This past week, I attended the grand opening celebration of Verizon Wireless’ Innovation Center in Waltham, MA. The center, which brings together companies and entrepreneurs alike, is designed to provide a collaborative, hands-on workspace to rapidly develop innovative products and services that leverage 4G LTE technology.
The grand opening was an exciting event and the center was filled with innovative demos and technology tours featuring all types of LTE connected innovations -- from the connected home, connected car, gaming, digital juke box, video and even future innovations such as a connected bike and an LTE-connected robot.
Cisco is a Premier Participant and we have been involved since day one. We are pleased to have provided many man-hours of expert resources to deploy Cisco Mobile Internet solutions to help Verizon Wireless establish this unique center of excellence for all things LTE.
At the center, we have many demonstrations and technologies on display including Cisco Mobile Videoscape, the Cisco Cius enterprise tablet supporting 3G and 4G LTE, Cisco TelePresense, LTE-Connected Enterprise Branch, LTE-enabled Digital Media Signage and Cisco RAN Backhaul and LTE Evolved Packet Core solutions. We’re pleased to also provide the Evolved Packet Core for the 4G LTE Innovation Center lab network - identical to the commercial network - for use by the ecosystem of technology developers accessing the center’s technical and business development resources.
Howard’s recent post on the potential for broadband to reshape rural areas raised some interesting issues, and generated a lot of discussion. For me though, the biggest question it raised was how service providers will actually make it work. How can they deliver broadband services to vast, sparsely populated regions in a way that makes sense economically?
Of course, the industry is already answering this question. One promising possibility: fixed wireless broadband.
As we contemplate the arrival of 4th-Generation mobile wireless capabilities in the form of the LTE standard, I’m going to take us back in time to reflect on an unlikely and intriguing true story from the archives of radio communication history.
Most of us in the telecom industry know that there has been something of a spirited competition that’s been going on for some time between two very capable wireless technologies — CDMA and GSM.
GSM is far more widely deployed than CDMA – the former is widely considered to be a de facto global standard. Whereas CDMA is mostly limited to the U.S. and Canada, along with a few deployments in Asia. Both mobile radio standards are used to establish and manage the wireless connection between a mobile device and the nearest cell tower.
Another CTIA has come and gone. Despite being tempted to sit by the pool all day (it was 85 degrees compared with the typical 40 degrees in Boston), CTIA surprised us all by being very busy in spite of “being too close to MWC” and “Orlando not being a great location.” The show was all a buzz on the recent AT&T and T-Mobile announcement. It seems like every show needs a big announcement like that to set the stage.
We were able to continue the momentum we set at MWC to talk to our customers and the media about our M.O.VE. strategic framework. Everyone agrees that monetization, optimization, and video are the hot topics, and are the main challenges that operators are working to address. It’s always exciting to talk about the tie-in between our recent customer announcements at Reliance and MegaFon and our M.O.VE solution.
The rapid proliferation of smartphones and the growing popularity of advanced mobile applications is well documented and often discussed and debated. Central to this is how mobile service providers are responding to this change in service types and addressing the rising expectations of mobile users.
Our daily interaction with the internet and its ability to inform and entertain has colored our expectations. Now as we “go mobile” with the internet, we bring along our fixed line expectations. We expect high throughput, high reliability, and high quality, no matter the application, no matter the access, no matter the location. Considering we’re now talking about high-bandwidth applications like music streaming, video, and web conferencing, as opposed to voice calls and text messaging, this is no small challenge for a mobile operator.
In order to provide these types of services quickly and reliably across a widely dispersed geography, operators like Telenor Norway are evolving their networks to 4G IP infrastructures. Cisco, as the recognized leader in IP, provides a comprehensive IP next-generation mobile network architecture that enables operators to build a high performance, highly intelligent 4G network with end-to-end security, reliability and tremendous flexibility.
Such a network enables today’s smartphones and advanced applications and allows operators to personalize the customer experience, deliver high-quality multimedia applications, explore new business models and develop innovative new mobile services.
At the heart of this network is the Cisco ASR 5000 mobile multimedia core. The ASR 5000 is a purpose-built platform featuring a distributed architecture, high-performance, high capacity, and high availability, combined with subscriber and network intelligence. Read More »
By Jason Kohn, Contributing Columnist
