Vendor Spotlight: Subex

By: Scott St. John, Pipeline

If you haven’t looked at Subex recently, it’s worth taking a look at them now. Subex has emerged from a period of major rejuvenation; shedding all its debt and strengthening its robust portfolio – including an increased focus on driving new business models, enhancing the customer experience and optimizing the enterprise  – with higher operational visibility into revenues and renewed commitment to creating shareholder wealth. More importantly, it’s doing this to leverage its key assets to help their customers better contend with digital transformation…

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Multi-dimensional Analytics: Why Real-Time is Critical

By: Scott St. John, Pipeline

Software Defined Networks (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) promise to dramatically lower both CAPEX and OPEX for Communications Service Providers (CSPs), while at the same time providing their customers with new, innovative services faster and more reliably. Any one of these benefits would be a tall order to fulfill.  Addressing all of them, at the same time, is clearly a challenge; especially if the CSP is still relying on traditional methods.  To address this opportunity, forward thinking service providers are automating as much of their back-office as possible…

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The A-Z's of Mobile World Congress 2017

By: Scott St. John, Pipeline

The industry is preparing for one of its largest pilgrimages as over one hundred thousand people plan to converge on Barcelona, Spain for Mobile World Congress 2017. Expectations are mounting as attendees, exhibitors, and speakers wait in anticipation to see, hear and present the latest industry advancements. Pipeline asked some of the exhibiting companies it works with regularly to tell us what they will be showcasing at MWC 2017. We received a tremendous response and, if it’s any indication of this year’s event, we are all in for a great show…

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Securing the Modern Cellco

By: Mark Cummings, Ph.D.

As the modern Cellco becomes more and more critical to society, new threats and vulnerabilities are creating new challenges. With the advent of nation state cyber attacks, Cellcos have become targets. At the same time, mobile networks are evolving from hardware-based components to more software-based components. Taken together, these two require strengthening internal security in two ways: changes in policies and procedures, and the extension of end-to-end orchestration to automated detection and response to intrusions and infections…

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In-Building Wireless: The Road to 5G

By: Slavko Djukic

The wireless industry is seeing a convergence of licensed cellular frequencies and unlicensed protocols such as LTE Unlicensed (LTE-U), License Assisted Access (LAA), and MulteFire and this convergence should play a major role on the road to 5G. While mobile operators are testing millimeter wave frequencies in the 28-30GHz bands for fixed wireless access in the macro network, 5G propagation indoors will most likely happen within existing licensed spectrum bands and future unlicensed spectrum in the 3GHz-6GHz bands…

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The Future is Life-Mobile Convergence

By: Tim Young

The latest Cisco VNI for mobile was just released, and as always, the forecast is one of crazy growth on the mobile front. By 2021—a scant four years away—we could be looking at 5.5 billion mobile users worldwide. Global networks will be tasked with supporting 12 billion mobile-ready devices and connections. And those devices will chew through some major traffic, with a predicted seven-fold increase in global data traffic by 2021. That’s a CAGR of 47 percent. And while, at the moment, the majority of objects added to the network are smartphones, tablets, and PCs, there is a growing percentage of “things”—IoT modules—being added as well…

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An Advocate for Safer Things

By: Alan Zeichick

Stuff connected to our networks is vulnerable. Vulnerable to being hacked, with customer data stolen or corrupted. Vulnerable to being taken over and turned into bots that can launch Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. Vulnerable to serving as an attack vector into a business, school, hospital or government computer network. There’s no doubt that there are vulnerabilities; we see reports of cyberattacks on the news every day. And like the tip of the iceberg, most of the attacks are never reported or seen…

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Fixing the future of 5G

By: Jaime Fink

The telecom industry has set its sights on delivering a 5G future. The fifth generation of wireless technology promises to be significantly faster than the current 4G standard, and to connect more complex data-intensive fixed and mobile applications with little or no latency. Internet service providers (ISPs) are now weighing up their options for deploying 5G as quickly and efficiently as possible in order to leverage the benefits. Against expectations, fixed-broadband adoption is increasing rapidly…

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Letter from the Editor

By: Tim Young

“Cell phones are so convenient that they’re an inconvenience.” -Haruki Murakami We’ve certainly entered a new age of mobility. The iPhone turns a decade old in just a few months. RIM’s first BlackBerry that was actually a phone (rather than just a two-way pager) was released close to 15 years ago. And the IBM Simon, considered by many to be the first smartphone, was released over twenty-two years ago. It was certainly the first thing I saw that was anything like a smartphone. I didn’t even own a cell phone in 1994, so the device was practically mystical to my eyes…

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Telecom Industry News

By: Jim Schakenbach

The New Year got off to a strong start with a number of developments on all industry fronts – from connectivity to security and the ongoing development of 5G wireless technology. Advances in connectivity Newer, easier, and more reliable ways to connect the user to the network and network-to-network represented a sizable portion of this month’s news. Fibercom announced the availability of the world’s first LTE Cat 9 M-2 module with global industrial and carrier certifications, including over 10 carrier certifications, over 35 regulatory certs, and field tests with over 70 carriers across 20 countries…

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