Mobile carriers are currently developing next generation of networks to handle the huge increase in mobile traffic. Long Term Evolution, which you might have heard referred to as 4G, will most likely be the next-generation technology for both voice and data wireless transmission.

With the exception of the air interface, LTE is an all-IP network – taking advantage of and converging with IP network technology. The reason for the optimism is that LTE has some impressive capabilities:

It has support for multiple-input, multiple-output antenna technology, including 2x2 and 4x4 configurations. It also features 300 Mbps downlink and 150 Mbps uplink bandwidth when using 4x4 MIMO, with latencies of less than 5 ms. It also can handle hundreds of users per cell.

Most major telecom equipment manufacturers and carriers are getting cracking on developing and providing LTE products and services. But in order for enterprises and carriers to be fully ready for the 4G transition, they must fully test their devices and networks. This means from end-to-end, from the radio tower through the IP core and at scale, using well-modeled scenarios based on actual subscriber usage patterns.

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Wind River officials say they are now delivering the company’s Embedded Development Kits “EDK” for a range of third party platforms, according to industry observer William Wong.

The EDKs “combine Wind River's development platform and operating systems with development boards from the likes of Emerson Network Power, Eurotech and Kontron. The idea is to have developers up and running in as little as fifteen minutes,” Wong said.

He explains that Wind River “stacks the deck by providing both sides in preconfigured forms. For the host development side, Wind River has a bootable USB drive with all the tools and target board support packages for the matching target hardware.”

Getting up and running, Wong says, is “a matter of connecting the target board to a laptop, booting the USB drive on a laptop that is connected to the target board, and start developing and debugging. It is likely to take a bit more time to understand the features of the operating system and target board but developers will not have to take lots of time trying to get the basic system working.”

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At the Wainhouse Research CSP Summit on Oct 12, at the Hilton Boston Logan, Gordon Arthur, director of business development at RadiSys,will present on the trends and challenges facing smaller and emerging Conferencing Service Providers “CSPs” offering hosted collaboration services to enterprise customers.

The event is presented by the collaboration and conferencing experts at Wainhouse Research and is focused exclusively on addressing the needs of CSPs. RadiSys is a leading provider of IP media servers and turnkey audio conferencing application software for conferencing.

As new service providers enter this growing market, downward pressures on per minute pricing are straining the profit margins of CSPs operating traditional circuit–based conference bridge technology, event organizers say:

“To compete in this market environment, CSPs and large enterprises must accelerate their adoption of next–generation conferencing tools that not only lower their capital costs, operating expenses, and cost of ownership, but also position them to offer unique and differentiated conferencing services in the future.”

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Officials with VoIP software provider Speedflow say the company’s team recently attended Capacity Africa, “bringing their impressions about new market tendencies and Africa itself.”

The 4th annual pan-African wholesale telecommunications conference took place in Nairobi during the third week of September. Capacity Africa “has become a significant event for the African telecommunication market, combining a conference, exhibition and forum,” company officials say.

During the two-day event carriers, service providers, mobile operators and ISPs from Africa, Europe, the Middle East, Asia and the U.S. discussed the future of the African market and the substantial growth opportunities in the region.Speedflow officials say that among the hottest topics were, “market regulation, the ongoing development of terrestrial and subsea capacity, the challenges of improving connectivity links to landlocked markets, and the general tendencies of the constantly growing African market.”

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