Hello! And welcome to our Friday column, Worst of the Week. There’s a lot of nutty stuff that goes on in this industry, so this column is a chance for us at RCRWireless.com to rant and rave about whatever rubs us the wrong way. We hope you enjoy it!
And without further ado:
Normally, I use this space to rant about a single topic and then sprinkle in a few extras at the end. Not this week! There was just too many WOTW-worthy items that came across my desk for me to be able to focus on just one, thus I will serenade you this week with special WOTW insight into several gems.
–First, my colleague Kelly Hill this week reported on a panel she moderated at the recent LTE Innovation Summit that looked at over-the-air testing standards. (Did you know there is some controversy around it? Check out the story so you have something to talk about at your next dinner party.)
I won’t re-hash the story here, but needless to say the juiciest part is where the panel discussion touched on the issue of “death grip.” No, not that Charles Bronson movie “Death Wish,” but the issue of consumers holdings onto their cell phones so tight that it impacts the devices ability to maintain a cellular signal.
Apparently, current device testing does not take into account consumers squeezing the life out of their phones when making calls while I can only assume they are dangling over the edge of the Grand Canyon.
This issue seemed to have received a spark some years back when Apple first unveiled its iPhone 5 device that is customers held a certain way – like in a way that would allow them to make a phone call – the internal antennas would quit doing what they were supposed to be doing, which I guess would be to antenna-ate?
Anyways, death grip-itisis, or death grip-gate or whatever the official slang term for its now is, is a real thing and has the T&M community wanting to squeeze the necks of consumers. So, before anything unfortunate happens, let’s all just cut back on the squeeze-y pressure we are putting on our mobile phones.
–Next, the equipment and tech giants over at the industry’s large vendors gathered this week in New York to talk turkey on all things “5G.” According to Nokia Solutions and Networks, topics for discussion included:
–Requirements and technologies for 5G.
–Propagation and channel modeling at new spectrum bands, from 3 to 100 GHz, including antenna design at these bands.
–5G spectrum availability and regulatory issues.
–Innovative architectures and systems needed to build out the capacity demands of tomorrow.
All fine topics and probably something that the industry needs to begin tackling if it wants to keep on track in making just deployed “near-4G” technologies like LTE obsolete by next Thursday.
Not that I need to be considered more of a luddite than I already am, but from recent conversations with peeps in the know, the wireless industry much too quickly zoomed past 3G and onto whatever the hell LTE is on the generational scale without recouping the costs associated with purchasing 3G licenses or paying for 3G deployments. Now, with near-4G just becoming a “thing” that most people have heard of, and plans for real 4G to be deployed at some point in the coming years, do we really need to be hyping the 5G term?
Can’t we just stick with developing true 4G services first before we jump ahead to 5G? What’s the rush people. Has “4G” already lost it luster? Has the fact that true 4G deployments can be counted on one finger of one hand made it so that we are now ready to shift our attention further up the number scale?
Alright, I will go back to playing “Pong” on my Atari 2600 in front of my massive 13-inch television.
–Next up was word that the wireless industry may have truly found what it was designed to do: wirelessly providing information on the amount of beer that remains in a keg.
That’s right, the people over at SteadyServ Technologies have come up with their IKeg system that not only steals the whole “if we put a lowercase ‘i’ in front of a word, it will be awesome,” but as they so elegantly stated brings mobile functionality to the $21 billion draft beer market that has somehow managed to become a $21 billion industry using the “shake-the-keg” method of seeing how much beer remains in a keg.
The IKeg solution – I refuse to play this “i” game beyond what Apple has done – allows businesses to monitor their kegs through a simple four-step process. I will allow IKeg to demonstrate this using this graphic:
Four steps? Definitely seems easier than shaking a keg.
–A beer does, however, sound good after reading how close Verizon Wireless got to “uncomfortable” territory this week. The carrier cited a “recent” survey from Nuance that showed cellphone owners were becoming very … comfortable … with their mobile devices. (It should be noted that by “recent” Verizon Wireless meant a survey released in January 2013, but whatevs.)
Verizon Wireless entitled this little message “A modern day love story: mobile intelligence is getting personal,” and noting that the Nuance survey showed that of 1,000 cellphone owners surveyed, more than half cited a “personal connection with their device’s mobile assistant.”
Luckily, Verizon Wireless quickly steers the conversation away from inappropriate after that luring headline and intriguing first paragraph by just hyping a few applications that can help those who can’t handle their own lives to handle their lives. Nice save, and let’s never talk about this again.
–Finally, some helpful tips for keeping your iPhone 5/5S alive until the iPhone 6 appears.
I welcome your comments. Please send me an e-mail at dmeyer@rcrwireless.com.
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