Anxious to wean the best man off a natural obsession with logistics and timings at a recent wedding, I asked him (he's in the wireless industry) whether Wimax or cellular would be the dominant 4G technology.
The resultant comprehensive switchover from contemplating the problems of the bridesmaids, the caterers, toasts and speeches to a consideration of the future of wireless telecommunications was gratifying.
The issue is clearly one with deep ramifications for the industry, and basically no one has much of a clue about which way the industry will jump.
"There's so much money involved", reckons Rene Penning de Vries, CTO of NXP, "people are concerned to see that the investment in 3G is used to the maximum."
Asked which wireless technology the industry would use for 4G if they were starting from a greenfield situation, de Vries replies: "It's all about spectrum efficiency. In the end that would be the most important criterion. I tend to believe that WiMAX would be the one."
"4G will be based on WiMAX if it has the performance which outperforms the other standards", reckons de Vries, "if WiMAX doesn't have the performance of extended CDMA then WiMAX won't be successful."
"This is strongly disputed by the 3GPP consortium which believes that LTE will provide the performance needed," adds de Vries.
Also, of course, deployment of WiMAX will be enormously cheaper than upgrading the cellular basestation to handle the new enhanced technologies like HSDPA, HSUPA and LTE. "The estimates to upgrade a basestation are hugely different", says de Vries.
Will China go for WiMAX? "It depends on who owns the IP", replies de Vries, "no one wants a company which owns 60 per cent of the IP of any system."
Software Defined Radio (SDR), which could provide a solution to multiple standards systems is "five, six or seven years away", according to de Vries, though he emphasises that this is for systems with six or more radios.
For simpler SDR systems it will be quicker. Maybe a couple of years away. "It's not going to be a Big Bang, it's going to be step-by-step", said de Vries, "the two most logical radios to put together are the cellular pipe and connectivity pipe."
TOMORROW MORNING: TEN BEST ELECTRONICS INDUSTRY QUOTES
but, was it a good wedding?
Excellent with, if I may say so, a superb best man