Does anyone have enough time anymore to enjoy their Memories

- Does anyone have enough time anymore to enjoy their Memories.
For those of us in the US, I wish you an observant Memorial Day. Next Week I will be in the district and visit my aunt. Her father, my grandfather was a gun designer for the Navy. He was also a Sergeant during WWI, which he was promoted to since he was the only one of the farm boys that could read. Clearly our society has changed a lot particularly when you consider that our military is stationed in over 75% of the countries in the world. The reason we are in 75% of the world’s countries has more to do with commerce and commodities than with military aspirations. Perhaps we should make it an International Holiday. Or perhaps we should consider what an amazing transition from an agricultural isolationist pre 1917; to a literate International power in less than 100 years.

One thing that’s truly amazing to see is how the military solution that started the Internet has changed the world. If information is power, the Internet has shifted power more than any other military effort. Jonathan Stewart joked about the Afghanistan & Iraq wars after the Arab Spring started “couldn’t we have just tweeted”. The transitions in culture the Internet has caused are bound to continue. At Devcon5 I often ask Jason Hoffman to speak http://bit.ly/KkJ2Fu. He is the CEO of Joyent which competes with the likes of Amazon with their virtualized cloud offerings. He points out that data is a commodity business. From Wall Street we know that information has shelf life. I unfortunately am more of a historian, so often I stay focused on a piece of information that has grown stale for most money makers, but I believe you watch for the trends in the news.

The world assembles in China, but the components are coming from everywhere. It will be interesting to see as China’s role continues to grow what changes in the next 100 years. In replacing my phone’s hot spot capability, I went to a carrier that gave me two choices, Huawei or ZTE. While Sir Terry Matthews sold boards to the CEO of Huawei back in the 80’s now we see the rise of Chinese brands and by the way, I still believe we are going to see the rise of Chinese standards. While the world is focused on Frequency based LTE, I think the TDD standards, championed by China, are going to win out in the end. That’s one of the reasons our Crossfire Mobility Tech/ M2M keynotes http://bit.ly/K3WfVp include Hamid Ahmadi of Huawei with our friend Hossein Eslambolchi of 2020 Venture Partners http://bit.ly/L5iplB. The Internet commodity is transforming into more than transport and into services hence the further marketing term “Cloud”.

As a historian new marketing terms are often frustrating, (for example I should call myself a “curator”), the M2M cloud discussion has made the term Platform universal hence this week’s M2M article http://bit.ly/JFWKoE.

Speaking of being leery of marketing, I would like to know if Whitey Bluestein http://bit.ly/K3VtaS has some inside information when he suggests Apple should become an MVNO? Apple has a great relationship with Capital Cities who learned some hard lessons when they made the Disney and ESPN MVNOs. I hope Apple’s Tim Cook will take the time with Disney and not arrogantly think the Apple brand solves the problem of managing wireless networks.

Speaking of arrogance, I was asked to elaborate on my analysis of Facebook, so I am going to end with this link http://bit.ly/JFgioE. As we celebrate memorial day, let’s not let arrogance get in the way of our future together. Take the time to enjoy the memories, regardless of where you are.

Axxcelerating the Apps

As you know, I don’t think the technology of LTE vs. WiMAX is half as
important as the issues of applications. I had the benefit of meeting
with the Axxcelera folks and we got on the subject of government
applications. Video Surveillance specifically, and I was not allowed
to say more.

Which of course prompted me to do this video.

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What I enjoyed about the full duplex nature of the system is that it
enables some very interactive camera movement and who knows what else
big brother would want to do. Ignoring the paranoia, the overall
effect of having such a system is pretty compelling to me.

Here are some of the other characteristics. While it is WiMAX it’s
designed more for some private solutions operating between 3.3-3.8 GHz
spectrum and supports a Full Duplex FDD (Frequency Division Duplex)
architecture. It does not need line of sight and supports error
checking and other quality management characteristics.

It could also be used for voice (VoIP) services given its full duplex nature.

Tastes Great : Less Filling Its all OFDM

First of all Congrats to the Steelers.  Great Game!

Getting ready for the show, I am looking forward to the new tutorial from Fanny Mlinarsky and Brough Turner today.

Last night while Budwieser was keeping the dreams of advertising based broadcast alive, Sorry Miller, I missed the one second ad.

I was brought back to the days of the Tastes Great : Less Filling ads.

Except I would substitute the words LTE and WiMAX.

The opinions expressed by friends were clearly based on the affiliation they had.  Belong to a carrier with a 3G deployment – LTE.  Working to be a bit slinger – WiMAX.

And so far the history is that when it comes to the Internet dumb pipes wins.

Even more to the point, the difference in the use of OFDM between WiMAX and LTE are marginal.  The difference really is the support for the status quo.

So lets see what the tutorial yields today.

A Tale of Three (FCC) Decisions

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.

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.

Where in the World is WiMAX?

I am waiting for the plane to take me to WiMAX world in Chicago.

As you know I am looking to create a 4G conference and the big question is does WiMAX represent an alternate part of 4G.  If you read pay attention to the ITU, the answer is yes.  3GPP and TIA organizations both aimed at making WiMAX part of the 4G discussion.

But when ATT and Verizon decided on LTE for their new spectrum it begged the question why?

The logical answer is that they wanted to service their existing customer base with the new spectrum. Thats part of the answer but the more direct answer is an assumption as to what the device of the future.  If you think the device is an iPhone, the control of battery makes Single Carrier strategies inherent in LTE is the deciding factor.

But phones are not the usual device of computing and the need for nomadic computing power and battery is not necessarily the problem.

But if WiMAX does not support the computing applications better than LTE for nomadic computing, then its going to be strictly a backhaul solution.

So in the 4G Wireless Evolution WiMAX will be marginalized.

Push to Wireless even at IT ExpoWest

Is there no escaping the inevitability that the entire network is going Wireless.

IT Expo West, which is a good CTI show has about 40% of the show displaying wireless strategies.  Most importantly are a number of companies that are building GSM gateways for the purpose of making the all you can eat plans more valuable to the enterprise or to provide an arbitrage solution.  

Another aspect of this was the SMS gateway from Multi-Tech that enables new services with their API for bulk messaging and developers of new applications. 

Part of this is the UC discussion, but here the story was not OCS but MS Response Point which included announcements from Quintum and Packet8 as well as the phone set partners of Aastra, Syspine and DLink (not at the show).  While Response Point does not include a wireless strategy per se in combination with Packet8 it becomes integrated with their MobileTalk.

I also had a lot of iPhone app discussions that I am sure will be better represented today in San Fransisco at Mobilize with Shai Berger of Fonolo presenting, although the GotVoice demo was very good.

Here at the show my best wiresless conversation was with Gaston of TelcoBridges as we took the worldwide view of where 4G will take us.

One thing that was missing was VoWifi.

Very good day yesterday and looking forward to my panel today.

 

Interview with Brian Glinsman of Texas Instruments

I had the good fortune to speak with Brian Glinsman, General Manager of TI’s Communications Infrastructure and Voice Group. I was looking for an update of the market from TI’s perspective. Brian services a number of markets including medical and telecom.

We talked about Video, Radio, LTE, WiMax and the opportunities available today. The world perspective on Japan and China’s leadership with wireless.

The advancement of WiMAX with Clearwire.

This issues of supporting the existing wireless network.

The problems of supporting femtocell strategies and the lack of standards.

And the concerns about the cost of power today.

The opportunities in the medical space.

We end with the Apple iPhone and the Nokia N95 and Sling Player

Anton Wahlman

I did a podcast with Anton Wahlman which you can hear here.

Anton’s reports at Think Equity were always insigthful and helped me think about what was going on in the industry overall.

I have a tendency to speak to a lot of people and discerning the whole picture is more than science, it’s art. I would say that Anton has this ability.

I wish him well on his new efforts, which I am sure will be revealed sometime this summer.