Funding 4G deployment...

so there's a common thread in current stories in the regulatory, economic and technical community concerning the deployment of 4G very fast wireless/cellular data services).

It goes like this:

1.demand is growing exponentially

2.revenue only grows linearly with number of users

3. ergo, we can't afford to deploy 4G

there's a couple of things wrong with this argument.
1. cost of deployment doesn't necessarily grow exponentially with capacity - there are
a) aggregation factors; b) energy cost savings with newer kit; c) new tricks (cooperative relaying from multiple masts).

2. revenue does grow - lots of users pay a lot more for unlimited data service contracts on than they did for voice/txt message contracts and also for very limited 2.5G (GPRS/Edge) typical volume limited services - If 35M people in the UK were paying a typical unlimited data contract, of, currently around 30 pounds per month, that is 12billion pounds per year - that is quite enough to deploy LTE.

3. revenue from the other side of the net also grows (if more people download more video, youtube and the BBC etc have to buy more high speed services from fixed net providers - these are non trivial income streams

someone is telling porkie pies.