The year 2012 marked the entry of Romanian mobile operators into the 4G war, Cosmote, Orange, RCS & RDS, Vodafone and other small operators purchasing licenses for the use of 4G LTE frequencies in our country. Similar inflows took place in other European countries, in 2012 a little over 1 billion dollars were invested in the development of the 4G infrastructure in Europe. In 2013, the figure is 50% higher and still fails to catch up with the investments made in the USA, where mobile operators have extensive coverage for this type of service.
Analyzing the two markets, those of Wall Street claim that only in 2017 the investments made in these infrastructures will be equal for the USA and the EMEA area (Europe, Africa and the Middle East), approximately 1.8 billion dollars will be invested in 2017 for the development of 4G LTE networks. The problem for all operators investing in Europe is that they have to offer their services at low prices to attract customers to them, and this seriously affects their profits.
We all know that even in Romania the operators did not ask for premium prices for the 4G LTE subscriptions offered to customers, preferring to offer access to this infrastructure to an existing customer base, and from next year they will probably start diversifying their offer a little. There is the possibility that some of them will start offering access to the 4G network only on the basis of expensive subscriptions and without much data traffic, but it remains to be seen how the market will evolve until then, because in the absence of interested customers, offers of this kind they will not succeed.
