Telecom FutureEra

Introduction:
              In order to fully understand the future of mobility, it is important to examine the evolution of individual streams of mobile telecommunication technology. These developments have not happened independently of each other. As mobility-enabling technology improves, three streams of telecommunication technology—networks, devices, and applications—will become truly smart in the future. Networks will converge, devices will become wearable, and context-aware applications will act spontaneously and initiate actions

In the past, enterprise adoption was a key driver of technology commodification. By contrast, recent progress in mobile technology has been largely shaped by consumer demand. Enterprises need vision to see how mobility will change over time so that they can help drive its evolution and bring about economies of scale.

A New Era of Mobile Telecommunications

Telecom technology is changing our lives in ways we did not envision. Today, efficient packet switched networks carry media packets (voice, data, and video) to intelligent mobile devices that users carry everywhere.

The past 50 years have witnessed a migration from traditional telephony networks to telephony networks based on an IP backbone and the cloud. Today’s telecom technology can be effectively divided into three streams—networks, devices, and applications. Following the evolution of each stream provides background and context for understanding what the future holds

The Evolution of Networks

The evolution of the Telecom Service Provider (TSP) wireless networks. We see that consumer demand shaped the evolution of wireless networks.

Figure 1: Evolution of Wireless Networks

Figure 1 lists wireless network types from shortest coverage distance (at the top) to those offering the widest coverage distance. Wireless Personal Area Network (WPAN) involves short distance wireless networking of devices and systems. One of the major uses of WPAN is for replacing wire with wireless access for peripheral devices to enable mobility and ease of deployment. Near-Field Communications (NFC) is a technology comparable to Bluetooth that has wider applications such as reading smart posters, exchanging information between devices (virtual business cards, photos), and conducting transactions. Unlike Bluetooth, NFC doesn’t require pairing. NFC-enabled cell phones have many applications; for example, they can be used by security or administrative staff to verify the ownership of an asset or the identity of a person carrying such an asset.

The range of a typical Wi-Fi network can be extended to what is called a Wide Metropolitan Area Network (WMAN). Such networks can span a campus, several city blocks, or an entire metropolitan area.

Wireless Wide Area Networks (WWAN) offer the broadest range and are currently generating considerable excitement and interest. In the past, the focus for WWAN was on voice communications. Subsequently, data support was provided by standards such as General Packet Radio Service (GPRS). Data rates were further enhanced with 2.5G technologies such as Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution (EDGE).

As network technology evolved, it ushered in yet another standard: 3G. For GSM, Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) can offer download speeds of up to 2 Mbps. The only other technology that competes with this download speed is CDMA2000.

Next generation technologies such as 4G consist of Long Term Evolution (LTE) and World Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX). These 4G networks are all-IP packet-switched networks. There is a move to consolidate the efforts of future versions LTE and WiMAX toward a unified standard to achieve the vision of 4G. These networks will involve the evolution of both WPAN and WLAN, as they will provide for a single ubiquitous network that supports speeds of over 100 Mbps for mobile devices. Convergence is the key to ubiquity, and ultimately we may see a single network mesh that covers the whole globe and realizes the dream of every network engineer – seamless wireless

The Takeaway

Today, networks such as WPAN, WLAN, and WWAN are evolving. In the future, seamless mobility between WLAN and WWAN will be addressed by the evolution of 4G. This will be aided by context acquisition through multitudes of sensors and markers involving technologies such as RFID, NFC, Bluetooth, and Zigbee. Networks will be more intelligent, have higher throughput, and be more secure.

Implications to the Organization

As newer wireless technologies are adopted for enterprise use, CxOs must keep three factors in mind when deciding what technology to deploy: cost of transition, throughput, and security. A transition plan for phasing out the existing wired infrastructure should be designed keeping in mind the payback period for each of the legacy investments..

The Evolution of Devices

Mobile device technology has undergone changes, and its evolution has been largely consumer driven. With the increasing availability of low-cost bandwidth, mobile devices are used not just for communication and content creation, but also for web browsing with rich graphics, and for tasks such as handling workflows.

Case in Point – Mobile Devices in the Construction Industry A medium-sized demolition and transport company had most of its employees and assets dispersed in the field. Coordinating employees and assets was a challenge. Mobile device technology offered a solution. The company decided on a two-pronged approach – a mobile device supported with appropriate software. They selected phones that were designed for the construction industry. These phones supported Pushto-Talk or PTT facilities and iDEN technology, which allows for radio as well as cellular communication. The phones also have location-based awareness via GPS. Coupled with specialized software, these phones could be used for both communication and for locating company assets. This helped the company save time on auditing assets as well as fuel. The company estimates savings of over US $1 million..

Usage patterns continue to evolve, which can be traced to three primary drivers of device technology evolution: mobile operating systems, user interface technologies, and mobile microprocessors/semiconductors. Other factors include new features, crisper displays, new applications, device miniaturization, and resulting form-factors, which have also played an important role (see Figure 2). The three primary drivers require a little more analysis to better understand their individual evolution and their influence on what we might see in the future.

Figure 2: Evolution of Wireless Networks

The first driver of device technology evolution is mobile operating systems. Enterprise customers saw the dramatic rise in popularity of the Blackberry OS, particularly for email access. The future could include decoupling of devices and operating systems, where end-users will effectively be able to run the OS of their choice on any device as long as the hardware is compatible.

Second, input device technology for the user interface (UI) has changed as well. Devices have moved from the keypad-based interfaces on the older mobile phones to touchscreens. Touchscreens are also undergoing evolution as they provide an increasing number of features such as multi-touch gestures. Today, in addition to touch-based input devices, gaming consoles use gesture-based remotes. In the future, haptic gestures may be captured by sensors on mobile devices, and the interface could be a projection onto a blank screen.

System on a Chip (SoC) integrates a processor, a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), and memory controllers on a single chip. This integration improves overall system performance. With the advent of quad core processors, complex 3D display systems are possible. Nanotechnology is promising in this area.

Case in Point – Augmented Reality for Customer Satisfaction A global bank offers a mobile augmented reality app that can be used by customers to locate the nearest ATM. Context awareness for this app comes from the camera and the GPS of the mobile device. Needless to say this has had a positive effect on customer satisfaction.

The Takeaway Device computing power and memory have significantly increased and will continue to do so. Along with low-cost bandwidth and the limitless nature of the cloud, tremendous computing power is possible. User Interfaces and battery capacity and life will continue to play a crucial role in this evolution. With a quasi-standardization in the device platform landscape in terms of operating systems in use, today’s consumer devices are suitable for deploying complex enterprise applications. Implications to the Organization As multiple mobile devices make their presence felt and the number of smart device users increases, the enterprise should ensure that its IT systems integrate well with these devices. A good approach is to first consider the impact mobility will have on the individual components of the IT infrastructure, and then design a technology adoption and transition roadmap. Organizations should also strongly consider adopting device management software in order to support a diverse set of smart devices, ensuring that patches and apps are up-to-date..

Evolution of Mobile Applications

Before mobile operating systems, applications had to be specific to various phone models. Figure 3 shows the evolution of mobile applications.

Figure 3: Evolution of Mobile Applications

One of the drivers of third-party apps was open source OSs such as Symbian and Android. A fourth generation of apps is cloud-based and runs on the mobile device’s browser. Utilizing the best-of-breed Web 2.0 technology and creating rich Internet applications for mobile browsers, these applications turn smartphones into mobile thin clients, where minimal code and data resides locally on the device.

Interestingly, evolution of Web 2.0 promises to be one of the biggest technology champions for mobility. This is true if enterprises want to extend their applications to the latest portable devices by enabling them to deploy applications on portable personal devices using app stores and widget stores. Such use of Web 2.0 technology allows organizations to extend Enterprise 2.0 concepts to employees’ devices. Also, by adding context-awareness to such applications, enterprise could use the device’s GPS to pinpoint an employee’s exact location. Accessed through the enterprise portal, such applications could use augmented reality features to direct the employee to a required area. One of the biggest advantages of these types of cloud-based mobile applications is that irrespective of device change or loss, the user enjoys seamless application usage on their next device. Context awareness can also aid autonomous applications to initiate machine-to-machine transactions on their own.

This form of context-aware cloud applications may very well be the next generation of mobile applications. Context awareness will not only include GPS and accelerometers but also may encompass devices that sense everything from elevation, altitude, and pressure right down to an individual’s blood pressure and other vital signs. These will allow the applications to predict user inputs by assessing usage patterns. This may one day become a reality as mobile devices become wearable (for example, the circuitry of the device may be woven into the fabric we wear). Such a device could gauge the pulse of the user together with the blood pressure and based on his or her history of cardiac trouble not only warn the user of an impending heart attack but also call the doctor automatically. Take this example to a newer level, smart applications running on pacemakers can call emergency units the moment the user suffers a heart attack. Could all this one day be called Mobile Artificial Intelligence (MAI)?

The Takeaway Mobile applications have evolved to take full advantage of the powerful hardware of today’s devices. Context awareness is helping some applications conduct autonomous machine-to-machine communications. But in the future, mobile applications may further evolve into smart applications that are context aware to such an extent that they will initiate most transactions proactively with very little, if any, input from users. These applications may not even reside on the devices themselves, but run from the cloud on the device browsers. Implications to the Organization There are multiple options that may be adopted for enterprise mobile applications. These can range from thick and rich clients to thin clients. These options have strengths and weaknesses ranging from cost to security implications. The best strategy is to adopt a mix depending on the context of usage.

Enterprise-Driven Technology Evolution

Mobility technology evolution has traditionally been consumer-driven rather than enterprise-driven. This slow and steady adoption of new technologies by enterprises stems from the balance they seek to create between the benefits that each new technology brings and its maturity at the time of implementation. The inherent need for stability and risk aversion has meant that enterprise customers adopt technologies only after they mature and are deemed stable?

At the same time, the enterprise has the potential to catapult any technology into mainstream by providing a scale of consumption and related efficiencies that are necessary to ensure mass adoption of new communications technologies.

From an adoption perspective, we see a shift from the traditional pattern of enterprise-enterprise-individual to an individual-enterprise-individual pattern. Improved connectivity and mobility in users’ personal lives has heightened connection expectations of employees, customers, shareholders, field workers, and other stakeholders. In fact, the point of inflection has already been reached, beyond which the cumulative sales of smartphones and tablets will exceed the number of PCs, laptops, and netbooks sold globally. It will also mark the first time that any such inflection point has been driven by the consumer as opposed to the enterprise.

The future promises more consumer segment driven changes, bolstering the case for enterprises to accelerate the pace at which they adopt and adapt to new technologies. Resisting change brings the risk of being unable to capitalize on the productivity that the new era of mobility and the significant productivity gains that each subsequent transition will bring.

Enterprise customers need to move faster and ride new technology transitions with less adoption latency while embracing the new communication modes and models that result from these transitions into their business processes. Those that do so will effectively be creating highly evolved, self-optimizing business models and environments that are capable of continually discovering new sources of highly profitable revenue growth. As the future unfolds, evolution in telecommunications will help create a digital utopia for both consumers and enterprises, where everyone is connected, and smart devices become an extension of our consciousness.