By: Jesse Cryderman
“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.” —W.B. Yeats Much to the chagrin of the incumbents, there’s a new breed of wireless communications service
provider (CSP) cutting a wide swath through the telecom landscape. In saturated markets these CSPs are pulling off some rather incredible feats, like causing a marketwide 50 percent drop in the
average price of wireless service in less than a year. What dark divinations give rise to such magic? Truth be told, these disruptive CSPs have access to the same tools and techniques as every
other service provider — they just use them differently…
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By: Sanjay Kumar
The explosion in the mobile communications marketplace has had a profound impact around the world and across all walks of life, including the changes in human behavior brought about by mobile
devices. Marshall McLuhan’s famous expression “The medium is the message” may best describe this phenomenon: mobile devices are at the center of our cultural transformation.As smartphones and
tablets extend the diversity of applications and uses, our dependency on these devices has increased our expectations of mobile service providers…
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By: Susana Schwartz
Whether they’re called “contactless payments,” “wave-and-pay” or “tap-and-go,” many mobile-wallet ventures are emerging around the globe, but little momentum exists despite optimistic
predictions. Will mobile wallet be the door through which operators reach the much-hyped two-sided business models they hope to enable with OTT (over-the-top) players and financial institutions, or
will it be another instance of a fruitless endeavor? How much energy, time and money should mobile operators invest in what are clearly complex service models? These are difficult questions
to answer: virtually everyone sees the potential for value and monetization, but virtually no one sees an easy way to make it happen…
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By: Scott St. John - Pipeline
Who wouldn’t want to be a mobile operator? Fierce competition, saturated markets, eroding margins, and astronomical network management costs – what’s not to love? But for companies
still longing to get in the mobile game, there may be a better way, and no better time than now. Top-tier mobile network operators (MNOs) have been rolling out the red carpet with comprehensive
wholesale offerings to ease the launch of MVNOs, or mobile virtual network operators. Sprint, which has been aggressively enabling MVNOs in the US market, announced its Single Source Enablement
package last July, proclaiming it “lets anyone from entrepreneurs to enterprises deliver their own branded wireless service with as much or as little investment as they prefer…
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By: Tim Young - do not use (default)
When I visualize data traffic, my imagination runs to that mainstay of the commercial internet’s early days, “the information superhighway.” In my mind’s eye it’s a gleaming stream of photons
traveling on a carefully constructed freeway that would make the German autobahn look like a downtrodden cow path. It’s clean, well maintained and flawlessly controlled. However, sometimes the
reality of data traffic is less “uber-autobahn” and more “downtown Dhaka.” It’s chaos. And that chaos is only getting more severe as more data enters the fray…
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By: Jesse Cryderman
Remember when cellular service was just voice? Even after the advent of text, assuring the delivery and performance of both was relatively cut and dried. But nowadays, much like the loosely
accepted Moore’s law of computer processing, the evolution of mobile communications seems to accelerate each year. Providing mobile service has never been more complex. The exponential growth in
data and voice traffic, brought about by new services and applications like broadband entertainment, gaming, video conferencing, and peercasting, has created significant strains on network
resources…
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By: Allan Johnson
Consumers today expect a rich communication experience from their smartphones, tablets and PCs, meaning they expect to be able to share photos, multimedia, files, contacts, locations, and
status updates and have multiparty video and audio chats. The challenge has been to enable developers of mobile apps to provide these kinds of real-time services anywhere, anytime in an easy-to-use
and reliable manner. Now the Rich Communication Services (RCS) initiative does just that, allowing these services to be performed in a standardized, universal way across all future cellular
communication devices…
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By: Michael Crossey
The proliferation of smartphones, next-generation LTE network rollouts, and the rapidly increasing consumption of both enterprise and consumer mobile services puts the cloud squarely at the
center of mobile industry innovation. Discussion about the advantages of cloud computing in general often focuses on the ability to offload functions like storage and processing to the cloud. But
the intelligence of the mobile network itself also provides a significant opportunity to enhance the capabilities of cloud-based services…
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By: Becky Bracken
Whether your customers are in their minivan in the Lincoln Tunnel, on a submarine at the bottom of the Marianas Trench, or bundled up at Gillette Stadium heckling Mr. Gisele Bundchen, they
expect five bars. That’s how spoiled wireless customers have become, and why there are more than a billion smartphoneusers in the world today. But operators face one inescapable truth: spectrum is
a finite resource, and although traffic is exploding, spectrum isn’t. Operators must therefore rely on technology to stuff as many bits and bytes as they can through that same tiny tube…
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By: Lisa Tovar
(Advertisement)Automation through revenue acceleration brings freedom to the carrier business From LinkedIn and Facebook to phones that sync with one touch, we live in a world where we’re all
interconnected in more ways than we likely know. Technology is at the heart of these connections, not to mention much of the world’s communication, and Telarix has found a way to utilize it to
better connect carriers, improve voice, data and video quality and automate many business processes with little upfront investment, allowing carriers of all sizes the freedom to compete with one
another and interact in an efficient manner…
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By: Becky Bracken
Twenty years ago, if a friend had told you that one day a computer would be able to update itself without any help from a human being, you might’ve made a ham-handed “HAL 9000” joke or called
your friend’s prediction a crazy science-fiction fantasy. Well, now it’s 2013, and self-organizing networks, or SON, are just like HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey, only without the big-screen
personality. SON is the realization of an automated network constantly improving its configuration in real time…
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By: Jesse Cryderman
As the first month of the year fades into memory, it’s safe to say that 2013 started with a bang. From global LTE deployments to mergers-and-acquisitions activity, the economic chill in
telecommunications appears to be thawing. This is welcome news for network equipment manufacturers (NEMs) like Huawei, which forecast a 5 percent increase in equipment revenue, as well as Ericsson,
Alcatel-Lucent and Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN). Both Gartner and Infonetics predict an uptick in spending by communications service providers (CSPs) this year, and even spending in Europe, which
has been particularly hard hit by the ongoing economic crisis, is expected to increase as mobile service providers roll out LTE networks…
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By: Tim Young - do not use (default)
“Get your motor runnin’, head out on the highway. Lookin’ for adventure, in whatever comes our way ...” —Steppenwolf, “Born to Be Wild” (1968) There’s something special about a really good
driving song. Standbys like Golden Earring’s “Radar Love” or “Take It Easy” by the Eagles have helped the miles melt away for countless motorists over the years. I’ve had a few, including Kings of
Leon’s “Back Down South” and M83’s “Midnight City,” on regular rotation during long drives lately, and they tend to make the whole experience just a little more enjoyable…
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