BROWSING: Opinion

Putting the ‘artificial’ in AI (Reality Check)

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) recently closed its formal comment period in its effort to reverse Title II utility-style regulation of the internet and restore broadband to its traditional status as an information service – the same status that it enjoyed for nearly 20...

Cellular connectivity LPWA standards for IoT – debunking the myths

Arm’s mission to scale and grow the IoT ecosystem, by providing the secure architecture that underpins end-devices, puts us in a unique position in our industry as being broadly connectivity agnostic. After discussing cellular IoT at length across numerous continents and conferences with our ecosystem...

Analyst Angle: Learning to share

The benefits of coordinated shared spectrum Mobile network operators (MNOs) continually strive to quench their customers’ seemingly inexhaustible thirst for data, and their response to this relentless growth in mobile data traffic is to improve network capacity and performance. This can be done in any...

Kagan: Wireless, meet Comcast, Charter and cable TV

The wireless industry continues to transform itself. This is an exciting time in the pay TV industry with cable television companies like Comcast and Charter re-entering the wireless space. If you recall, this has been tried once before several years ago and failed miserably....

A failure to plan small cell networks is planning to fail (Reader Forum)

With 80% of mobile data already consumed indoors and customers expecting a seamless experience as they move between indoor and outdoor environments, operators and system integrators are under pressure to deliver ubiquitous connectivity. The traditional approach is to rely on macrocells to penetrate...

Telecom Tweets of the Week: Should the FCC count 10 Mbps mobile speeds as “broadband”?

There's a bit of a dust-up at the Federal Communications Commission this week, over the agency seeking input on exactly how fast it should require "broadband" to be as it tries to expand high-speed internet deployments, and whether fixed and mobile "broadband" should be...

Collaboration, not acquisition, is the future for cable and Wi-Fi (Reader Forum)

XCellAir sees collaboration as the future for cable and Wi-Fi The cable industry has seen some huge acquisitions over the years. Charter’s purchase of Time Warner Cable and Bright House last year was worth over $65 billion, but this was just one of a series...

Optical anyhaul: Addressing mobile transport and the path to 5G (Reader Forum)

Mobile transport networks are on the threshold of a major transformation driven by the demands of 5G wireless technology. The demands include greater coverage, connectivity, and availability, along with dramatically improved speeds and latency. A key goal for mobile operators is to enhance revenue from...

Kagan: Update on Charter wireless strategy

Last week, at this year’s MWC Americas wireless conference, Charter updated us on their wireless strategy for their entry next year. If successful, wireless could play an important role in helping the company evolve to the next level. They face many of the same...

Florida Keys: Returning to normal one call or text at a time

The Florida Keys are a special place. My then-girlfriend, now wife Katherine and I moved there in 2008 after we finished college. As a graduation gift, my parents took us to Key West for a week-long vacation; a little less than a month later...

Telecom Tweets of the Week: MWCA recap, and that uber-pricey iPhone

It was another busy week in telecom, this time with Mobile World Congress making its American debut. Here are a few snapshots from the MWCA show, ranging from 5G simulation to actual, if pre-standard, "5G" equipment: https://twitter.com/PaulCowlng/status/908394396759891968 https://twitter.com/geoffblaber/status/908418865348014080 To virtual reality in more than one sense: https://twitter.com/geoffblaber/status/908399935640420352 https://twitter.com/CTIA/status/908464860614189057 https://twitter.com/CTIA/status/908451878798688256 Cute puppy!...

How to build the next generation of telco sales leaders

The consumer market for telcos has reached a saturation point. Millions of homes are equipped with cable and streaming services, and consumers are using mobile devices to instantly access entertainment on-the-go. As a result, telco executives are challenged to continue their growth trajectory and...

Top 5 use cases for usage reporting and monitoring (Reader Forum)

Globys Research Identifies Top 5 Use Cases for Usage Reporting & Monitoring Customer-centric invoicing improves visibility, making it easier and faster to review and submit payments. But for customers with usage-based products and services, that monthly, reactive view may not be sufficient. For many,...

Kagan: Why Apple iOS is more secure than Google Android

When considering Apple iOS, which runs the iPhone, or Google Android, there is more than just a different operating system to consider. Apple iOS is much more secure compared with Google Android. These different operating systems account for the vast majority of phones and...

Telecom Tweets of the Week: On to Irma

Another week, another potentially catastrophic hurricane -- is this what the rest of the 2017 hurricane season is going to look like? Let's hope not (stay away, Jose!). Irma has reportedly taken out all of the cellular towers on some Caribbean islands, on its path...

The micro-business revolution

There was a time, not long ago when the skies were clear; it was necessary to provision a desk phone for every employee to run a large organization or business. Then suddenly, in a flash of brilliance, the smartphone changed everything. Employees quickly...

Kagan: Should Altice acquire Charter or Sprint?

It looks like Altice may become one of the more aggressive growth-oriented pay TV providers. If so, would they be more interested in acquiring Charter to expand their cable television business or Sprint to offer wireless? To tell you the truth, I think the...

The telecom industry gets cloudy (Reader Forum)

Across industries, the cloud has completely disrupted the way people and organizations do business. Nowhere has the impact been more apparent than in the telecom industry, which is in the midst of a major shift to the cloud as it looks to take advantage...

Telecom Tweets of the Week: Waterlogged by Harvey

It was a rough week for southeast Texas, as Hurricane Harvey slammed into the coast and dropped an unprecedented amount of water -- more than 50 inches, in some places. The pictures and video posted to social media by residents and journalists attempted to...

The most important call (Reader Forum)

Google just announced the ability to make telephone calls from its Google Home speaker. At first, calling will be limited to outbound calls. Amazon was first to bring outbound and inbound calling capability to its Echo speaker device. The most important outbound call...

Narrowband IoT – Solving the last-mile problem of the internet of things (Reader Forum)

The internet of things (IoT) has a last-mile problem. While the cloud infrastructure to gather and analyze data is ready today, a robust wireless infrastructure with the range, low-power and low-cost characteristics to connect large numbers of devices to the internet hasn’t been ready...

Kagan: Why Comcast is growing when cable TV is not

If cable TV is on the falling side of the growth wave, why then is Comcast Xfinity continuing to grow, even as others struggle? The growth wave I often talk about always rises, crests then falls. This creates both new growth opportunities and huge...

Analyst Angle: Virtualization or containerization for 5G?

It’s anticipated that 5G networks and services will begin to be operational by approximately 2020, but the preparations and investments in the foundational technologies are still being tackled. Virtualization and containerization are both networking architectures that use common, off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware in order to...

Ensuring network and IT readiness to monetize IoT business services: It’s all about the data (Reader Forum)

The evolution of enterprise IoT services may be in its early days, but it is already clear that business models must be built around technology that can react in real time to quality of experience factors. IoT initiatives will not be successful based...