By most accounts — mine included — this year’s CTIA Wireless in Las Vegas bore a striking resemblance to February’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona (the show formerly known as 3GSM). To be sure, there were clear differences outside the convention center: cava vs. champagne; Gaudi vs. gaudy; tapas bars vs. topless bars. There was no denying, however, that many of the demos, announcements, presentations and even keynotes were similar.
Why so? You can blame the maturity of CDMA along with a global interest in WiMAX and LTE, robbing CTIA of a unique technology focus. You can blame the extended focus (and size) of Mobile World Congress, allowing it to tackle every wireless topic under the sun. You can even blame scheduling that gives few vendors a chance to roll out any significant innovations between the two shows save for region-specific developments such as LTE in the 700 MHz or AWS bands. I’m not sure it matters why they’re so much alike. But if you believe that they are (and you should), you have to ask the value of the last three days we all just spent in Vegas — especially if you lost any money in the casinos or clubs . or worse yet couldn’t get into the clubs.
Time, then, for a refresher. For operators and vendors, alike, trade shows are more than just an occasion for marketing departments to sell a vision. They’re an occasion to meet with customers and divine market demands while explaining what they can do to execute on these demands. For those of us on the slower side of brilliant, trade shows represent an opportunity to look for new trends and market developments we might have missed earlier; with so much information coming out of Barcelona, the repetition at CTIA actually provided a chance to let things sink in a bit.
While I wish I could promise something more coherent from a red-eye on the way home from Sin City, allow me to share a few of those insights.
Alcatel-Lucent in the WiMAX Market. After Sprint awarded its WiMAX network contracts, three vendors — Motorola, NSN and Samsung — were ordained as market leaders . at least per the media and analyst communities. Ask them who they see as a credible competitor and one name keeps popping up: Alcatel-Lucent. I’ve been making the argument for some time, so maybe it’s just what I wanted to hear. But, of the major telecom vendors, it is hard to beat Alcatel-Lucent’s momentum or continuing strategic WiMAX focus.
Cisco in the WiMAX Market. Speaking of major WiMAX vendors, how often do you hear Cisco included in this group? Me — not so much. The newness of the Navini acquisition teamed with the vendor’s focus on less-than-sexy fixed and portable applications is doubtless at play here. Regardless, it’s an unfortunate problem because the company has a strong technology position, decent momentum and added stability thanks to Cisco. Yet, it’s a simple fact (still not acknowledged in some camps) that in the presence of solid products, a winning image can breed its own success.
The Return of Profile B. Sprint’s Xohm requirements vaulted Profile C to the head of the WiMAX ASN class — abruptly cutting off discussions of other profiles (surprisingly named “Profile A” and “Profile B”). Yet, as operators begin to take the concept of WiMAX femtocells seriously, the concept of a distributed data gateway residing in the base station begins to look more attractive. If the technical aspects of the last few sentences bore you, take away the following: the WiMAX market is way too young for anyone to make architecture predictions with much accuracy . especially when basing them on one operator with its own unique network vision.
WiMAX vs. LTE. Presumably after a weekend bender or crazy bachelorette party, someone decided to give me an opportunity to moderate a panel on the topic of 4G. With an esteemed set of panelists and an audience trying to recover from Tuesday night’s parties, I planned on a boring 45 minutes. I was happily mistaken and actually enjoyed the raucous school yard tone. “WiMAX is 4G and looks forward to LTE joining it.” “Oh no it’s not — only the ITU can call something 4G . and you just made it into the 3G club as part of IMT Advanced.” “Well, we’ve got a two-year jump on LTE.” “Two year jump on what? WiMAX won’t be 4G until 802.16m is ready and that’s still a ways off.” “You smell bad!” “Yeah, well your mother’s fat.” While it was great to see this level of passion, it worries me that basic facts got overlooked. Today, operators are not deciding between WiMAX and LTE — if they feel a pressing need to move on something beyond 3G, WiMAX is the only choice. If they can wait a few years, LTE will become an option — as will 3G evolutions such as HSPA+. Then, however, business issues such as spectrum availability (including the ever-fun TDD vs. FDD requirements), local competition, planned business models, product availability and regulation will become just as important as technology. Oh, and customers could care less if its 4G, 3G or 3.995G as long as it works, isn’t too expensive and comes with a nifty set of device options.
Core Before RAN. Say you’re building out an LTE network. Where do you start? Logically, you’d deploy base stations then link them into network gateways, switches, etc. However, if you want your 4G network to talk with your 3G network — and who wouldn’t? — you’d start somewhere else. You’d start with the network core instead of the radio access network, giving you an opportunity to work on 3G integrations and front-load deployment work while waiting for LTE base stations to become available. Vendors aren’t talking much about this, focusing instead on getting the LTE core network standards finalized. Operators aren’t talking much about this, hoping to ignore 4G CapEx requirements as long as possible. Yet, given the logic, you can bet that initial 4G investment will take place in the core.
April Fools’ Jokes. Kicking off on April 1st, it was inevitable that CTIA would be accompanied by a few jokes couched as serious comments or announcements. Beyond the Mars-Ark chuckle that was Richard Branson’s Virgle there were a few others that went less-noticed. My favorites? (1) Ericsson bought-up Qualcomm’s UMB intellectual property, hoping that by teaming up with the 3GPP2 it could finally chop the head off that pesky WiMAX. (2) To create confusion that will sell reports, analysts begin explaining that a CDMA-to-LTE migration requires operators to first launch UMTS. Operators — still not sure what 4G really is — actually believe them. (3) Fresh off their 700 MHz auction wins, operators refuse to talk about their plans for AWS, claiming that any AWS details would shed light on their 700 MHz plans and we’d all have to go to jail. In honor of Las Vegas strip-tease acts, details will be available on the very last day of the show as we’re all on our planes home. OK, to be fair, these weren’t all that funny. Unfortunately, only one of them is a joke!
I understand that next year’s CTIA will be in Orlando at the end of March.so, there won’t be any casinos, showgirls, or jokes. Luckily, I can live without casinos or jokes and if the content mirrors Mobile World Congress that’s OK with me too.