50 Billion Connections Including Your Coffee Maker After the flurry of mobile device announcements on Day 1 of this year’s Mobile World Congress, Days 2 and 3 provided time to see what else is going on. Various presentations and exhibits at this year’s show are continuing an increasing interest in Machine-to-Machine (M2M) applications that started last year. Automotive industry exhibits and conference sessions are drawing big crowds, as...

Everyone’s first challenge at this year’s Mobile World Congress is to learn their way around the huge new digs at Fira Gran Via. As many of you remember, it wasn’t long ago (2006) that MWC moved from Cannes to Barcelona and took up residence in the 115,000 m2 (plus 50,000 m2 outdoor space) Fira de Barcelona (Montjuic). The Gran Via has 240,00 m2 spread over 8 pavilions and everyone has to learn where the Conference Village, App Planet...

Every year at this time the build-up to the largest mobile technology show, Mobile World Congress (MWC), begins in earnest. Vendors start their product introduction cycles and journalists start publishing stories about what you can expect at MWC. As you might expect, much of the early publicity is about the new smartphones, tablets and other mobile technology the will be introduced.  A good example highlighting the expected announcements...

2012 has been a solid year for AdvancedTCA (ATCA) blades and systems. VDC Research believes that 2012 will end up with an almost 20% growth in the ATCA blade market alone. Cellular build out around the world, particularly in developing nations such as China, and the jump to LTE in North America and Europe are driving this growth.  When you add in the acceleration of LTE deployments in 2013 to increase bandwidth that will satisfy...

So, you are driving along using a mobile phone as your navigator and all of a sudden, the map disappears.  You take a look at the screen and see the reason immediately – the symbol indicating the type of network connection has turned into an E (for Edge.)  In today’s world, the definition of ‘the boonies’ is anywhere with a slow (OK, very very slow) Edge connection. Even as LTE and other ‘4G’ networks expand, the service...

According to many of the executives speaking at Mobile World Congress 2012, the number one challenge today is to build out the mobile infrastructure to support the explosion in mobile data traffic. Many feel that the current infrastructure is barely able to provide adequate service for current use and with the exploding growth in mobile devices and the deployment of new applications such as mobile payments, data usage will explode. The most...