In an attempt to shine a light on all that is good in the world in what are considered by most as dark days, xchange recently set out to find the bright spots for service providers in 2009. Forgive the poor grammar, but here’s a list of what turns our sources on.
3G
China is moving forward with 3G. And in the U.S. a rash of development, especially in HSPA, could well be the big wireless story for 2009.
“Three things — devices, network and business model changes — are without question the sweet spot of what's going on and what will go on. We’re talking about the network that has the capabilities to run those apps and devices in the way customers expect them to run and act ― and they're here, now.”
-- Glenn Lurie, AT&T
4G
Verizon Wireless says it is accelerating its schedule for the rollout of the 4G technology known as LTE (now launching late 2009), and the final spec for that is finally frozen. There’s also the ongoing WiMAX build-out from Sprint-Nextel Corp. and Clearwire Corp, which have added a combo 3G/WiMAX modem to spike subscriber uptake.
And the wireline outfits that sell mobile backhaul are licking their lips.
Barack Obama
I guess you either love him or hate him, but obviously most folks are feeling the love, at least during this honeymoon period. His work during the transition has received high marks, but what he does during the first year in office will have world-changing implications.
“If you want to look for a bright spot, the bright spot is either Obama or there isn’t one ... because either his program of investment is going to jumpstart the U.S. economy to get us at least flat with GDP in the second quarter and to get us into a growth mode by the third quarter, in which case we’ll pull the whole world out of recession.”
-- Tom Nolle, CIMI Corp.
Ecosystems
Telcos have figured out they can’t go it alone in the Web 2.0 world. They need to find partners to both develop applications to run on their networks and to pay them for that privilege. Evidence of this direction of new Alcatel-Lucent CEO Ben Verwaayen’s December announcement of how the company will help service providers create ecosystems and become the trusted provider for the ecosystem partners.
“We, when you look at our industry and us together with our customers, we’ve always partnered as an exception rather than a rule. And, instead, we’re saying ‘We’re going to partner as a rule rather than an exception.’ When you watch the industry you know that opening up to a development ecosystem such as you see with the proof-point of the iPhone platform as just one example, also when Amazon opens up its platform in the EC2 environment and exposes its services to a cloud environment, they’re looking to leverage a really broad ecosystem of innovation around application development to get where they want to go. And I think service providers are starting to discover that and will discover it more.
“So our idea is we’re going to build platforms that virtualize our customer networks to the point that they can expose capabilities to the Web that have never been exposed before, in a very [manageable] way. And then you have the possibility for a broad ecosystem of application developers to come and use those capabilities in their own creation of applications and services.”
-- Tim Krause, Alcatel-Lucent CMO
