Opinion

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. Mobile consumers …

The FCC has announced that wireless customers will begin receiving real-time alerts next year if they are about to go over their monthly voice, data or text-message limits. While this is a typical practice for some operators, making it mandatory is a favorable development for both U.S. carriers and their consumers – and, based on carriers’ widespread acceptance of the new standards, they are well aware of this fact.

As data consumption continues to skyrocket, service providers are coming to terms with the fact that a once voice-centric market is rapidly turning into a data-centric one. Consumption of data on mobile networks is being driven by a perfect storm of ubiquitous mobile broadband, smart connected devices and new data services. While the growth in data consumption may be exponential, the growth in data revenues is somewhat less stellar. Service providers around the globe are tackling the very real issues of how to best monetize data services while ensuring the best quality of experience.

Operators are desperate for spectrum that will facilitate LTE migration. By 2020, Morgan Stanley predicts that there will be more than 10 billion connected devices globally. Consumers increasingly expect access to data anywhere and on any device, placing increasing pressure on mobile networks. LTE offers operators the chance to relieve some of this pressure and deliver data at a low cost per bit and low latency.

Service fulfillment is one of the twin pillars of the traditional OSS/BSS architecture, turning customer orders into active communication services and mirroring a parallel flow of chargeable records from network to bill. But these straightforward days are fast disappearing – are we now witnessing fulfillment’s final finale?

Self-organizing networks (SON) is a key element of next generation radio access networks, especially LTE where SON techniques are an integral part of the LTE specifications. While SON in the RAN network has been defined through organizations like 3GPP and NGMN, SON in the mobile backhaul space remains undefined. Here, I like to present my take on what SON means in the context of small cell mobile backhaul where SON techniques are set to play a prominent role.

Increasing performance of mobile devices along with today’s mobile subscribers’ higher levels of adoption for mobile apps has encouraged developers to produce powerful mobile applications. Because of the complexities in the mobile apps development and competitive pressures, apps developers are sometimes turning a nelson eye towards conforming to established app development standards. As a result, apps produced are prone to issues like inefficiencies in end user experience, interruptions and interferences with phone operation and network resources, mala fide intentions, and resultant vulnerabilities such as attacks by worms, Trojans and other malware.

Consumer appetite for video-on-demand services – the ability to access videos when and where it is convenient to them – is on the rise. The arrival of 3G/4G and LTE networks has opened up new bandwidth for on-demand access, with entertainment such as movies and television shows driving adoption. Other driving factors are at work, too, particularly for mobile subscribers, which leaped over the 300 million mark in the United States alone this past year.

Man, is there not a more confounding company in the domestic wireless industry than Sprint Nextel? I mean is there a company that makes more screwball decisions that were then horribly executed? Nokia? Microsoft? Research In Motion? Palm? Motorola? I think Sprint Nextel has them all beat.

Anytime there’s talk about the promises of LTE, look around the room. You’re bound to find someone wondering how we’re really going to deliver on these promises. From a marketing perspective, LTE is impressive as mobile users will be able to take advantage of faster data speeds and cool, new devices. From a technical perspective, LTE presents several challenges. The good news is that there are some innovative solutions available to solve these challenges.

“A small coffee, please.” – As the barista uses a tablet to take your order, you check the balance of your bank account and look at the weather forecast on your smartphone. When your coffee arrives, you sit down and scroll through the latest news headlines on your smartphone. Convenient and easy, right?

HTML5 is a language for structuring and presenting content for the Web, a core technology of the Internet. It is the fifth revision of the HTML standard and as of September 2011, is still under development. Its core aims have been to improve the language with support for the latest multimedia while keeping it easily readable by humans and consistently understood by computers and devices. You may ask, what the big deal, why should I care in wireless telecoms? The short answer is that HTML5 will be the technology that will create a multibillion dollar value chain disruption for app developers, enterprises, for Apple, for Google and for wireless operators – does that make it interesting enough?