Our Friends at Cisco love standards so much they adopt them all!  And contrary to popular belief that 4G will be a mass migration, I expect it will be adoption and adaptation of what standards fit best.  I think the point will be made today.

Day Two sessions kick off with "Does your device compute or communicate?"  David Yedwab will be moderating this session. Panelists include, John Glosser of Sandbridge, one of the few companies focused on 4G chipsets, and Paul Tornatto of Skycross, a company focused  on the antenna side.  Using Orthogonal Frequency Division makes antenna usage and processing, a collaborative balance. I expect this discussion to show that processing will be the driver for 4G devices.   However, it may turn out  that so much processing has to be done, that communication will have to be the focus.

Running alongside this session,  Liliane Offredo-Zreik, Verizon's Bill Goodman,  Richard Brennan of Huawei and Chris Ebert of Nokia Siemens. will be   discussing the role that  IMS will play in the 4G evolution.    After conversations with my carrier friends, I have been told that the IMS implementation has allowed them to support virtualization of the switches.  So while the promise of applications has not been that important, IMS has yielded some benefits and continues to grow.

For the rest of the morning, we will join TMC  and attend the  Microsoft and Digium keynotes as both of these companies  continue to drive the edge of communications with better integration. This is a great segue into our next session on  4G and Fixed Mobile Convergence.  The Integration with the edge is going to be where the market drivers represent revenue , so it will be good to learn from the experiences of Mark Segre of IBM,

Brian Deobald of SkyTerra and Richard Brennan of Huawei. This panel will be  moderated by Michael Khalilian.

Running concurrently with the FMC session, Ari Zoldan  Ari Zoldan will be moderating the discussion focusing on WiMAX implementations.  Kamran Etemad of Intel will speak on behalf of the WiMAX Forum, and Tariq Qureshi of A-Infiniti Consulting  and Jeff Thompson of Towerstream will share their rollout experiences.

Continuing on the discussion of Rollouts, I will be moderating a session titled "Migrating the Core"  along with Joe Mocerino of Fujitsu Networks and Girish Pathak of ITE Services .   We will discuss the issues associated with upgrading the wireless backhaul network  As we move to an IP backbone the use of Fiber and fixed WiMAX  are alternatives.   One thing I will be listening for is the rationale for the upgrade.  Is it cost effective to upgrade just based on the savings or does it require new revenues to make the transition?


Across the way, Akshay Sharma from Gartner is moderating "Giving Voice to 4G" which will focus on the meet point before the backhaul.  This is where the IP backbone will segment traffic and offer applications. Kevin Mitchell of Acme Packet and Payam Maveddat of Mavenir Systems will guide us through this point of connectivity.

The conclusion of these morning and early afternoon sessions  brings us to point where applications are used and the question arises  "who is using them other thant the social network types.  Andy Abramson moderates a panel of social networking developers that have a history of delivering services on their own,as well as  other, social networking platforms.
Ed Pimentel, Thomas Howe and Luca Fillegheddu will all share their experience and expectation for how we move forward with applications.

Simultaneously at 2:50,  the LTE Advanced vs. WiMAX standards discussions will pit friends against one another as Hyung Myung of Qualcomm and Junsung Lim of Samsung share their insight on what is happening in the standards development and when we should see new solutions.  This session will be moderated by Joe Mazzeo of Crossfire Consulting.

After a break we will then join the rooms  together to hear "The LTE business Case" moderated by Altman Vlilandrie's David Waite and Stefan Bewley.  Derek Kuhn of Alcatel-Lucent and Chris Ebert of Nokia Siemens will share their perspective on the migration path to LTE.

And the migration path may be easy, at least that's  the point that Dr. Ravi Kalavakunta of Qualcomm will be expressing as he looks at HSPDA and sees the CDMA legacy having the advantage for service providers migrating to 4G.

From there its back on to the show floor for some drinks.