By Howard Baldwin, Contributing Columnist

How symbiotic is the relationship between wired and wireless technologies? Simple answer: very. Increasingly, the perceived gap between traditional cellular (3G, 4G), Wi-Fi, and wired technologies is narrowing.

There’s no question that the gap between wireless technologies is narrowing. Tiago Rodrigues, project director for the Wireless Business Alliance (WBA), sees venues such as sports stadiums, shopping malls, and even universities combining cellular and Wi-Fi coverage.

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Tags: 3G, 4G, broadband, mobility, New Normal, service provider wi-fi, wireless, wireline

[WARNING: This blog post contains specifics on actual product features. Stop reading now if you prefer PowerPoint to Excel.]

“Enterprise class.” Sounds awesome. But does it have any meaning to your business?

It turns out that it does, but we need to dig into a real product example to make it clear. One shining example from Cisco is our leadership in Enterprise class (there’s that phrase again!) 3G/4G. Let’s use this example to highlight how our engineers create “Enterprise class” products by focusing on: Read More »

Tags: 3G, 3G MIBs, 3G/4G, 3GPP, 4G, business continuity, CPE-based 3G, Enterprise Class, enterprise class security, enterprise network, EZ VPN, modem lifecycle, router, vpn, WAN, Wireless WAN

Last week, the annual 4G World show was hosted in everyone’s favorite windy city—Chicago!  This year, I was lucky enough to be a keynote speaker for the event.  It’s always an honor to speak at an event on behalf of Cisco and the countless folks that have made our SP Mobility a success.  As the show progressed, I was reminded at how far the world of mobility has come in such a short amount of time.  Moreover, I was amazed at the vast amount of new opportunities that have emerged as a result this rapidly evolving market.  I am extremely excited about what the next year will bring!

Aside from the keynote event, I spent the vast majority of my time in meetings with new and existing service provider customers.  The conversations were Read More »

Tags: 4G, 4G World, Cisco, monetization, Service Provider, wi-fi

4G mobile Internet is back in the news with word that Apple has sold over 5 million LTE-enabled iPhone 5s in the first three days it went on sale, and I know that my wife is counting down the hours until she is eligible for an upgrade (likely my two-year old daughter too… if she could talk.  Have you seen how kids naturally master an iPhone like Ronaldhino and soccer ball?).

Whether it’s for uploading pictures of the kids to social media sites or getting work done faster, over 100 million smartphone users will belong to the “gigabyte club” (over 1 GB per month) in 2012 according to the Cisco Visual Networking Index. However Read More »

Tags: 4G, ASR 901, Cisco, Emerging Markets, iphone, LTE, mobile backhaul, Partho Mishra, Service Provider

Three years ago I wrote a paper “Top Ten Considerations for a Successful Evolved Packet Core Deployment” (if you want a bit of history, check it out here). In that paper, I listed flexibility as the #2 consideration and control plane/signaling as the #3 consideration. Number 1 was an “Open Evolved Packet Core.”

I think I was wrong. Today I believe that Control Plane/Signaling and flexibility should have been and should be co-Number 1s. Not that an open EPC is not needed, it surely is, but it’s now taken for granted that the EPC is the common core for all access mechanisms moving forward. Don’t feel bad Open EPC, Number 3 still isn’t bad.

Three years is an eternity in the mobile market and the one thing for certain is that there is no certainty. The market is moving faster and in more directions than Read More »

Tags: 3G, 4G, asr, ASR 5000, asr 5500, asr5000, asr5500, mobile, mobility