Sprint Brings 4G Routing to Any Place near you.

By Carl | August 17, 2009 - 11:44 am | News

I interviewed Todd Rowley of Sprint to talk about their MiFi and Cradlepoint announcement. With the Novatel Wireless MiFi and the Cradlepoint solutions, Sprint is bringing 4G services to the nomadic user.

“These mobile broadband routers provide an unprecedented bridge to high-speed network performance for multiple Wi-Fi devices or multiple users,” said Todd Rowley, vice president, Sprint 4G. “The addition of these mobile hotspot products offers even faster connectivity speeds to Wi-Fi users without the need to find a Wi-Fi hotspot. These two new products can potentially connect the Sprint 3G and 4G networks to the hundreds of millions of Wi-Fi-enabled devices in the U.S. today.”

Sprint has also been agressively working Femtocell with AirRave and a netbook solution with Compaq. Todd Rowley shares Sprints vision of what we should expect from the 4G world of wireless broadband services.

You have added a great deal of mobility for the nomadic computer what do you see driving 4G services?

Your pricing is agressive? Should we consider a price war is officially in process?

Does prepaid have a roll in the 4G solutions? Should we expect support with Boost and Virgin Mobile?

What kind of devices should expect to be supported in the future?

Todd Rowley of Sprint Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

A Tale of Three (FCC) Decisions

By Carl | November 5, 2008 - 5:25 am | News

2 Comments

As the FCC enabled whitespaces for the computing industry the wireless world continued to be advanced with the merger of Sprint WiMAX into Clearwire and the approval of the Alltel acquistion by Verizon. While I will miss the wizard commercials, I think the more important observation is the question of how wireless evolves.

The Verizon story will be mostly around LTE, Clearwire around WiMAX. But who owns White Space? Who do you associate with this alternative? Google and Microsoft have been big advocates, but I am not sure they intend to be a service provider for this space. On the other hand, Cloud Computing is probably going to benefit tremendously from the access the White Space provides. Should I insert Ebay/Skype and Amazon into this discussion? Motorola and Phillips for their devices?

Imho the future of wireless is going to be very dynamic. And as we have seen from the iPhone’s success its going to be more about what you can do than what technology is used.

4G Wireless Evolution.

By Carl | October 30, 2008 - 8:26 am | News

1 Comment

Moderating conferences for the last decade has been a wonderful experience and I have grown in the process.

Last night we announced a 4G event that is being organized with TMC. The team at TMC has been wonderful and I am looking forward to working with them.

Looking at the infrastructure they have put in as an organization they have a great many abilities that were left undone in my previous experience.

The most fascinating thing to me is there ability to embrace the industry and help deliver the message. The editorial staff is dedicated and they are very good at gathering all the data.

So where do we fit in? Crossfire Consulting is a trusted name in the IT industry that often develops and delivers projects that are either critical to our customers or are adopting new concepts that need to be proven. We worked with telcos on their Internet strategies and did technical due diligence on many acquistions. Crossfire Consulting success has helped in other industries as well.

So we are in a position with TMC to not only deliver the news, but put together the appropriate people in the industry.

In my favorite book, “Fifth Business” the character in opera is explained as neither protagonist nor antagonist, but the keeper of the secrets. While publicly moderating I have been very good, (though it would be hard for you to know) in keeping company council and progressing the story.

Crossfire Media is dedicated to progressing the story of what happens next for telcos and the wireless Internet. That is the story behind the 4GWE conference and it’s the story we will follow on the portal.

As 3GPP progresses there are several issues that make Long Term Evolution uncertain. Remember the Internet was built to overcome any one network’s weakness and we are seeing these same concerns expand the applications providers network. So high speed services are going to be a continuously evolving mixture of applications being implemented in new ways, consumers adopting them virally and access providers (telcos) trying to profitably connect them.