Untethering the Future at NXTcomm08

The themes of broadband and convergence may sound familiar, almost hackneyed, but at NXTcomm08 both will be center stage and supercharged by a wireless dimension.

“What we’ve all been hoping and wishing for is finally becoming reality,” said Grant Seiffert, president of TIA, which co-produces the NXTcomm event. “Broadband wireless is creating a truly mobile environment, and we’re seeing operators becoming comfortable moving from wired to wireless. That’s also where all the capital spending is going. So we expect wireless service revenue to surpass wired in 2009.”

Motorola Inc., for instance, had more than $1.2 billion in wireless network sales in the first quarter of 2008 in both in-home broadband solutions and new technologies to take service providers beyond 3G into full mobile broadband offerings. Motorola’s Home & Networks Mobility business has shipped more than 73 million digital entertainment devices and more than 4 million IPTV set-top devices, and entered 80 WiMAX engagements worldwide. It’s also working on a combined WiMAX/LTE platform for, you guessed it, convergence.

Moto has been talking up its media mobility strategy and will continue the theme at NXTcomm. “Changes in how much, how often and where content is delivered and consumed are fundamentally driving the convergence of wired and wireless broadband devices and networks,” said Dan Moloney, president of Motorola Home & Networks Mobility.

That’s a theme that Sprint-Nextel Corp. President and CEO Dan Hesse will pursue in a keynote address on June 18 at NXTcomm. He’ll be there to talk about the future of converged communications and what it means for Sprint and others in the service provider, manufacturer, enterprise and entertainment communities. It’s likely that WiMAX and wireless data that’s enabled by open-access networks will feature prominently in his speech, too. Sprint, for its part, just issued a new version of its developer toolkit for developers to create wireless applications that customers can run on Sprint phones. And its wide-release WiMAX service launch is, of course, expected this year — a launch that, if successful, will shore up the struggling carrier, which has been hemorrhaging subscribers and is rumored to be a takeover target.

Sprint won’t be the only operator focused on converged wireless data. "The greater availability of rich media content, from HD and video on demand to Web video and downloads, is driving unprecedented demand for greater bandwidth as well as personalized broadband experiences," said Ruchir Rodrigues, vice president of product design and development for Verizon Communications Inc. “The Verizon networks — the all-fiber-optic FiOS network, our next-generation wireless network and our dynamic broadband networks — provide a great platform for high-speed access and delivery of the types of content that consumers want, and give us the opportunity to focus now on integrating the toolkit of solutions needed to offer consumers more choice, more customization and ultimately more mobility than ever before."

Verizon has chosen LTE as its 4G technology choice, and while commercial LTE services are still a couple of years out, the technology will be a hot topic at NXTcomm. Ericsson, which has publicly eschewed WiMAX, in April unveiled the world’s first commercial LTE solution, the M700 mobile platform, with peak data rates of up to 100mbps on the downlink and up to 50mbps on the uplink. At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the vendor also unveiled a high-speed LTE mobile prototype device with download speeds of up to 300mbps. Rumor has it that the first of its commercial LTE devices are due this year. Could NXTcomm be the perfect venue for such an announcement?

NXTcomm’s themes are all being driven by the need on the part of operators to find new revenue streams, but also by thirst on the demand side.

“Broadband connections around the world continue to grow and will surpass half a billion by 2012, and that's only increasing competition for service providers of all types to put in place the tools and technologies that will keep them ahead of the competition," said Patti A. Reali, research director at Gartner Inc. "At the network level, transformation to next-generation platforms that meet consumers' needs for increased digitization, capacity, and control of converged voice, video and data services already is under way. But success with consumers will require service providers and their technology suppliers to enable, manage and make transparent the increased complexity of delivering ultra high-speed broadband services and applications, high-quality HD content and others services in an on-demand environment throughout the home and on the go.

Share this article: Email, Slashdot, Digg, Del.icio.us, Yahoo!MyWeb, Windows Live Favorites, Furl
Add this article feed to: RSS, My Yahoo, Newsgator, Bloglines