The Buzz from International CTIA Wireless 2009 – Part 2
More smart phones flooding the market!!
Mobile phones are becoming smarter by the day. User experiences they enable and the features they bring to the consumers just keep getting better. A number of device makers including the likes of Samsung, LG, HTC, INQ and Nokia show cased their latest line up that will make the device market even more competitive and will drive more consumers towards smart phones.
Wireless industry becoming “greener”!
“Green” was one of the major buzzwords at CTIA 2009. We saw companies introducing recyclable phones with their bodies made out of recycled materials to the next generation of base stations which reduces the power consumption, space consumption and thereby by reducing the operational costs for the operators. This is one very interesting area that had a lot of emphasis on from various participants and we will have to wait and see what innovations are in the pipe line!!
Mobile Broadband and Service Innovation
One thing that was very clear from various participants at CTIA was that the wireless network infrastructure is at the verge of a major revamp in an effort to move towards 4G (an example is the LTE rollout announcement). Mobile broadband is about to grow much more with rollout of WiMax based networks and other technological innovations that are happening on the network side. What remains to be seen is how all of these are going to benefit the consumers in terms of innovative services and how these services and broadband access becomes more affordable to consumers than before.
Operators are also looking at ways to extend the use of their wireless data networks to much more than just mobile phones. This was very clear from the fact that the major wireless operators were hinting on selling devices like Net Books and Electronic Readers to connect to their data networks to drive data usage. A number of interesting consumer oriented services are also in the horizon varying from connected services (ex: Nokia’s Ovi suite of services) to unified communications (ex: All-in-one mail box providing a unified interface for SMS, MMS, Emails, Visual Voice Mail, Call history and IP-based telephony). All these will definitely benefit the consumers in terms of the superior user experiences these will enable but the cost factor will be some thing that will be influential for the uptake of such services.
Wireless mobility is becoming a part of the core strategy for many enterprises and industries. This was evident from the key note on day-3 centered on how wireless mobility can revolutionize the health care industry. I am sure that there is definitely a big opportunity that exists for the various enterprises to reach the consumers with mobile enabled services to derive benefits not only to their businesses but also to offer a more compelling user experience. We will have to wait and see how enterprise services reach the consumers on their mobile phones.
I believe there are some pretty interesting times ahead of us with the Wireless industry remaining the most 'happening' industry and I am excited to be a part of it!!
Comments
Wireless networking is the future and not too far I suppose.
Posted by: Shravan | April 13, 2009 09:12 PM
Hi Shravan, Yes I agree. I feel that "wireless" is the future of networking. When it comes to Data networking, Wireless has become the defacto medium of choice for most of the homes and businesses. But I believe there is still some way to go when Wireless Networks provide high data transfer speeds (though the speeds are improving, I feel that they lag behind the wired networks) and provide a more secure way of exchanging information (as they are still vulnerable to attacks).
Posted by: Sandeep Chandrasekar Seshadri | April 23, 2009 04:48 PM