Wireless Commentary Archive
:: Wireless Commentary Archive ::
3G – The Natural Follow-up to China’s Olympics
By: By Peter Jarich
Six years ago when we launched Current Analysis’s wireless infrastructure practice, Chinese 3G license allocations were talked about on a weekly basis; 3G allocations and deployments, we heard (from many different sources) were imminent. Those sources were wrong....
In search of replacement revenues
By: By Rich Karpinski
When one revenue stream (landline, anyone?) shrinks, the challenge for service providers is to find another revenue stream that can grow to replace it....
The tube guy
By: By Ed Gubbins
There’s a certain irony in the fact that a large section of the American public think of Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens first and foremost as the guy who referred to the Internet as "a series of tubes."...
P2T’s app ambitions widen appeal
By: By Sarah Reedy
Push to talk historically has been a staple of a loyal sector of field workers and emergency personnel. ...
Ask Steve
By: By Steve Hilton
Have you ever heard about a new technology offering or idea that instantly made you cringe?...
VZW’s expansion worrying Alltel’s roaming partners
By: By Kevin Fitchard
Verizon Wireless’s competitors are not willing to take the megacarrier at its word on roaming...
The ‘black magic’ of handset success
By: By Rich Karpinski
What makes a successful mobile handset? Is it functionality? Hardware? UI? Apps? The right price? Some hard-to-measure buzz? Or the longed-for stamp of teen approval?...
The gender divide: Mobile gets girly
By: By Sarah Reedy
In a market traditionally dominated by men, it appears that most people might actually be asking their teenage daughters how to operate their cell phones. ...
The beauty of NOT being connected
By: By Kevin Fitchard
We live in a connected world, and sometimes that’s a problem. BlackBerrys zip us our e-mail while we sleep....
Corrected: AT&T: Presto! More 3G capacity
By: By Kevin Fitchard
Over the weekend hundreds of thousands new 3G devices suddenly appeared on the AT&T network. I’m referring to the new iPhone 3G, which sold out in many stores in a matter of hours last Friday...
Narrowing the innovation gap
By: By Whitey Bluestein
The winds of change are blowing through the mobile industry. Maybe it's mobile penetration — now at 85% — forcing the need for new strategies....
Rethinking mobile's social explosion
By: By Sarah Reedy
The social-networking wireless revolution is coming; brace yourself and your business model! … OK, there's still time to prepare. But when the floodgates open during the next 10 years...
Is 3G fast enough?
By: By Rich Karpinski
There's an interesting side issue at play this week as Apple launches its 3G iPhone: Is this bit of extra bandwidth really worth it?...
Apple hysteria x 3G
By: By Sarah Reedy
Apple iPhone week is upon us once again, inspired by a new handset with new features and new marketing, along with the same old hype, sea of press coverage and publicity-craving line campers that we've come to expect from last year...
Going mobile
By: By Teresa Mastrangelo
Thirty-five years ago, The Who, sang about mobility long before it was in fashion. “When I’m drivin’ free, the world’s my home, when I’m mobile.” ...
Mobile music reaches tipping point
By: By Rich Karpinski
Days before Apple’s iPhone gains 3G capabilities courtesy of AT&T -- seemingly enhancing its ability to access over-the-air music downloads -- Verizon Wireless this week took a big step away from OTA music to link its mobile music ambitions closer to the PC...
Fixed voice providers: Surrender
By: By Ed Gubbins
T-Mobile's entry into the landline voice-over-IP business last week was the latest accelerant of the trend toward voice as an application owned predominantly...
Making sense of the new Symbian
By: By Kevin Fitchard
Why buy a company just to give away its prime assets the next day? That’s exactly what Nokia is doing, scooping up the remaining 52% share of Symbian and then donating the whole operating system, its associated software and accompanying intellectual property to the newly minted Symbian Foundation...
Defining the WiMAX subscriber
By: By Kevin Fitchard
30.75 million customers--that’s a lot. It’s the number Clearwire projects to have in 2017, but what does that really mean? Clearwire, through its tie-up with Sprint, Comcast, Google and a host of others, plans not only a nationwide WiMAX network, but a completely new business model, alien to the telecom industry today. And that business model implies that a subscriber on tomorrow’s 4G network won’t be the same as a subscriber on the 3G network of today...
Look! Up in the sky!
By: By Kermit Ross, Millennium Marketing
OPASTCO, a small telco trade association, just released a report forecasting that small telcos, on average, will lose 17% more access lines and 13% of their revenues between now and 2010...
Them that's got gets
By: By Joan Engebretson
A former co-worker used to say, "Them that's got gets" -- and nowhere is this truer than in today's wireless industry...
New iPhone, old-style subsidies
By: By Rich Karpinski
By now, you’ve seen all the coverage of the iPhone 2.0. But for our industry, the news behind the news is AT&T’s changing relationship with Apple...
Mobile TV: "Catching the wave" in the U.S.?
By: By Bernhard Kickenweiz, A.T. Kearney
Many of us have experienced TV to mobiles, but this unicast experience is suboptimal -- the images break down easily and the proposition is untenably expensive for the large majority of potential users. In contrast, broadcast TV to mobile phones, which does not suffer these problems, has been commercialized already elsewhere, but is just now reaching US shores in force...
What Verizon’s SureWest and Alltel deals have in common
By: By Joan Engebretson
It’s always fun to interview someone who has a good answer to every question--and Steve Oldham, CEO of Sacramento-based SureWest Communications, recently provided that kind of interview. I talked to him about the company’s strong take rates for triple-play services and about one service the company won’t be selling any time soon--wireless...
Riding the FMC hype cycle
By: By Sarah Reedy
Fixed/mobile convergence (FMC) is another telecom victim of the hype cycle. The technology gets promoted, marketed and heralded as game changing; the buzz wears off; the benefits emerge followed quickly by the return of a second wave of hype; reality sets in and the hype dies down yet again...
