There are two important wireless industry conventions coming up. One is CTIA Super Mobility 2015. The other is the 2015 CCA Annual Convention. The Competitive Carriers Association is not as well known by many in the industry, but it should be. Both are important....
As mobile phones have become “smarter” over the past few years, they have also become essential to our everyday lives. Beyond merely connecting people, smartphones stream videos and music, monitor our health, manage finances and pay bills, and offer easy access points to the...
Since 2009, there has been a significant push to encrypt all Web traffic in order to protect Internet users against surveillance of the content of their communications. The goal was to transition from HTTP, which is notorious for being easy to manipulate, to the...
Hello! And welcome to our Friday column, Worst of the Week. There’s a lot of nutty stuff that goes on in this industry, so this column is a chance for us at RCRWireless.com to rant and rave about whatever rubs us the wrong way....
Much has been written in the past year about Sprint's need to upgrade its network, including by iGR. Sprint management has been very public about plans to “densify” its network and make more use of the 2.5 GHz spectrum band. The question of how...
Telecommunication service providers – both telecom and cable providers of Internet, video, voice and wireless service, commonly referred to as “telcos” – have had a rough ride in recent years. This highly concentrated, highly regulated industry has experienced a series of disruptions, from both...
The “Internet of Things” is growing at a phenomenal pace. Estimates about how many connected devices will be in operation by 2020 range from 25 billion to 75 billion. Even conservative analysts expect the amount of connected devices to quintuple over the next five...
The telco mentality
Last week we rounded out telecom and cable earnings. To no one’s surprise, cable is trouncing its competitors and quickly turning into the favored high-speed data provider for both small business and residential markets. Here are some selected extracts regarding cable vs. telco...
The upcoming CTIA Super Mobility 2015 show reminds me once again of a problem many companies have when dealing with the wireless analyst community. Since industry analyst opinions are important, every company wants us to think of and speak highly of them. So if...
The bigger 5G bang will be in the network
In the first of our series of articles, “5G is coming: Wireless telecoms is dead, long live wireless IT,” we identified flexibility and simplification as two of the key cornerstones upon which future “5G” systems will...
How to manage mobility in a complex mobile world
Out of the gate, the Apple Watch was criticized as not actually doing much other than serving as a fashion accessory with some nifty configurations. Consumers and businesses alike felt that there weren’t that many practical...
Hello! And welcome to our Friday column, Worst of the Week. There’s a lot of nutty stuff that goes on in this industry, so this column is a chance for us at RCRWireless.com to rant and rave about whatever rubs us the wrong way....
Your mobile carrier has made it very expensive for you to leave the country with your mobile phone. Whether you live in the U.S., France or Uganda, the cost of mobile roaming can be a big expense for leisure or business travelers. Collectively, international...
T-Mobile US’ ‘to-do’ list
Last week, the new No. 3 carrier, T-Mobile US, held its quarterly earnings session – it’s hard to classify it as an earnings call since there are as many “tweets” and e-mail questions from avid followers as there are Wall Street analysts...
Boingo is a global provider of Wi-Fi, distributed antenna systems and small cell services with access to more than 1 million Wi-Fi hot spots in more than 90 countries connecting more than 22.8 million users. The company deploys its network in multiuser venues such...
I met with Steve Brumer of 151 Advisors about the upcoming CTIA Super Mobility 2015. He invited me to speak at their APP-SOLUTELY Enterprise event scheduled for this year's CTIA show. The more we talked, the more interested I became. Let me explain.
Enterprise solutions are...
What is the real promise of mobility in the enterprise? Is it the ability to read and respond to e-mails on the road? To dial into a conference call? To work from home?
These are all productivity enhancements, to be sure. But a key facet...
More millennials enter the consumer marketplace each year and their effect is drastically influencing a multitude of industries. Millennial consumers are mobile driven and hate not being able to engage with businesses on their terms. With the increased adoption of mobile devices, there has...
Hello! And welcome to our Friday column, Worst of the Week. There’s a lot of nutty stuff that goes on in this industry, so this column is a chance for us at RCRWireless.com to rant and rave about whatever rubs us the wrong way....
In 2013, according to IDC, the digital universe contained 4.4 zettabytes of data. By 2020, that figure will surge to 44 zettabytes. This 10x jump in data is the result of the explosion of mobile devices, cloud services and the millions of sensors and...
Verizon: On Edge
Verizon led off the earnings parade last week, and the headline was their anticipated growth rate (3%) compared to their previously stated growth rate (4%). The primary reason cited by Fran Shammo, Verizon’s CFO, was the Edge take rate:
"Some of the other...
Once again I would like to thank CTIA for inviting me to be a judge in its 2015 CTIA Awards. There are so many companies – large, small, new and old – with so many innovative ideas. This year's entries are exciting in their...
Now that we’re well into the 21st century, any business that wants to be taken seriously needs to start leveraging every digital tool available to it. If you don’t, rest assured one of your competitors will. They could easily leave you in the dust...
The cable business typically doesn’t feature high on lists of dynamic industries that rapidly adopt innovative new technologies in order to deliver compelling new products and stellar customer support.
Under the surface, however, cable operators are using virtualization technologies to achieve major changes in how...
