mobile

Microsoft won't win consumer hearts by appealing to IT minds

10 September 2014 by Steve Blum
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Suit, check. Hair cut, check. Mojo, oops.

You have to give Microsoft credit for trying. It was a distant third (or fourth or fifth or worse, depending on how you count) in the mobile operating system and smart phone races coming into the CTIA trade show in Las Vegas. No matter what happened, it wouldn’t narrow the gap significantly leaving it.

But if it ever wants to matter in the mobile world it has to start changing perceptions, and CTIA is a good place to begin.… More

Transparent auction rules and a clear business proposition needed to get more mobile broadband spectrum says FCC commissioner

9 September 2014 by Steve Blum
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Finding new radio bandwidth for mobile broadband services and then figuring out how to pry it out of the hands of businesses and government agencies that don’t use it particularly well is a perpetual challenge for the FCC. Four commissioners – the whole bunch except for chair Tom Wheeler – took questions from CTIA president Meredith Baker at the CTIA show in Las Vegas this afternoon. Not surprisingly, given the venue, much of the hour-long session focused on moving twentieth century technologies and analog users off of spectrum, particularly in the coveted 600 MHz bands, to make way for twenty-first century digital services.… More

CTIA leans in to the Apple punch

9 September 2014 by Steve Blum
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All eyes were on Cupertino this morning, even – or maybe particularly – eyes that had flown to Las Vegas with the intent of being briefly at the center of the mobile telecommunications universe. So CTIA made the smart move, and built its opening keynote session around Apple’s iPhone 6 and Apple Watch announcements this morning.

New CTIA president Meredith Attwell Baker made her rookie appearance, earnest enough but lacking the easy stage presence of her predecessors in the job, like FCC chair Tom Wheeler, who was next up on the stage.… More

Las Vegas mobile show struggles for the spotlight

8 September 2014 by Steve Blum
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The rebooted CTIA mobile telecoms show is ramping up in Las Vegas today. It officially opens tomorrow, but pre-show activities and associated meetings – particularly the Competitive Carriers Association – are already underway.

This new version of the show is, among other things, a combination of the big, technology and business-focused CTIA springtime convention and its fall MobileCon conference, which was more about applications and services. But the market is crowded and both shows were faced with declining attendance.… More

Mobile operators are short term cure, long term cause of broadband divide

Wireline upgrades get low priority on the wrong side of the divide.

Mobile broadband networks are increasingly ubiquitous throughout the world, and are the most widely used way of accessing the Internet in developing countries. But that’s despite high costs and stingy caps on data transfer. As a solution for increasing primary household access to broadband and encouraging people to use it, mobile networks have limited potential, according to a South African broadband policy study…

Of the access mechanisms, mobile coverage is the most extensive, but mobile broadband access is limited to lucrative urban areas and data costs are relatively high.

… More

U.S. supreme court considers limits on local barriers to broadband

28 August 2014 by Steve Blum
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Some Roswells understand advanced technology better than others.

The U.S. supreme court will decide whether or not to set practical limits on the ability of local governments to stall – sometimes indefinitely – cell towers and other mobile broadband infrastructure deployments. When the court reconvenes in October, it will be hearing a case brought by T-Mobile against the City of Roswell in Georgia, which denied permission to install a tower disguised as a pine tree.

The specific issue in the case is whether a local agency has to provide a written statement detailing why a particular wireless project was nixed, or can it just stamped denied on the application and leave it to others to figure out the reasons by reading through council minutes and memos.… More

Job cuts show Microsoft CEO is serious about new direction

19 July 2014 by Steve Blum
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Microsoft’s new CEO, Satya Nadella, has gotten it right. His 10 July 2014 email to Microsoft employees set out a clear path forward for the struggling giant and this week’s announced layoffs of 18,000 employees turned that vision from clear into ruthless. Which is the only way the company will survive as a major tech player in the 21st century.

Star legacy businesses – Windows OS, Office productivity software, Xbox – will survive, but primarily as stepping stones to cloud and mobile services, which are intended to reach customers regardless of whether they’re using Microsoft products…

All of these apps will be explicitly engineered so anybody can find, try and then buy them in friction-free ways.

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On the whole, it's broadband market failure


What’s a snowball’s chance in Washington?

Telecoms mega-deals (or have we upgraded to giga-deals?) are snowballing: four in four months. First Comcast and Time-Warner, then Comcast and Charter, AT&T and DirecTv and now Sprint and T-Mobile. Each new merger – of companies or markets – looks to the previous ones for justification. If Comcast is bulking up, AT&T needs to as well. A bigger AT&T, in turn, requires that Sprint and T-Mobile combine forces, or so they say.… More

Developing countries take the lead in global broadband adoption

Click for the report.


By the end of the year, 3 billion people will be on the Internet, according to the latest projections by the International Telecommunications Union. Of those, three-quarters will be getting broadband access via mobile networks (with or without wireline access, too), a five-fold jump since the end of 2008. The majority of Internet users will be in the developing world, according to the report…

The new figures show that, by the end of 2014, there will be almost 3 billion Internet users, two-thirds of them coming from the developing world, and that the number of mobile-broadband subscriptions will reach 2.3 billion globally.

… More

Tizen out to prove one invisible OS is as good as another

21 March 2014 by Steve Blum
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Enough treats to attract developers.

Samsung is following Google into the wearable operating system space. Its Android alternative – Tizen – now has a software developer kit available specifically for wearable devices, including, of course, the Samsung Gear smart watch. The release came close on the heels of the announcement of 64 winners of the $4 million app development challenge the Tizen Foundation launched last year.

The contest was particularly aimed at HTML5 developers, who were offered $50,000 bonuses on top of the regular prizes, which ranged up to $250,000.… More