By: Jesse Cryderman
Like everything else in the realm of telecommunications, satellite technology has undergone a profound metamorphosis since its inception.On July 10, 1962, the first telecommunications
satellite, Telstar, was launched from Cape Canaveral; developed by AT&T and Bell Labs, it resembled a disco ball. Thirteen days later the first transatlantic broadcast in
history—video of the Statue of Liberty—was viewed by millions of Europeans. Telstar, which earned the distinction of initiating the first commercial use of outer space, also introduced
Europe to baseball that day with a live broadcast of a Chicago Cubs-Philadelphia Phillies game at Wrigley Field…
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By: Edward H. Kennedy
One of the greatest long-term indicators of a country’s potential economic growth is the consistent delivery of affordable and reliable electricity. But devastating weather events
and the aging infrastructures of public utilities make the job of keeping the lights on tougher every day. Consider these statistics: non-weather-related power outages
can cost US businesses and consumers up to $188 billion a year, according to Massoud Amin, professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Minnesota; and,
in a study of 15 major storms that took place in the US between 2004 and 2012, power restoration was shown to take anywhere from 3 to 20 days (Executive Office of the
President, “Economic Benefits of Increasing Electric Grid Resilience to Weather Outages,” August 2013)…
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By: Jesse Cryderman
How would you like to reduce your travel budget and skip out on keynote presentations at the remaining trade shows this year? If I were to summarize the overall theme of every trade show
and industry event over the past three years, it would be this: the rate of change in telecommunications is so swift that it’s outpacing communications service providers’ ability to evolve.
We’ve all heard the data. When the analyst firm Ovum researched the impact of social messaging on CSPs’ revenues, two disturbing trends came into focus: over-the-top (OTT) social messaging is
leeching billions of dollars, and this trend is rapidly accelerating…
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By: Becky Bracken
Software-defined networking (SDN) sells itself. The idea of taking hardware functions in the communications network and replacing it with inexpensive, easily updated software is appealing on
its own. But separating the reality of what SDN is doing right now from the super-duper, hyped-up excitement is easier said than done. Strategy Analytics says SDN can save mobile
operators $4 billion in capital expenditures (CAPEX) by 2017. That’s a ton of dough for an industry beleaguered by the trifecta of over-the-top (OTT) competition, the “dumb pipe” conundrum and
the slow crush of the global economic downturn…
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By: Steve Hateley, Nancee Ruzicka
Fulfillment has become an unmanageable collection of manual processes, systems and data that are inefficient, inaccurate and expensive to operate and maintain. Moreover,
consumers want transparency so they can start an order online and finish it in a retail outlet, but it doesn’t work that way when a company has multiple sales channels, each with its own
product catalog. The company may also have a single CRM (customer relationship management) system but multiple instances of it maintained across its organization…
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By: Douglas Suriano
In creating an enriching and productive digital-lifestyle experience, numerous interrelated layers of a service provider’s network, business and operational support systems
(BSS/OSS) and service-delivery platforms must communicate to derive more intelligence and drive personalization. While much is written about mobility and connectivity, few details are actually
provided on how to move toward monetizing usage and, ultimately, digital-lifestyle services. In order to intelligently orchestrate the subscriber experience, all digital-lifestyle service providers
and their partners will have to manage many layers of an ever-broadening ecosystem…
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By: Jesse Cryderman
Eight-core processors the size of a postage stamp. Particle accelerators reduced to a chip, data centers on a chip and base stations that look like a Rubik’s Cube. The iPad
Mini and the Ultrabook. With the exception of display screens, in the world of technology it seems small is always the new big. The same holds true for the hardware responsible for shuttling
cellular traffic to and from end-user devices and the backhaul network. Cellular transmission sites have benefited from the onward march of Moore’s law and concomitant reductions in power
consumption as well as improvements in beam forming and spectral efficiency…
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By: Robert Machin
Networks and connectivity have been the bedrock of the modern internet era, and new network technologies such as 4G LTE will bring broadband access to people previously outside the reach
of the internet—not just in developing regions such as central Africa and many parts of Asia, where the number of new users will exceed one billion, but also in rural areas of developed
countries, where previously the delivery of fiber or even fast DSL wasn’t economically or technically feasible…
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By: Christoph Glingener
With each passing day, figuring out how to provision enough bandwidth for resource-intensive applications that connect to data centers and cloud computing becomes a more
pressing, complex and costly question. The long-term solution lies in a more dynamic and programmable network infrastructure. Software defined networking (SDN) is a promising approach for achieving
the cost-effective, end-to-end infrastructure flexibility that both network operators and their users seek…
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By: Becky Bracken
Times are tough just about everywhere. Infrastructure buildout is taking a back seat to just keeping the lights on in many communications service providers’ organizations. But while
CAPEX (capital expenditures) may be slowing, customers have increased their demand for fixed-line broadband and the services it delivers; as a result, cable companies have historically dominated
the broadband scene. But now copper DSL is getting a new lease on life. Sure, fiber may be best but, with its high cost and labor-intensive installation, it's priced out of reach for most practical
CSP deployments…
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By: Bernard Breton, Cyril Doussau
Perhaps the two greatest challenges that today’s mobile network operators (MNOs) face are the drastic increase in over-the-top (OTT) service usage and the constant changes in subscribers’
behaviors. We also live in a hyperconnected world in which mobile applications and services are expected to be constantly available and perform seamlessly, making it critical for MNOs to
optimize network resources and streamline the buildout of additional capacity. Additional capacity is available in the form of several network-technology migrations, including that of TDM to
Ethernet in MNOs’ backhaul, 2G and 3G to LTE and LTE Advanced in their radio access networks (RANs), and the deployment of small cells and Wi-Fi offload to release traffic pressure
on their wireless networks…
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By: Jesse Cryderman
According to the latest data from the GSMA, 206 commercial LTE networks in 79 countries have now been deployed. In December 2011 there were only 50. The superfast wireless technology is
being rolled out faster each year, but it has yet to be widely adopted by consumers; in Europe, for instance, just 1.3 percent of wireless connections are 4G LTE.Next on the wireless
roadmap is LTE-Advanced, or LTE-A. One of the prime reasons the industry chose to embrace LTE over WiMAX as its preferred fourth-generation technology was because it offered a clear path to
the next generation…
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By: Tim Young
“Evolution is not a force but a process; not a cause but a law.” —John Morley, On Compromise (1874) Networks are enormous, complex machines that span the globe, and they’re in a constant
state of flux. To get a handle on how they evolve, you also have to look at the way that user behavior is changing. You have to consider how devices and content are undergoing their own
respective metamorphoses. And you have to take a system-level approach to the vibrant, writhing circus that is the modern communications landscape…
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By: Jesse Cryderman
LTE 2.0The second wave of LTE rollouts is occurring around the world, and by 2016 more data will move across 4G networks than 3G ones, says ABI Research: traffic on 4G networks
is growing at a rate of roughly 82 percent year over year. Cheaper, more powerful devices and rapid LTE deployment work in concert to drive mobile-video consumption, which makes up the bulk of
traffic on 4G networks. “Already, Verizon saw video accounting for 50 percent of its network traffic earlier this year,” wrote Ying Kang Tan, an ABI research associate, last month…
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