For the first time in two years, I am going to be heading down to take part in this year's CTIA Show in sunny Orlando, Fla. My focus remains squarely on wireline, but as the lines between the two domains continue to blur, there are lots of opportunities to look at how service providers are trying to provide a compelling experience over both mediums.
These trends will be reflected in two panels I'll be overseeing for ATIS' Today's Technology Leaders, Tomorrow's Networks program: The Telco Cloud Services Landscape and Creating the Network of the Future.
Instead of a death by Powerpoint, my panels will be conducted in Donahue-style format where we'll engage in a discussion about the issues around clouds and policy management.
While there are different connotations of just what the idea of what cloud services are, during the The Telco Cloud Services Landscape a panel of service providers (TELUS and Sprint) and vendors (Juniper and Cisco) will discuss how wireless and wireline service providers can build a compelling cloud service package for the consumer and business users.
Cloud services create benefits for both corporate and residential users alike. For the enterprise user, they can forgo the day to day onsite maintenance of a hardware-based firewall device and hand it off to a service provider that can host that function in a remote data center.
Then, in the Creating the Network of the Future panel, I will be again joined by a panel of experts from service providers (Verizon and AT&T Mobility) and vendors (GENBAND) to discuss the growing role of policy management in the wireless and wireline networks.
The advent of policy management not only can be used by service providers to create fair use management and tiered offerings, but also to create value-added services like parental control and provide a personalized user experience.
Seeing that CTIA is after all a wireless event, I also wanted to make sure to mention FierceWireless' The Path to 4G event.
Run by my colleague Sue Marek, Editor in Chief of FierceWireless--whom I will meet live for the first time during the show--the all-day program on Tuesday, March 22 will feature perspectives from the technologists of the largest wireless operators, including AT&T Mobility (NYSE: T), Sprint (NYSE: S), Verizon Wireless (NYSE: VZ) and T-Mobile.
Interestingly, the wireless industry's ongoing drive to 4G is driving wireline operators to step up their wholesale fiber and Ethernet-based wholesale offerings to wireless operators.
A number of the largest wireline-centric incumbent service providers, including CenturyLink (NYSE: CTL), Qwest (NYSE: Q), Windstream (Nasdaq: WIN) and regional independent ILEC SureWest (Nasdaq: SURW) all cited wireless backhaul has a major capex and revenue driver in 2011. Just the same, cable operators like Comcast (Nasdaq: CMCSA), Cox Business, and Time Warner Cable (NYSE: TWC-WI) are also keen on getting a piece of the wireless backhaul market as well.
With those themes in mind, feel free to reach out to me during the show if you'd like to meet up to talk about the panels or anything else.--Sean
