There has been no shortage of news affecting the telecom and wireless industries. First, as many expected, a three-way merger among Charter, Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks was announced last Tuesday. Many, if not most, of you are versed on the details of...
More than 75% of all mobile phones used in the United States are smartphones, according to ComScore’s most recent MobiLens report. That’s 184 million Americans using Web-connected devices every day. A major component of smartphone use is the reliance on over-the-top services offering users...
As promised, this week we draw some conclusions from the results of our mobile first poll, which resulted in three ways to be an innovative leader as your company is planning for 2016 and beyond. Often, strategic planning sessions can be pretty dry and boring events...
No Jitter’s recent research sheds some light on Skype’s initiative into the business communication arena, known as Skype for Business, previously Microsoft Lync. The study reveals that 90% of Skype for Business adopters voted it as a better solution than their traditional PBX systems.
The...
RF spectrum paramount for continued LTE expansion across Latin America
LTE has been fast to arrive in Latin America if compared to the time from the first launches of GSM and UMTS worldwide to their landing in the region. While it took 2G and 3G...
This was a very active week in telecom, with AT&T extending its termination date on its DirecTV merger to the end of June; Charlie Ergen making headlines defending the designated entity structure for the latest wireless auction (CNBC interview here); Google releasing its self-driving car on California...
“Messaging services are killing SMS” – Beta News
“There are more WhatsApps than texts sent each day. A lot more” – TechRadar
“Texting is in decline” – Business Insider
“How WhatsApp is killing off text messaging” – ITProPortal
These are just a few of the recent headlines accompanying...
Secrets are pervasive in the high-tech industry.
For many years, members of the industry have been wary about sharing their intellectual property with others. They believed doing so would jeopardize their competitive differentiation and business opportunities.
But, in many cases, remaining secretive is no longer the...
Greetings from Chicago (INTX show), Philadelphia and Albany (the back of the NY State Capitol shown). This has been a busy earnings week, with Comcast, Cablevision, CenturyLink, Frontier, Windstream and Sprint all reporting earnings. While our focus will be on Sprint’s earnings this week, we’ll...
Technology innovation has been a significant disruptor of established markets for quite some time – and the telecom industry is no exception. In fact, there is arguably more disruption going on in this industry than any other. The growth of messaging apps is unstoppable,...
After a steady stream of significant investments in both labor and dollars as well as a series of successful trials, network function virtualization has proven its value to service providers. NFV brings virtualization in service providers’ back-end data centers, effectively converging IT and network...
This week, on top of earnings news we had a number of announcements across the industry. Comcast announced it would be launching 2-gigabit-per-second service to 200,000 homes in Chattanooga, Tenn. This news item would have minimal impact except for the fact that Chattanooga has...
Almost 20 months ago the world’s largest radio access network company proclaimed the arrival of the Ericsson small cell, except it was, and is, a distributed antenna system. Since then, many of the world’s largest DAS vendors have followed suit and have started to...
Large data centers started using software-defined networking principles a few years ago to create interconnect “fabrics” out of many switches, something difficult to do with conventional routers and switches and protocols. Looking at carrier networks, moving from today’s routed network to an SDN network...
Last week was already overflowing with earnings news (we will cover AT&T and Verizon Communications earnings in great detail next week), when Bloomberg broke the story last Thursday of the likely Comcast/Time Warner Cable merger demise. CNBC confirmed this rumor on Friday morning, and...
Verizon and AT&T tackle video for value creation
When I was a manager in the engineering and operations workforce in Sprint’s local division (later to become Embarq, and then CenturyLink), I remember a discussion with the VP on a process improvement project. “Jim, everything we...
A closer look at Wi-Fi’s evolving technology and services
Once viewed as a threat to mobile operators' valuable 3G and 4G services, Wi-Fi (family of technologies under the IEEE 802.11 protocol) is now seen as a cost-effective way of helping operators meet their customers’ insatiable...
Is virtualized VoLTE the answer to fighting OTT challengers?
It’s quite clear that mobile telecommunication operators are being redefined by LTE and the transition to all-IP communications. The transition of telephony services from circuit-switched legacy to voice over LTE now seems a certainty. However, Ovum has...
Top 10 events of the first quarter: recap of Pt. 1
We started the first quarter review before the Easter/Passover holidays with five events.
1. Sling TV announced at Consumer Electronics Show: Our bottom line was that this was a big idea with decent implementation, amazing...
One of the very first lessons taught to telecommunications students is that radio frequency spectrum is a scarce resource. This limitation forces governments and other market players to seek alternatives aimed at maximizing its efficient use with the purpose of promoting wider coverage and...
These next two weeks, we’ll recap the first quarter with a quick spin through the top 10 events that will influence telecom earnings calls throughout the year. Thanks to several of you who sent in your own nominations.
Top 10 events of Q1 (in no...
T-Mobile US' 'Un-carrier 9.0' set to disrupt enterprise market
Throughout the course of telecommunications history, the pricing alchemy between business and consumer plans has been convoluted at best, and perverted at worst. This started with landline – voice – pricing in the previous century, and continues...
Mobile operators expanding their voice over LTE services in 2015 want to make sure it’s not a replay of the massive LTE data outages that plagued the industry from 2011 to 2014. One way they’re accomplishing that goal is by revamping their monitoring approach to...
Remember the dawn of the Internet? Remember all the skeptics who didn’t see its transformational genius? Remember how it became enormous?
It’s happening again.
What’s happening involves the Internet, of course, but in a newly emerging context. I am referring to a phenomenon called the industrial...
