Notwell said. LTE has more tricks than just faster connection speeds. One of the key yet under-reported features of LTE is its low latency — the time it takes for a packet to make a round trip through the network. 3G latencies can be as high as 750 milliseconds, introducing noticeable delay into data transactions, Notwell said, but LTE drops those numbers to 30 milliseconds.

“The significance of that is anything less than 50 milliseconds is considered real time,” Notwell said. “What happens when you put real time in front of your application?”

The answer to that questions is a number of applications that never made their way from wireline networks to wireless networks. While voice over IP, an application heavily dependent on low latency, has been making its way to the wireless data network, its more sophisticated cousin videoconferencing hasn’t made sizable in-roads. Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) made a splash with the introduction of its Facetime video chat app, but the service is limited to Wi-Fi connections. Low latency will also open up a whole new world of network gaming to the mobile device. Massively multiplayer online role playing games and first-person shooter network death matches are all heavily dictated by network response speeds. You might pull the trigger faster than your opponent, but if his packet reaches the server before yours does, you’re dead.

Examples such as network gaming and real-time video communications raise a different set of questions, though. Will the 4G network server primarily as a means of breaking down the barriers between the wireline and wireless network experience, or will it evolve into a distinct experience of its own? Will 4G just allow us to take all of our full-featured PC apps mobile?

Not that that faster and higher-quality video streaming, real-time fluid video communications and the prospect of blowing up online enemies are anything to scoff at. 4G will have a tremendous impact on the apps we know and love today. I just wonder whether we will ever see something we would uniquely term a 4G app.

When online mapping was combined with mobility, vehicle and personal navigation applications were born. Combining the wireless data network with push notification technology and e-mail servers created the BlackBerry, which fueled a mobile revolution in the enterprise. What technologies will 4G link up with to create the distinct 4G application? What will be the app or apps that define 4G as a game-changing technology? I’m sure those apps are out there. They’re just waiting for some developer to invent them.