Is this the beginning of a new era in wireless services deployment?
Today, I attended a panel discussion organized by FierceWireless that invited top telecom industry executives to discuss the latest developments in the embedded wireless ecosystem. In spite of the pre-defined topic on embedded wireless, the discussion and the follow-up Q&A of course veered in other directions regarding the challenges being faced today by service providers and the wireless industry at large. Which got me and our team here thinking – is this truly the beginning of a new era in wireless services deployment?
For one thing the number of connected devices is exploding – expected to be up to 50 billion by 2012 as heard in the panel discussion today. Now, these devices come in all forms ranging from the more familiar handheld devices to embedded wireless in automotive, mobile health applications, mobile commerce, and a variety of M2M connectivity-s. For service providers, dealing with these huge numbers of connected devices are creating signaling as well as capacity issues. So, service providers need to build new service delivery platforms, have new ways of monitoring the health of the network and loading, and start distinguishing between traffic from different device types.
For end users the issue is where does the quality guarantee and customer support come from? In, embedded wireless devices and m2m scenarios, the wireless carrier may not be directly visible to the end user. Conventional wisdom would suggest that such support be provided at the first level by whoever is providing the actual service or utility to the end user, leading to a chain of customer support requirements rather than one-stop support and clear accountability.
Finally, the success of smooth network operation and services delivery depend one way or the other on every player in the chain being “good citizens” of the network. Over the last 25 years, this has been guaranteed via standardization bodies and certifications, as well as the expertise and experience of a relatively small number of companies. Now, with embedded wireless, the number of companies building these connected devices are expanding and so are application developers for connected devices. It will be essential that guidelines are set on how applications are written and the network accessed by these devices and their applications, to prevent signaling issues as well as minimize unnecessary traffic overhead.