By: Scott St. John, Pipeline, Tim Young
“If I have a thousand ideas,” Alfred Nobel once mused, “and only one turns out to be good, I am satisfied.” While his most famous invention… dynamite… went on to do both good and bad things,
there is no question that it was an important advancement, and that it changed the face of the 19th and 20th centuries. And this was possible because he was willing to risk failure to accomplish
something unique that would have an impact so great, it would change the face of history. This willingness to reinvent and try new solutions for new challenges is the soul of innovation, and
innovation drives our industry and our society to new heights of inter-connectivity and productivity…
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By: Jesse Cryderman
While navigating through the throngs of attendees and dodging schwag-slingers at Mobile World Congress (MWC) this year, I overheard someone say, “If you want to know what the future looks like,
spend half an hour observing the habits of a digital native.” Certain that my aging collection of cassette tapes disqualified me from this demographic, I began to consider these digital natives and
the profound impact they are having, and will increasingly have, on everything from transportation and commerce to entertainment, education, healthcare and communities of all sizes…
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By: Bill O'Brien
The networking industry is experiencing a kind of renaissance, with impacts that will be far-reaching. The acronyms SDN and NFV are the buzz and all the pundits are weighing in, but few are the
stories of real production deployments with real customers consuming virtual network functions. Network Functions Virtualization or NFV represents a glass ceiling being transcended with carriers
building off the influence of cloud architectures to virtualize network functions. Network is finally feeling the impact of virtualization that the computing and storage industries experienced
almost a decade ago, and there is a lot we can learn from that transformation…
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By: Jesse Cryderman
Believe it or not, the smartphone revolution is only eight years old. It kicked off in 2007 with Apple’s prescient slogan, “This is only the beginning,” and the release of the first
iPhone, which pulled smartphones as a whole out of the geek toy box and into the realm of mass-market acceptance. The world was changed as a result. Smartphones, and later tablets,
combined the power of a PC with mobile connectivity, creating an always-connected society with an ever-increasing appetite for data, media and social interaction…
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By: Dean Mechlowitz
Mobile service providers face growing operational challenges from new 3G, 4G and 5G technologies and massive radio access network expansion from small cells. Backhaul complexity has also
increased dramatically with the transition to Ethernet/IP. New business models resulting from Machine-to-Machine (M2M), Internet-of-Things (IoT) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) further
complicate operations, while increasing customer expectations increases service assurance challenges. Operators are racing to introduce new services, maintain network quality, and improve
costs…
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By: Flavio Gomes
By all accounts, the Internet of Things (IoT) is still in its early days. Analyst firm Gartner predicts more than 26 billion devices will be connected by 2020. IDC is even bolder, predicting
nearly double that amount in the same timeframe. This is happening both on the consumer side of IoT, as new devices such as refrigerators and home security systems come online, and in the
traditional machine-to-machine (M2M) communications space, which can be referred to as the B2B IoT.At the same time, these devices are generating data—lots and lots of data…
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By: Jesse Cryderman
Communications service providers (CSPs) maintained relatively small product catalogs for many, many years. Following deregulation and the rise of cable VoIP service and telco-TV, things got a
little more complicated. Competitive pressure and new service options increased complexity across all levels within service provider organizations, from ordering to provisioning to support. The
arrival of mobile certainly increased complexity further; but for the most part, until recent years, CSPs sold a handful of services that were bundled and sold in different ways, and the
purpose-built systems for telecom supported this ecosystem…
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By: Matthew Roberts
It’s taken a while, but service providers have finally come to understand that they have to deal with the reality of Big Data. Developing data lakes and supporting infrastructure have taken all
their attention so far. The focus now needs to shift to the daunting task of extraction and cleaning and using data science to deliver actionable insights to service providers’ users and systems.
Thomas Edison’s famous quote, "Genius is 1 percent inspiration – and 99 percent perspiration,” could be aptly applied to the situation that service providers find themselves in as they consider
their Big Data strategy…
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By: Jesse Cryderman
Mobile money and mobile banking is changing the way people conduct day-to-day financial transactions across the world. The mobile device is a standard method of paying for goods and services in
the developing world, and in the developed world, it’s catching on. The introduction of Apple Pay will no doubt hasten the growth of mobile money in the U.S. Unlike new technologies such as
self-driving vehicles, the barrier to widespread mobile money services is not user demand nor is it device capability…
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By: Jesse Cryderman
AT&T U-verse recently updated its U-verse App to include 41 additional live channels and compatibility with a wearable. The U-verse App has more live channels available to watch outside the
home than any cable provider with 236 live channels inside the home and 173 channels available outside the home. The new channels build upon U-verse’s existing channel lineup available outside
of the home, which already includes channels like ESPN, Fox News, HBO and USA Network.“We’re proud of our leadership in the TV Everywhere space and the extensive lineup of content we’re able to
offer customers today,” said GW Shaw, Vice President of U-verse and Video Products, AT&T Home Solutions…
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By: Tim Young
“Progress is the nice word we like to use. But change is its motivator. And change has its enemies.” -Robert F. Kennedy When Bobby Kennedy said those words, he was Attorney General of the
United States and he was speaking to a conference of mayors from cities and towns across the country in 1964. He was talking about big change. Social change on a massive scale. His point,
however, is not confined to lofty goals and massive socio-economic upheaval. It is a nearly universal truth that we, as human beings, like to see things “getting better” in the abstract, but tend
to be led by the oft-forgotten half of inertia… that an object at rest tends to remain at rest…
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