At the recent CTIA show in Las Vegas, TMC's CEO Rich Tehrani had an opportunity to interview Verizon Wireless's Executive Director of Service Performance and Device Evaluation, David McCarley.

McCarley's in charge of the "can you hear me now?" service assurance teams, as he said they have about a hundred vehicles scattered around the US, which will drive over a million miles this year.

When asked what special announcements they were going to make at the recent show, McCarley said the 4G LTE is on the top of the list of their deployments, saying "We're going to get out to 20 or 30 markets this year, and hopefully a third of the US population by the end of the year."

Recently at the CTIA show in Las Vegas, TMC's CEO Rich Tehrani had a chance to sit down and talk with Chuck Kaplan, the VP of Portfolio Solutions at Ciena.

Kaplan announced the closing of Ciena's acquisition of Nortel's metro Ethernet network's assets, the big optical business from Nortel. "We're now one company, this has been a while in coming," he said, "and we're all thrilled it happened. We're now a bigger company, we're a company of scale, and we're feeling good about things."

Responding to Tehrani's question about where the company sees opportunity for growth now, Kaplan said there's a space the new combined company is focused on, called converged optical Ethernet. He described it as "the convergence of optical technologies, think wavelengths, and Ethernet technologies - think packets, all on the same combined network."

Giving an example of why the converged optical Ethernet space is so important, Kaplan said there's "a huge amount of traffic coming in from cell towers, coming into a metro area, there's a huge amount of traffic coming in that's going between data centers - think virtualization and cloud."

At the recent CTIA show in Las Vegas, TMC's CEO Rich Tehrani spoke with Mahonry Sanchez, Vice President of International Sales for VNA Group.

Sanchez introduced the company's latest products, including a watch that's "actually a phone at the same time." Dick Tracy lives!

If you "want to go out jogging, running errands or whatever, and you don't want to take your big phone, just slip your SIM card in here," Sanchez said, showing off a modestly-sized watch on his wrist, "and it's unlocked, it'll work with any carrier."

The watch has a touch screen that allows you to make and receive phone calls. You can choose to either take the call on the speakerphone, or use the Bluetooth-enabled "communicator" provided with the phone. It's GSM-based and quad band, so it works in Europe.

The phone also has a camera, "a video camera," Sanchez said, adding that it also is an MP3 and MP4 player. And it has a 2 gigabyte memory card. Just amazing what they can do these days for $199 retail.

TMC's Stefania Viscusi recently had the chance to sit down and talk with Eric Levitt, CEO at Endstream Communications, a VoIP and telecom carrier offering VoIP termination services.

Levitt explained that VoIP termination is the ability to complete a VoIP call over a public or private network.

"It requires that both the customer and the carrier have VoIP enabled equipment, capable of taking a digital or an analog signal and translating them into IP," Levitt said.

This, he said, can be done either on the customer's PBX, or a digital or analog gateway. IT-enabled carriers, such as Endstream, he said, "can usually provide that equipment if the customer doesn't already have it on their IP PBX." After that, all it takes is a broadband connection, or a private IP connection, he said, from your VoIP carrier.

At Interop 2010 in Las Vegas recently, TMC's Erik Linask sat down and talked with Cisco's Chris Kozup, senior manager mobility solutions, about some of the things going on in wireless technology, specifically interference.

Kozup said Cisco has just announced a product called Cisco Clean Air, explaining that "much like the name suggests, the focus of this technology is to actually improve the performance of the wireless network," by cleaning the air of interference.

Listing the most common causes of interference, Kozup mentioned the standard culprits - "cordless phones, Bluetooth, little spy cameras, microwave ovens, baby monitors, the list goes on and on."

It's actually part of a trend, Kozup said. The number of consumer electronic devices using the spectrum are causing more interference.