Telecoms Tech

While LTE smartphones drive growth in small cell deployments, the enthusiasm among ecosystem stakeholders is tempered by significant challenges with the new technology.

Have you ever wondered where telephone numbers come from? Well, kids, there’s this bird called a stork that delivers the numbers to your phone company which is very happy to receive them… if only it were that simple.

​The convenience and mobility benefits afforded by media tablets are very apparent, given the results from record unit shipments and revenues that were reported by vendors in 2012.

According to the latest market study by ABI Research, American companies like Netflix, Hulu, Apple and Amazon helped to drive the over-the-top (OTT) video entertainment market past $8 billion in 2012.
The three largest markets -- North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific experienced year-over-year growth in excess of 50 percent in 2012.

Dish Network has made a $25.5bn counter offer for US mobile operator Sprint. Dish’s bid is $5.5bn more than Softbank’s offer, which creates a significant dilemma for Sprint. Whatever the outcome, Sprint is likely to suffer as negotiations continue over the coming months.

So what is changing according to the proponents of the Cloud? Through cloud services, licenses are cheaper. Updates are done on a regular basis while installation and on-site maintenance are reduced dramatically. New functionality and updated databases are immediately available to all users.

Ask a telecom service provider’s CTO, “Would you prefer to operate network infrastructure based on fiber optics or a copper-based network?” These CTOs snap back in a second, “Fiber!” Now ask a CIO or IT manager, “Would you prefer a local area network (LAN) based on fiber optics or copper?” and you may hear 100 questions.

Racing to LTE is well under way with over 145 commercial LTE networks launched on a global basis according to GSA. Yet, a lot of operators are still evaluating what is the right migration path to enable single, converged mobile backhaul infrastructure to carry voice, data and video for 2G, 3G and LTE.