Reader Forum

At this year’s Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona, Spain, one wondered sometimes if large sections of our industry have equally lost touch with what consumers want.

If you look around as you shop in a store and find people using their phones, you may not guess what one-third of them are doing.

A new era of energy services is on the horizon. Soon, utilities and municipalities will have the capability to support activity such as demand control, video monitoring of grid assets, real-time information access for customer service and mobile technician.

The explosive growth of 3G and 4G applications has placed significant demands on mobile backhaul. Wireless service providers require 50 megabits to 100 Mb at large capacity sites today, growing to 300 Mb to 1 gigabit by 2015.

Most of us are familiar with “wireless triangulation,” which involves identifying the approximate location of a wireless device using IEEE 802.11 standards.

It is apparent that we are currently experiencing an explosion in mobile data traffic and that wireless operators globally are rapidly increasing wireless network capacity both in the wireless portion of the network and in the backhaul.

While the United States has long been in the lead in enabling white space access to TV bands there has been substantial longer-term uncertainty over just how much white space there might be in the future with some concerns that the amount might fall so low as to render access unviable.

The mass adoption of tablets and smartphones has fundamentally changed the telecommunications landscape. The immense popularity of these devices has resulted in a surge in the exchange of data and growth in bandwidth consumption.

There has been growing excitement in the wireless industry about the opening of TV white spaces radio spectrum. This is the spectrum band that was vacated by broadcasters in the shift from analog to digital television in 2007.

The mass adoption of advanced mobile devices and the growing popularity of bandwidth-devouring websites and applications are fueling an explosion in mobile data traffic. This uptick – in combination with wireless service providers’ commitment to 3G+/HSPA+ and 4G/LTE and

The first wave of early-stage mobilization has hit the enterprise, and the growth rates continue to escalate. Industry analyst group IDC predicts the worldwide mobile worker population to hit 1.19 billion in 2013, accounting for 34.9% of the workforce.

With Mobile World Congress 2012 this week, analysts on the judging panel of this year’s GSMA Global Mobile Awards have predicted the hot topics and themes to come from Barcelona, Spain.

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.

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.

Advancements in communications technology can be seen everywhere today, but the most prevalent trend is mobile video. Mobile video and data demand is exploding, driven primarily by the growing popularity of mobile video applications. Mobile video traffic could reach 66% of all mobile data traffic by 2015 according to a recent Cisco report.

Facing increasing resistance to building more cell sites along with new services that demand much higher network capacity, mobile operators are looking for alternative ways to build out their infrastructure. This is changing the relationship between mobile operators and equipment vendors.

The communications industry is faced with transaction volumes in the billions of records per day. It is expected to grow rapidly over the coming years in large part due to increased adoption of smart devices, but also the fact that any one consumer now holds a number of different devices, each generating many gigabytes of data every day.

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …