Today is the first day of CTIA Wireless 2007 in Orlando, Florida.
In general, the show is well attended. The big market players are talking about WiMAX, WiFi-enabled handsets, GPS advancements, and UltraMobile Broadband.
In the M2M Zone, most companies are displaying uses of cellular technologies in applications such as AMR, vending, traffic management, facility management, and point of sales terminals. Big name companies like Siemens are displaying a tremendous number of application segments across a range of geographic areas. The primary technologies used by Siemens in the M2M sector are WCDMA and GSM. The company has expressly stayed away from older CDMA, presumably for political reasons.
WiMAX is definitely generating a lot of noise, as evidenced by the completely full WiMAX session this afternoon with lines out into the hallway, however there are also rumors echoing the industry that Sprint may not have the market focus behind WiMAX that the press is leading people to believe. The verdict on the impact of WiMAX is still out, beyond the real use case of back-end connectivity. While companies are showing and talking about mobile WiMAX, it will be up to the carriers to actually make the market. Meanwhile alternatives are fast approaching. Until Mobile WiMAX can reliably travel beyond the radius of a given cell in a handoff to its adjacent counterpart, the use case is not all that viable.
WiFi-enabled handsets are at the point of moving into the market full stream. This advancement of the application is likely to be steady, and not gain market share as rapidly as some analysts believe. Very few products have gained 300 million unit 'Voice over Wi-Fi', or VoWLAN, adoption in the matter of a couple of years. Voice over WiFi requires a shift in the way people use products, and that takes time. Look at the adoption of the camera phone. That took a long time to reach mass adoption. While VoWLAN is likely to be quicker, given the number of new technologies that paved the way and softened consumer resistance and contributed to consumer education, it is still not likely to skyrocket.
That aside, it is encouraging to see handsets on the market globally, from BT, to Orange, to Verizon. With these key big participants, others are likely to quickly follow. This is further evidence that the WiFi Alliance has done a good job of developing interoperability and certification for these products, as well as looking to new market opportunities for WiFi that stretch the technology beyond the PC.
GPS now has the chance to become as pervasive as the camera phone in handsets. However, it will not mean adding yet another power-hungry chip to the handset. In the next couple years we are likely to see highly optimized GPS solutions from companies like CSR. CSR purchased two market leaders, NordNav Technologies AB and Cambridge Positioning Systems Ltd, earlier this year and already has a product available on the market which is a stepping stone to future developments. Key to CSR's strengths, the focus of adding GPS is on minimizing power consumption but more importantly on reducing the MIPS consumption of new features.
Among the less publicized no-shows at the conference, the only exhibitor to show up from STMicroelectronics was their sign, and that provided by CTIA show staff.
Finally, UltraMobile Broadband (UMB) is being promoted heavily as a new addition to the 3G family. More details will follow tomorrow. The fight between Qualcomm and the rest of the industry who is tired of their business model, remains a strong underlying motivation for many of the companies here at CTIA to develop new wireless alternatives.
Tomorrow, expect to hear more about WiMAX, MediaFlo, and UMB.
