If Mobile is Everything

Peter : On Rad's Radar?
Peter
| Peter Radizeski of RAD-INFO, Inc. talking telecom, Cloud, VoIP, CLEC, and The Channel.

If Mobile is Everything

Fred Wilson repeats that Mobile is Eating the World. It might be just what I am reading (my influence bias). It's all about tablets or smartphones. Where does that leave your business in 2 or 3 years?

The Internet of Everything is like putting M2M (machine-to-machine communications) on steroids. Bridges are being built with nanotech sensors in order to get a warning when the bridge structure is in need of repair.

More and more sensors connecting everything. Shoes, wristwatches, cars, cameras, thermostats and door locks are just some of the always-on connected things that will be eating up wireless capacity on one band or another. The FCC is setting up the next spectrum auction now - AWS-3 (1755-1780 MHz and 2155-2180 MHz). Cellcos in the US want 500 MHz of spectrum.

VZW is sitting on its A-block and B-block 700 MHz band (humorously called 5G) as well as 40 MHz of AWS bands. Other cellcos are deploying 1.8 GHz, 1.9 GHz and 2.x GHz, device radios will need to read a lot of spectrum (from 700 to 2600 MHz). Why? Current VZW LTE is the only one on 700 MHz bands, so customers can only roam to 3G networks. Also, no other carrier can roam to VZW 4G since the radios in the phones can't read that spectrum band. It's like early Sprint 4G phones that only connected to Clearwire WiMax. Worthless bricks now that Clearwire is mostly LTE.

And that is just phone spectrum. The FCC freed up 5 GHz for unlicensed wi-fi, since a majority of the devices attach to wireless networks (WLAN) at homes, businesses, coffee shops, malls, etc. Wi-fi offload is what is helping the cellcos now. The problem will be that there will be too many devices attached to the WLAN (especially at home) and then what? Consumers aren't going to be able to manage a WLAN.

Then you have wearable tech. All those pieces of gear - like Google Glass, Nike Fuel band, Fitbit, etc. - all chewing up Bluetooth or other frequencies. RFID tags and so much more in the way of home health monitoring, home security, personal security, personal health, yadda. We will be eating up a lot of spectrum.

So if all of this Connectedness is the wave, what happens to the UC players, MVNOs, CLECs and other service providers without a mobile strategy? There isn't profit in being an MVNO or a reseller so in the Internet of Things, what will you do to capitalize on the Mobile Connected World?

There is plenty of opportunity in managed services, training, repair and the like. However, for those thinking that they just need an app to take care of that: you might want to re-think that.



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