Networks (wide area or local area) are changing. Most of the hype tends to center on “5G,” the next-generation platform mobile operators will adopt. But there are all sorts of other [...]
It is not too hard to find skeptics about revenue upside for mobile operators in 5G, internet of things or edge computing, because it is hard to demonstrate the business case in a near term [...]
Global revenue growth rates provide the best evidence possible of why new revenue sources and business models must be developed in the mobile industry. Traditional mobile revenues will have a [...]
Network architectures and communication protocols are not the primary concern of most people who work in and around the telecommunications industry, but architectures always reflect the dominant [...]
It might seem like hyperbole to claim that, in the 5G and future eras, all device access will be untethered. Not most; all. So here’s the logic: “access” increasingly means the way a device or [...]
Network architectures always directly reflect perceptions of what drives revenue. Many decades ago, the architecture of a telecom network, in a single domain, was simple. Traffic passed between [...]
Mobility “broke” some rules about telecom architecture, namely the rule that the public network terminated on the side of a house or in the basement of a building or inside a wiring closet. In [...]
Forecasts of near-term 5G revenue are nearly meaningless, since most of the revenue will come from mobile customers shifting from 4G to 5G networks. So most of the 5G revenue is a simple [...]
Will MulteFire replace Wi-Fi in many enterprise settings? In some cases. More likely is coexistence of Wi-Fi and MulteFire, as mobile device connectivity inside the building becomes a new [...]
Some 23 mobile operators have commercially launched 41 mobile internet of things networks worldwide, including both NB-IoT and LTE-M platforms NB-IoT networks are available from 3 Hong Kong [...]
Analogies sometimes are helpful when trying to understand the underlying dynamics of the “telecom” industry. In past centuries, telecom might reasonably have been likened to roads, pipelines, [...]
Here are two examples of innovation in the telecom industry that come from “outside” the industry. First, Amazon’s Alexa and the line of Amazon voice appliances has created a new platform for [...]
Consumers are rational. That is why they use Wi-Fi. But they might be equally rational in the 5G era when there is no financial advantage to offloading mobile device access. The data seems [...]
With the caveat that many continue to doubt the likelihood, an argument can be made that, as mobile substitution has become a reality for voice services, messaging and now stands to happen for [...]
Coming 5G networks might change use cases in many ways. Growth of new use cases might well be driven by enterprise, not consumer apps, by sensors requiring communications, more than people needed [...]