This week, I was out moderating the Wi-Fi Wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA) semi-annual Congress in San Francisco. Hence in a bit of a departure, I actually would like to point you to two articles I wrote because the future of public Wi-Fi is emerging as critical to the entire Next Generation Communications Community.
In the first item the focus was on the release of the WBA’s Wi-Fi report, which is instructive in terms of understanding how fast the all important Next Generation Hotspot (NGH) and Wi-Fi roaming are about to transform the Wi-Fi, mobile, and fixed businesses. The second posting looked at why NGH is important and also contained several insights from WBA CEO Shrikant Shenwai.
Wireless also dominated the other big industry news. In fact, we had something quite unusual that may become a trend when Sisvel (News - Alert) announced the launch of a patent pool for 4G LTE (News - Alert). And, as a demonstration of just how important LTE is not just to the developed world but also to emerging nations, Telesis Tanzania, the dominant carrier in the East African nation, announced that they have selected the Alcatel-Lucent (News 
- Alert) (ALU) portfolio of 4G LTE solutions in a major upgrade of their nationwide infrastructure.
Features
While wireless topped the news, it by no means is the only thing going on in the industry as all of our feature highlight.
Service Providers
- For example, TMCnet Contributor Mae Kowalke had an interesting feature on how community host Alcatel-Lucent’s 400G Photonic Service Engine chipset is laying the foundation for the inevitable move to enabling service providers to have exponentially more bandwidth as the contend with the coming data storm.
- ALU is also enabling service providers through its CloudBand solution to be at the center of the growing move by enterprises of all sizes to the cloud.
- And, I took a look at the new messaging surrounding ALU’s flagship go-to-market initiative High Leverage Network™ (HLN). The old marketing communications advisor in me was pleased after kicking the tires and talking with Gary Holland, Portfolio Marketing Director, High Leverage Network, at what I saw.
Industries
- Service providers were not the only area of industry that we featured. In fact, it is worth a read of why Brazilian conglomerate Grupo JMalucelli decided that now was the time to not only upgrade to IP telephony for all of its operations but also why its interest in leveraging the benefits from unified communications (UC) was an important part of the consideration.
Weekend reading
If you have time this weekend a few clicks could be very valuable. In keeping with the wireless concentration in the news, check out two Alcatel-Lucent TechZine articles:
The latter in particular is important because as I found out this week in speaking with numerous not just Wi-Fi operators but also mobile service providers, concern over how to handle that other data storm in the form of the tidal wave of signaling is of critical and somewhat underappreciated importance.
In case you missed it, the webinar, SDN: Let’s Cut The Hype, What is the Reality?Embedded OTDR. , was incredibly educational. And, I close with my weekly request that you make full use of the Resource Center. It is constantly being updated with whitepapers, videos and case studies. The featured eBook, Innovating Innovation, and the whitepaper Creating Your Smart Grid: A How-To Guide are extremely useful. And, I think you will enjoy viewing the featured video on
