By
Craig Clausen and Joseph Kestel
Introduction
As industry analysts and consultants here at NPRG, we're like radar operators. A significant amount of our time is spent scanning the broad horizons of the communications industry—alert to changes, threats or opportunities that might affect technology vendors, service providers or a myriad of other vested industry participants. One of the areas actively being tracked at our Chicago offices is the emerging wireless arena, because, in spite of the extraordinary promise pent up within the space, a cloud of confusion continues to envelop the sector. This article will look to clarify the shape and disposition of the emerging wireless market, clearing up misconceptions as well as providing some brief insight into a market ripe with opportunity.
Emerging Wireless: What Is It?
While the term encompasses really all things wireless, with the exception of cellular service, this emerging arena is anything but well understood. The lack of a common understanding derives primarily from two factors. First is the embryonic nature of the space. Any technology sector, in its formative stage, is a blur of activity that makes it at best challenging for casual observers. In a haze of constantly whirring change, it becomes difficult to identify the moving parts that might otherwise constitute a coherent whole. The challenge then is to pinpoint, with any level of precision, where opportunities might unfold. |
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Any technology sector, in its formative stage, is a blur of activity that makes it at best challenging for casual observers. |
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linguistic knot will untie itself as the sector matures, it allows the market to languish, awaiting coherence.
While we won't be able to address all the sub-sectors that constitute emerging wireless, we will provide detailed data and analysis on the two most prominent iterations—Fixed Wireless and Broadband Wireless. Our hope is that you emerge from having read this article with a clear sense of what distinguishes one from the other, the relative size of each market, and a full appreciation of the as yet untapped opportunity that awaits technology vendors—especially OSS providers.
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The second factor causing misapprehension of emerging wireless is the more mundane and endemic disease afflicting the body politic of telecommunications. Like any other self-respecting telecom sector, emerging wireless has given rise to its own alphabet soup of acronyms, a mass of terms being used arbitrarily and interchangeably, as well as a dizzying array of abbreviations. While this
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Broadband Wireless
NPRG defines "broadband wireless" as internet access services (1 Mbps and above, symmetric or asymmetric) provided wirelessly in the licensed and unlicensed spectrum below 6 GHz. Broadband wireless typically involves point-to-multipoint distribution with one base
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