BROWSING: Opinion

Move over connected cars (Reality Check)

4 reasons IoT on wheels is accelerating and will be bigger than the connected car market With headline-grabbing bells and whistles, the growing cult around connected cars is understandable. The booming market for connected services is expected to hit $250 billion—it’s undeniably hot. Wearables, the connected...

3 ways carriers can monetize video (Reality Check)

For years, video has caused headaches for telecom carriers, driving costs up faster than revenue and leaving consumers dissatisfied. But as technology improves, and consumer viewing habits change, the future presents increasingly better prospects. Online video isn’t new. But the large quantity and high quality...

Kagan: Influence marketing affects every business

What is influence marketing? As it turns out, I have been an influence marketer for three decades. Who knew? And, one way or another, this affects every business. Let me share some important thoughts with you as one of these influencers. Companies use influencers...

Clearing the path for 5G

It was a huge deal when wireless carriers started launching 4G/LTE less than a decade ago—not just because of the speeds for consumer downloading and streaming, but for the broader implications of those speeds. LTE was the promise of telemedicine, enhanced technology for first...

Connected lighting: its potential and challenges (Reader Forum)

One result of the advent of solid-state lighting (SSL) has been the development of connected lighting systems (CLS), which are networked to share the data produced by LED drivers or collected from sensors. SSL technology, which is based on LEDs or organic LEDs (OLEDs),...

Telecom Tweets of the Week: Hitting the big time

According to the GSMA, worldwide mobile subscriber numbers have hit 5 billion. That's just actual users -- the GSMA says that mobile connections are actually at 7.7 billion. And those figures don't include machine-to-machine connections like all those connected cows. https://twitter.com/GSMAi/status/874942141688156162 As Mike Quindazzi, managing director...

Kagan: Why Verizon growth is stalled

Something confusing is happening in the wireless industry. Why is Verizon, one of the two biggest wireless growth giants, stuck in the mud? AT&T is the other growth giant, and they have been on a rapid transformation and growth wave. Other competitors like Sprint,...

Powering your network vision (Reality Check)

The internet is now the “reason for being” for most wireless and wireline service providers. Indeed, wireless and wireline networks are becoming the internet (homage to Eric Schmidt’s original vision of the network becoming the computer). These broadband networks are increasingly looking and working...

Guest Wi-Fi bolsters the small cell “sell” (Reality Check)

Asking an enterprise customer, say, a sports venue, to blanket their arena with your small cells is like asking your dad to buy you an expensive hot rod: it’s not going to happen unless you sweeten the deal. Instead of taking this one-down position,...

Mobile trends argue for more smartphone storage (Reader Forum)

Storage performance and capacity within smartphones continued to increase significantly as smartphones have become the go-to devices for consumers globally. As such, mobile manufacturers around the world have nearly doubled device storage capacity on an annual basis as high-end smartphones now offer more capacity...

New skills for the digital network (Reader Forum)

As digitization transforms how organizations operate, it is changing how the network operates in profound ways as well. As significant as the move from analog to digital, it is a shift away from hardware to virtual functionality. The speed of this change should not...

Kagan: 2017 is IBM Watson coming out party

It seems like 2017 is the IBM Watson coming out party. You may have noticed their new television ad campaign showing how Watson and AI will impact, transform and improve company after company in industry after industry. Are you ready for artificial intelligence? Well,...

A converged architecture approach for 5G (Reader Forum)

Over the last decade, we have experienced rapid growth of broadband access to both consumers and businesses. This growth of broadband services is being driven by multiple factors, namely: 1. The fast deployment of public and private Cloud systems increasing number of over-the-top (OTT) service providers...

Optimizing NFV for mobile infrastructure (Reader Forum)

All of the major mobile operators are beginning to use network functions virtualization (NFV) to implement fully-virtualized network infrastructures by 2020, but traditional server-based networking models limit performance and increase costs. NFV applications are I/O-intensive, and mobile operators can overspend on servers to deliver...

Telecom Tweets of the Week: Sprint, T-Mobile US CEOs among the most hated

Sprint beat T-Mobile US this week, but I don't think they'll be bragging about the circumstances any time soon. Marcelo Claure edged out John Legere as one of the most-hated CEOs in America, according to analysis done by crowdsourced analytics company Owler. The two wireless...

AI is the end of legacy networking solutions (Reality Check)

What do 42 grocery stores, a large corporate office and a 350,000 square foot distribution center distribution center have in common? They all make use of artificial intelligence. AI-powered Wi-Fi as-a-service enables our company to focus on our core competency, which is to manage...

Kagan: Will Sprint and T-Mobile merge?

The rumor mill is working hard. The question is, will Sprint and T-Mobile U.S. finally get together and merge? No one knows. Not even Sprint and T-Mobile. First, they have to decide yes or no. If yes, then the U.S. government has to approve...

Telecom tweets of the Week: Verizon takes VR, 5G to the track

Verizon's mobile "5G" demo at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway must be every driver tester's dream come true -- until they blacked out the windshield. The video is worth checking out. Of course the speeds achieved (by the network, not the car, people: more than 6...

Analyst Angle: T-Mobile’s nationwide 5G strategy – A game changer?

T-Mobile’s recent announcement that it is targeting 2020 for a nationwide 5G network is by far the most aggressive 5G announcement to date, and it could be a game changer – not in the sense that the event itself will change the mobile infrastructure...

Federated identity management unshackles your Wi-Fi access (Reality Check)

Today, Wi-Fi is the lowest-cost, highest-performance internet connection available, and its impact only continues to expand. It is generally accepted that by 2020, more than 25 billion devices will be running on Wi-Fi networks. However, this growing number of devices still runs on “islands of...

Journey of an SMS: Global SMS messaging in a complex world (Reader Forum)

SMS engagement rates are over 94%, dwarfing those of most other communication channels. The personal, direct nature of SMS makes text messages nearly impossible to ignore. Think about it: when was the last time you ignored an SMS? You may have 1,136 unread emails...

AT&T and FirstNet: The plan comes together (Reader Forum)

I love it when a plan comes together Some of us are old enough to remember the actual origins of that phrase, now an ever-popular Internet meme. In one of the most famous lines from the mid-1980’s television show, “The A-Team”, starring “Dancing with the...

Kagan: Charter Wireless will start in 2018

The cable television industry is re-entering the wireless space. First it was Comcast Xfinity Mobile starting its rollout. Now, Charter Spectrum has announced they will also become a wireless provider in 2018. Charter says it will work with Comcast to think through new ways...

Telecom Tweets of the Week: 5G; net neutrality

Another week, another round of the industry grappling with exactly what 5G is, how they're going to make it work and what they're going to do with it -- oh yes, and how they're going to make it profitable. I heard slightly less of the...