Recently in Emerging Technology Category

People are expecting that the way they communicate in their everyday life is all part of the services they buy with their phone.  The regulatory concepts of access and content mean little to end user.  They expect that everything works, and they have not noticed that everything does not work together. The Real time communications event did a nice job of exploring that opportunity. 

SIP is being pushed into the Web with RTCWeb and the rich media opportunities that provides. Texting and videos to 911 are assumed even though no process is in place to accept them.

I should also mention that the kids at the lab have done a lot thanks to corporations using the lab as a resource.  Carol Davids is looking to support corporations with lab work performed by IIT students.  If you want to see what a millennial will do with your product, you might want to put it in their hands at IIT.

Dear Senator/Congressman

As you are aware the role of the FCC and the goal of providing a National Broadband Policy is very much in question and requires you guidance.  We believe the old models need to be rethought and we have addressed the discussion in something we call Regulatory 2.0.  http://4g-wirelessevolution.tmcnet.com/conference/east-11/regu.aspx

We are holding a conference that is available to you and your staff just by registering at http://www.4gwe.mobi.  Please join us on February 4^th from 9 AM EST to 1PM EST.  If you would like a formal briefing on what was said we can arrange that as well.

Kind Regards,

Carl Ford

VP Conference Content & Community Developer

4GWE

[email protected]

Question 2) Is there psuedowire involved from Ceragon and if so how do you address timing?

Answer. No pseudowire. Currently the network is geared for TDM only. Upgrade to IP can be done via hybrid approach – hence no need for PWE "Delivering reliable mobile service to our customers is extremely important to mcel," said  Mr. Arlindo Mondlane, mcel CTO. "We selected Ceragon's products because they are technologically superior, use spectrum efficiently, and are highly reliable. Through careful network planning, we will be able to provide high-quality mobile service to our customers as cost-efficiently and as quickly as possible.

Who cares if you carriers billing system is working right? when you have all these options to pay from the web.  Once again the mobile Internet is really just the Internet. 

Watching a panel of companies at Gigaom's Mobilize of companies successful in mobile payments.  But it is all over the top. 

The companies include Boku, Groupe Hi-Media, Mastercard, Paypal, Zong

Interesting Geoff of Mastercard, has not brought up Smart Cards.

The Commission is rearranging the deck chairs on e911.

First of all to their credit they want to improve accuracy of wireless services.  According the Chairman Genachowski over 50% of the e911 calls need better details.

Then came examples of suggestions for people to tell the dispatcher.  What Floor you are on, what are nearby landmarks.  All good stuff except they have little to do with the GPS system.

On the other hand, pictures using MMS, or email would be useful.

Oh Wait!  The dispatcher does not have capabilities for these things.

It would be nice if more emphasis was placed on fixing the government's side of the connection and upgrading it rather than putting pressure on the private sector to deliver more details.

Worse, solutions such as VoIP they force fit the old rules upon.  It makes me wonder if the commission had been around at the beginning of POTS would it have required an integration to the telegraph.  After all at the time it was the central point for all communication.

The sad reality is that we could build a better 911 application on Android than any dispatcher can get from the current system.  Anyone up for the challenge? 

As LTE networks begin the testing phase, one mobile phone competitor, SkyTerra Communication, is planning to build a nationwide wholesale mobile network using a combination of Mobile Satellite Service (MSS) and an ATC (ancillary terrestrial component) network to deliver 4G mobile capability. 

 

I plan to bring in three industry visionaries to discuss this bold and very interesting strategy. The discussion, in the form of an audiocast, will take place on June 15^th at 11:00 a.m. and you can register here. The audio cast will be a panel discussion, moderated by myself and three very astute industry visionaries see their bios below.

 

The mobile satellite business plan is the Holy Grail for those with the vision that satellites can provide "universal" 4G mobile service to the typical consumer.  The MSS strategy has been unsuccessfully attempted in the past. But now, better chips, better phones, and bigger satellite dishes are pushing more power than ever to smaller handsets - making the business case for MSS more likely. 

 

The satellite plan is of great interest in both urban and rural areas as the network could deliver the ubiquitous and redundant mobile service for public safety and first responders. The SkyTerra business model became newsworthy when on March 26, 2010, the FCC issued an order approving the merger of SkyTerra Communications and Harbinger Capital Partners.   The Commission included controversial requirements and conditions that would potentially limit the use of Verizon Wireless and AT&T wireless networks by SkyTerra.    

 

Aside from the contentious issues imposed in the merger order, there are other matters which are of interest for industry vendors, regulators and mobile users.  The SkyTerra business plan, filed shortly after the March 2010 merger order, would give public safety much of what was sought in the D-Block 700Mhz auction - that is a provider of a single, nationwide, redundant mobile network using a low cost handset.   SkyTerra is potentially in a much better position than FrontLine Wireless was to build out a nationwide network that would allow public safety to communicate from across departments.  The loss of cell towers would not limit public safety from communicating.  Also, the ability to deliver broadband mobile capacity to rural areas would provide an alternative to expensive special access.

 

Some issues that we will discuss on this call include:

 

1.       Will the SkyTerra project change the FCC's position on the 700Mhz D-Block?

2.       What is the FCC's current D-Block plan?

3.       Has the Commission initiated a policy of supporting more wireless competition by limiting the largest providers from participating in future spectrum auctions?

4.       Will the Commission conduct such thorough competitive reviews with stringent conditions of future mobile mergers as it did with SkyTerra and Harbinger?

5.       Could such future Commission orders increase mobile competition in the U.S. but further erode slowing user growth and ARPU for the largest mobile providers?

6.       Is 4G mobile satellite a reality or just a long shot?

 

 

June 15^th audiocast participants:

 

Barlow Keener, Attorney, Keener Law Group

Barlow Keener has been specializing in communications law and development for over 15 years and is an authority on wireless and wired matters related to telecommunications, CALEA, femtocells, WiFi mesh networks, and fiber optic networks.  He represents telecommunications providers in state and federal regulatory matters.   He has served as lead telecom regulatory counsel in connection with numerous RBOC, VoIP, CLEC, conference calling, voicemail, and collocation projects. Barlow delivers guidance to communications providers and systems integrators related to defining telecommunications and non-telecommunications services. He also provides strategic and policy advice to telecommunications, information technology and media firms in the United States, Asia and Europe.   

 

Brough Turner, Founder and CTO, Ashtonbrooke Corporation, soon to be doing business as BigBroadband.Net

Brough Turner is an engineer and entrepreneur focused on communications in the broadest sense.  Previous to Ashtonbrooke, Brough was co-founder of Natural MicroSystems and co-founder and CTO of its successor, NMS Communications, where he focused on business strategy, product architecture and new market development. He speaks and writes widely on communications topics and gives tutorials on 3G and 4G wireless technology and markets.  In addition, he serves on advisory boards for several startup companies in telecom and Internet markets and occasionally consults on related topics.  More at http://broughturner.com

 

Lyman Chapin is co-founder and partner at Interisle Consulting Group,

Lyman advises companies, non-profit organizations, and government agencies on Internet technology, policy, and governance; telecommunications network security and resilience; and critical infrastructure protection. Before starting Interisle in 2002 he was Chief Scientist at BBN Technologies. Mr. Chapin is a Fellow of the IEEE, and was a founding trustee of the Internet Society. He has served as a Director of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), where he currently chairs the Registry Services Technical Evaluation Panel and the DNS Stability Panel, and as chairman of the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication (SIGCOMM), and the ANSI and ISO standards groups responsible for Network and Transport layer networking standards. Mr. Chapin was a principal architect of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) reference model and protocols, and is the co-author of Open Systems Networking--TCP/IP and OSI. He currently serves as the USA/ACM representative to the International Federation for Information Processing Technical Committee on Communication Systems (IFIP TC6) and recently completed a five-year term as the USA representative to the NATO Science Committee networking panel.

 

Please remember to pre-register for this call here: http://www.zipdx.com/event/sat15jun.php to ensure you spot on the call

Supercomm was cancelled for 2010.  While it would interesting to talk about this from the conference side, I will make the assumption that other people will take that opportunity and try to talk about it from a different perspective.

CES was hoping and the buzz was around various forms of wireless use.  Ford with Sync, Microsoft with KIA, Wireless devices and devices using wireless were all around most of them Internet enabled. 

Mobile World Congress is going on in Barcelona and it's expected to do well next week. 

I want to point out that these events are following the money which is no longer about the network its about the consumers freedom of choice.

As congress and the FCC contend with the legacy of the PSTN the new network is flourishing and its not about wireless its about customer choice.  The wireless world may still have the same issues facing it that their fixed line brothers faced.  Brough Turner points out that over 90% of the packets on any network head for the Internet.

If I were at the FCC I would be ready to advocate that its time to treat all networks as if they were accessing the Internet.  Looking at competition not based on the technology but on the services and the primary services.  Voice, video and data are probably going to converge at some point as well with the over the top (internet) model

Legacy service providers are looking for protection, but government should praise itself for enabling the competitive landscape we are heading for rather than embedding old rules into the new environment.

In these days of government bail outs its hard to see what is the economic downturn versus technological progress.

If the goal of net neutrality is to support the progress, I would contend it's to dynamic a market to codify.  If its to protect the applications from abuses by the legacy networks, I am not sure its needed.  

 

"It's not a Femtocell!"

Chris Zeigler at engadget took this picture and as asked what is this thing?



If you live alone and you don't have to keep the family entertained.  Why have the Internet Access at the house and not with you.  That seems to be the reasoning behind the this terminal adapter.  That connects your LTE phone to the house and gives you connectivity. 

Given the fact that 60% of CES, was trying to move video from the Internet to the media server in the house, this would probably require some network smarts.  

In my humble opinion this places LG's LTE closer to the dual mode camp, but since they have femtocell strategies, it maybe this was an internal product that had to be different the LG / Nortel Femtocell.

Can we call it MonoMode?

Google and Apple are vying for your attention today.

If you are a carrier, your bed fellows are not staying the night! Google with the Nexus One announcement that is all about the Android operating system and not a carrier. And strangely enough the Apple iTablet maybe the same thing. The rumors on the iTablet seem to indicate it may be devoid of 3G / 4G wireless interfaces and only support WiFi. While that will be a major plus for ATT who has already worked with Apple on the dual mode functionality of the iPhone, I should point out that Verizon has been the better company at supporting the use of USB 'sticks' (dongels?). It will be interesting to see if a bundle comes from either of the two carriers with the iTablet.

The appointment of Jonathan Rosenberg as Chief Strategy Officer adds a new wrinkle to a career that started in "The Labs" and now moves beyond Cisco.  He has followed voice to app side all his career, and now he is at the right place to look at the application of all he knows.

Candidly,  I was feeling like all the can SIP save Skype discussion was a waste of time.  My thoughts were that the courts were going to be the place where this got settled and not in the standards bodies.

However, I was mistaken.  While I believe much of the knowledge about NAT traversal came from the capabilities embedded in Paradial, the world was off chasing the use of SIP as a solution.

Upper management found a strategy at a deeper level.  Namely to make it so that Skype now had the benefit of Jonathan (Prior Art) Rosenberg.

If ever there was someone who had been looking at the issues of NAT traversal Jonathan has been the guy. From the development of MIDCOM, STUN, ICE, TURN and of course SIP,  Jonathan has been there.

Mind you, the addition of another Jonathan at Skype also indicates where the company is heading even after being acquired.  You can think of Jonathan as being at the beginning of SIP coming somewhat full circle.  From adapting the Web model to telecom to now guiding the SIP model into the Enterprise, Jonathan is going to be well positioned.