The Brazilian telecommunications market will over the next two years will face its best time since its opening to private initiatives. Here are eight issues, facts or trends, that deserve attention.
What can possibly be said about LightSquared at this point, besides bad puns? I know that the company is not “dead” dead, but it seems that the hill it has been climbing in trying to launch a wireless service just received a new helping of lubrication. And that lubricant was delivered with GPS-like accuracy. ZING!
Ever get a feeling of déjà vu? The longer I spend in the wireless industry (2012 will be 20 years), the more it seems that history repeats itself. This has become apparent recently as we have been looking at the developments in the smartphone market.
Sprint Nextel released fourth quarter and full-year 2011 results this week, wrapping up the financial reporting for the nation’s three largest wireless operators and highlighting an interesting fact about the industry: people like Apple’s iPhone.
The annual Pacific Telecom Council (PTC) conference is known as the "Davos of Telecom.” For 34 years, CEO's and telecom regulators descend on Hawaii to sip mai tai cocktails and spar over policy.
In an earlier article we discussed how the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show had a highly visible new presence from the major automakers this year, and how this revealed their strategy to defend the in car infotainment market opportunity by re-inventing themselves as technology firms, and providing improved in car infotainment solutions.
Smartphones are now the majority of mobile phones in countries such as the United States, and at the end of 2011, nearly 15% of U.S. consumers went online using a tablet,
Just as cable and wireline telecommunications providers did before them, wireless network operators are getting smarter. They’re recognizing the need to make their networks smarter as well.
To the chagrin of some, Apple has recently come under attack (again) for its history of sourcing its profit-heavy hardware from factories in China that have a history of questionable working conditions.
At this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, there was a new category of product making its debut as consumer electronics, and it was the automobile.
The LTE spectrum auctions are changing competitive dynamics in mobile markets. Leading mobile operators are paying billions to achieve long-term spectrum dominance, while challengers are hoping to use acquired spectrum to deploy smart network solutions and boost their competitiveness. In this article, we assess who may be the winners and the losers of the spectrum poker.
Editor’s Note: Welcome to our weekly Reader Forum section. In an attempt to broaden our interaction with our readers, we have created this forum for those with something meaningful to say to the wireless industry. We want to keep this as open as possible, but we...
The case for deploying smaller cell configurations – such as picocells, microcells and femtocells – to supplement traditional macro-cell-network architectures, both for LTE and existing 3G networks, is becoming more compelling as traditional macro cells will soon not be able to cope with traffic demand in urban areas.
Editor’s Note: Welcome to our weekly Reality Check column. We’ve gathered a group of visionaries and veterans in the mobile industry to give their insights into the marketplace.
Brazilian Picture
The number of mobile broadband capable accesses in Brazil grew 82.18% last year, totalizing 18.6 million new devices, according...
2011 was another year of diversity for the mobile industry. With a raft of new smart devices, tablets, applications, services and new pricing plans, consumers and enterprises alike have had more choice than ever when making use of the mobile device.
The enthusiastic acceptance of Apple’s Siri, with its combination of speech recognition and natural language understanding, has demonstrated the practicality and attractiveness of a voice-enabled personal assistant user interface.
Editor’s Note: Welcome to our weekly Reader Forum section. In an attempt to broaden our interaction with our readers, we have created this forum for those with something meaningful to say to the wireless industry. We want to keep this as open as possible, but we...
Operators have reacted to the swell in data usage with a variety of strategies that include volume-based tiers, usage caps, time-of-day usage pricing and data-speed throttling. While this may address the immediate challenge of preserving network integrity for the majority of users, it has also led to increased customer confusion and “bill shock,” higher support costs and, ultimately, higher customer churn.
Telecom analyst prediction pieces often seem to walk a fine line between, “I think this is going to happen” and “I hope this is going to happen.” I can’t say that I’m immune from this tendency. I’ll do my best to make it clear which side of that line is driving my thinking in terms of the themes I’m looking for in 2012.
As mobile data matures in developed markets, we expect several significant evolutions in 2012. The biggest for subscribers will be pricing plan innovations, providing new personalized service and cost options. In addition, we forecast rapid cloud service adoption, new content business models and new device segmentation.
Recently, a lot of people have been asking me: “Will small cells be the end of the macro network?” No way. Small cell growth will be explosive, to match the need for higher data capacity in mobile networks … but the macro layer is still the best way to handle about half of the anticipated traffic on future networks.
I try to not feel sorry for huge, multi-national conglomerates. This is due mostly to the fact that they always seem to forget my birthday, unless they want me to buy something.
Mobile connectivity for objects and devices is growing enormously. Never before have so many devices been able to “talk to each other” like they can today – from mobile hotspots being embedded in cars to a home security system alerting its owners that a tornado is approaching. The machine-to-machine market enables some of the coolest consumer apps to the most critical emergency communications.
