4G mobile services - fast and furious Speed can be a tricky investment. While consumers welcome it in principle, their willingness to pay for extra pace can be patchy. One only has to think of Concorde, an engineering marvel but the archetypal financial white elephant. With the rollout of superfast 4G mobile services set to accelerate across Europe next year - spectrum auctions have concluded on much of the continent and will take place shortly in the UK - pricing issues loom large. The region's mobile operators know they need to bolster revenues. In spite of modest usage growth in recent years, pricing pressures have meant falling revenues. Barclays estimates that underlying European mobile service revenues were on the slide throughout 2012. By the latter half of the year, that was as true in more resilient northern markets as in the recession-hit south. Is it right to view smartphones as the best hope for reversing these trends? In the US, which is further down the LTE/4G track, most operators have seen average revenue per user rise as customers have upgraded. But the US industry is less fragmented than in Europe, where intense price competition now exists in many markets, making consumers and regulators happy while frustrating operators. Even so, there are reasons to think that the growth in data services, in particular, could impose more discipline. Traditional voice services carry small marginal costs: a few extra minutes or added texts have been largely free to provide once networks were built. Data, by contrast, puts extra burdens on a network more quickly. Already, pricing is becoming more complex, with tiered structures, usually based around usage, although Swisscom is using bandwidth. Sadly, though, the operators" gain may be consumers" loss: unwrapping one's Christmas smartphone may be much easier than selecting the best price plan.