Recently in standards Category

• Announcement that the creator of BlackBerry (Mike Lazaridis) has replaced Motorola’s CEO (Ed Zander) as the CTIA keynoter.
• Announcement from TCS that it has been selected as a CTIA Wireless 2007 E-Tech Award finalist.
• Announcements from Pantech and Nokia about their displays at the show.

As is usually the case with technology, once the underlying specifications become standardized, adoption becomes widespread by both consumers and manufacturers/providers. That’s because standardization reassure people they knew what they’re getting, and that it will work the same way in a variety of applications.

Research company Parks Associates noted this fact in its recent report about the market for wireless, multimedia networking. The firm predicted that “industry adoption of next-generation specifications will provide a substantial boost to the market for wireless multimedia networking, prompting growth in excess of 50 million wireless network devices by 2010.”

Two of the specification poised to help spur the growth are next-gen WiFi and Ultra-wideband (UWB), Parks Associates said.

The firm further predicted that annual sales and shipments of wireless multimedia-capable devices (think person computers, fixed and mobile consumer electronics) will grow from 2.5 million units in 2006 to almost 52 million units by the end of 2010. Standardization in the market will play a key role in that growth.

Parks Associates analyst Kurt Scherf said in the report that several factors are driving manufacturers and service providers to embrace wireless connectivity:

• Service providers want more ownership in developing home networking solutions
• Operators need to reduce CAPEX associated with deploying home networking solutions
• New content services are on the rise
• Consumers are in favor of eliminating cables

“These are all positive signs that the 802.11n and WiMedia solutions – among the many home networking options – will continue to drive growth in new home networking applications,” Scherf said in a statement.

As an end-user, I like where things are headed. Continue Reading...

In a recent Sage/CMB Market Pulse newsletter, Chadwick Martin Bailey (a marketing and analytics company) reported that fixed-mobile convergence (FMC) technology is not yet mainstream in corporate America—and offered some reasons why that is.

Among those reasons:

• Demand for FMC won’t really pick up until enterprises integrate mobile devices into their corporate telephony systems; most have not yet done this.
• It may be true that business use of mobile phones is prolific, but most of those devices are not connected in any way to the corporate PBX.
• FMC won’t become mainstream in corporate America until it becomes clear that adopting the technology offers clear return on investment (ROI).

Yesterday in this blog, I wrote about the differences and similarities between established wireless standard Bluetooth and new-kid-on-the-block Wibree. Talk about good timing—guess what landed in my mailbox today? A report from ABI Research regarding the future of, you guessed it, Wibree.

Specifically, ABI is predicting that the market for Wibree products could be worth $513 million by 2011—if certain things happen.

ABI lists several key “ifs” that are required for Wibree to grow as predicted. There include:

• Nokia forces Wibree into handsets at the earliest opportunity

• Sillicon vendors bring dual-mode ICs to market at prices close to those of Bluetooth ICs today

• Ratio of dual-mode to standalone devices grows rapidly after market seeding

• Bluetooth SIG adopts the Wibree standard

• Widespread adoption of Wibree by handset vendors

In the report, ABI analyst Stuart Carlaw says: “While some industry observers are skeptical about the prospects for Wibree, we believe it is a unique technology that can leverage the very positive market position of Bluetooth in segments such as medical and sports equipment, where the total available market is extremely large and still relatively untouched.”

But, Carlaw cautioned, if Bluetooth SIG thumbs its nose at Wibree, and if handset vendors pass on adopting the new technology, the Wibree market in 2011 will be worth almost nothing.

"These two factors go hand in hand to some degree, and positive noises emanating from both the Bluetooth SIG and Wibree communities provide support for a favorable market forecast,” Carlaw said.

The main advantage of Wibree seems to be its low power consumption. Continue Reading...

A reader of this blog recently e-mailed me to ask what I know about the differences between Bluetooth and Wibree. I had to admit to myself that I really didn’t understand the differences and similarities much better than my reader. So I set out to educate myself.

First stop was Wikipedia, where I uncovered the follow definitions for the two technologies.

Wibree – “a digital radio technology (intended to become an open radio standard) designed for ultra low power consumption (button cell battery) within a short range (10 meters / 30 feet) based around low-cost transceiver microchips in each device.”

Bluetooth – “an industrial specification for wireless personal area networks (PANs). Bluetooth provides a way to connect and exchange information between devices such as mobile phones, laptops, PCs, printers, digital cameras and video game consoles via a secure, globally unlicensed short-range radio frequency.”

Wikipedia further explained that WiBree, which operates in the 2.4 GHz band, is designed to complement Bluetooth (although in some circles the two are slated as competitors). Continue Reading...

So much news has been generated lately about WiFi that sometimes it seems as if the world has forgotten that technology’s younger, more powerful sibling, WiMAX.

But, market research firm In-Stat hasn’t forgotten. In a recent report, the firm predicted some significant growth in worldwide subscribers to WiMAX-based broadband.

In-Stat said it expects 2006 to yield 222,000 WiMAX subscribers, and that number should grow to 19.7 million by the end of 2010. The firm noted that most WiMAX subscribers today are in the Asia/Pacific region.

I find it interesting that, even looking ahead to 2010, WiMAX subscribers are measured in the millions rather than the billions. The technology does need to overcome some notable challenges before it becomes more widely adopted.

“The biggest challenge still comes from competing technologies and services,” In-Stat analyst Daryl Schoolar said in the report. Continue Reading...