qualcomm

Intel selling heavy metal thunder to a lightning fast market

25 July 2013 by Steve Blum
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The next industry standard.

After playing with an Atom-powered smart phone at CES this year and hearing execs talk up Android, I saw glimmers of hope that Intel was finally coming to grips with the mobile world. It seems I had it backwards: the mobile world is tightening its grip on Intel’s corporate throat.

Long the dominant player in PC and big server processors, Intel is all but shut out of smart phones and tablets, a billion unit market, and has no presence at all in the machine-to-machine space, which could be five or ten times that size in the next handful of years.… More

Gigabit mobile phones teased for the 5G road map

18 May 2013 by Steve Blum
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It’s more than a 5 year mission to the next generation.

Samsung’s latest mobile technology announcement could result in faster mobile data traffic running on much higher frequency bands. Speeds of up to 1 Gbps on the 28 GHz band have been claimed, using antenna designs that are intended to mitigate the poor indoor penetration and range associated with millimeter wavelengths. It’s experimental – the commercialization target is 2020 – and intended to be a foundation for 5G service.… More

Five broadband trends shaping communities


A good place to talk about water, land and technology.

I was asked to do a presentation on broadband trends at the Urban Land Institute’s spring meeting in San Diego today. Specifically, it was for one of the ULI’s community development councils, which is focused on planned community developers. I had to narrow the list down to five:

  • Conduit is gold. Cities and private developments can build a base for jobs and industry just by putting conduit in the ground whenever a trench is opened.
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5G mobile means more fiber in more places

13 May 2013 by Steve Blum
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Qualcomm graphic.

“Bringing the network closer to the user is key to 1000x,” said Prakash Sangam, director of tech marketing for Qualcomm, speaking to the Wireless Communications Alliance in Santa Clara, California last month. 1000x is Qualcomm’s shorthand way of saying that with mobile data traffic more or less doubling every year, we’ll need one thousand times the amount of available bandwidth in a few years.

“Reaching this 1000x is a matter of when and not if,” Sangam said.… More

Health care driving mobile M2M traffic

10 February 2013 by Steve Blum
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Bits keep you fit.

Some time this year, we’ll hit the point where there are more connected devices on mobile networks than there are people on the planet. That doesn’t mean everyone everywhere will have a smartphone. A lot of people have more than one device, of course. And a growing share of those connections don’t involve human beings at all.

According to a report on worldwide mobile data traffic just released by Cisco, 369 million machine-to-machine (M2M) devices accounted for 3% of global traffic last year.… More

Qualcomm's medical M2M platform gaining ground

10 January 2013 by Steve Blum
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Sensible shoes.

Qualcomm Life's medical M2M (machine-to-machine) platform, 2net, had a good first year on the market. About a dozen companies were demonstrating their connected medical and fitness products in and around the Qualcomm booth at CES. So far, about two hundred have adopted the platform.

Introduced at the show last year, 2net securely connects personal monitoring and measurement devices – glucose meters, activity trackers, blood pressure monitors, for example – to health professionals. It provides the gateway and and the backend servers, plus the Internet connectivity when necessary.… More

Oh, you mean a Maxwell Smart home

“Chaos is an opportunity for people like me,” said Tom Kadlec, one of the founders of The Homeworks Group. They do the hard work of integrating and managing home automation systems for about a thousand subscribers. Both he and his partner have electrical engineering degrees, which is great for them but not so good for the home handyman who majored in, say, political science.

Come quick, 99. I’m surrounded by ARMed phones.

Protocol agnostic and easy to use: home automation needs heavy helpings of both if it’s to ever find its secret sauce.… More

More mobile phones in use worldwide than toothbrushes

If what Paul Jacobs said is true, it’s probably a good thing people are communicating by phone and not face to face. The CEO of Qualcomm made the claim at a conference organized by the Telecom Council of Silicon Valley.

His point was that mobile phones are ubiquitous and, because of that, can do more for healthcare than the humble toothbrush. Qualcomm has an interest in promoting new uses for mobile phones that make good use of the increasingly powerful and sophisticated chipsets, devices and services on the market.… More

Qualcomm's consumer services business going to the dogs

Tagg is a mobile pet tracker and promising veterinary diagnostic tool, offered by Snaptracs, a Qualcomm subsidiary. The hardware costs $100, with ongoing service at $8 per month for the first pet and and $1 for each additional one.

Tagg on a not-so-lively dog

That eight bucks gets you a text message whenever your dog strays from home, with GPS feeds to help you find him. Or your cat, if it’s one of the few big enough to handle the weight and tolerant enough to wear it.… More

Thinking forward from CES 2012

If CES 2012 produced one quote that might be remembered in years to come, it was from Ericsson CEO Hans Vestberg: “Anything that benefits from being connected will be connected in the future.” It says two very important things about the consumer electronics industry.

First, going forward, mobile telecommunications manufacturers and core technology companies will be the primary innovators. Computer companies provided much of the innovation for the industry in the past ten years, but they are all but gone from CES.

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