As parents of an infant during winter in Chicago, my wife and I are always looking for places to walk around indoors. The stroller is napping place, restraint system, and entertainment chariot all in one. Aquarium and zoo visits can become expensive, so sometimes we opt for the shopping mall. Parking and admission are free. Of course, wandering a mall means my wife is going to seek cute new clothes for the little one. While she's cooing over pink overalls in the Children's Place, I'm noticing there's a retail store for every wireless provider - and a new kiosk selling Clear's WiMAX services. Sprint resells these services, so both operators are advertising their "4G: offerings. Suddenly, the panic sets in. Is 4G just the next, fatter pipe? What happened to watching Hulu on my mobile while Skype-ing with my friends back in New York? If 4G is just a higher capacity connection, isn't our industry marching down the path to commoditization? Is that a sign of the end of days, or am I just sleep deprived? I desperately needed the answers to these questions, so I reached out to some old pals in the industry for reassurance.
Policy control means a smarter network, and that is what I want to believe 4G is all about.
And that's what I fear. That instead of 4G delivering the big-bang we've all been waiting for, we'll be hoping for 5G to make our dreams come true. Fearing the worst I read on, and find that there is hope for us yet. "I'm seeing operators implementing capabilities such as policy control as they build out their 4G networks, not as afterthoughts as they've
Thank Goodness for Old Friends
Shira Levine, Directing Analyst Next Gen OSS and Policy for Infonetics Research, is an OSS/BSS celebrity. We became friends 1000 years ago when I was a rookie reporter and she was writing for America's Network. Turns out we both have roots in Michigan, are members of the same tribe, and have a sibling-like bond that's resulted in her exchanging baby pics with my wife through Facebook. So I asked her, "What does 4G mean to you?" I hoped we'd share a perspective.
"4G could mean one of two things," she wrote. "It could mean having the bandwidth to do truly innovative, convergent services that are rich in content and can be personalized to create a unique customer experience." Oh, thank goodness. As an analyst she has to talk to everyone, so if we share this point of view, there has to be some truth to it. Except..."On the other hand," she added, "it could just mean a repeat of 3G, as more and more bandwidth-sucking traffic clogs up the network."
done in the past." Whew. Policy control means a smarter network, and that gets us closer to what I want to believe 4G is all about.
George Orwell and the Smart-Network Business Case
Next in my inbox is a note from David Sharpley, Senior VP of Marketing and Product Management for Bridgewater Systems. Bridgewater lives and breathes this policy management and personalization stuff, so I'm pretty sure David has something encouraging to add. He writes that to him "4G is an entirely IP-based network" where "not all packets can or should be treated the same." How Orwellian; some pigs are more equal than others. I can live with that, but I don't always buy the personalization and customer experience arguments because we've been talking about them for years with very little movement. David doesn't disappoint though. He says the business case is really about "mass introduction of machine-to-machine communications...we expect lots of data only devices that are driven by machines, not humans."
Pipeline
Publishing, Volume 6, Issue 10
