I had an interesting call with Rizwan Tiwana, the CTO of Wateen, a large competitive operator which recently rolled out a 802.16E WiMAX network spanning 22 major cities across the nation of Pakistan.   I was looking forward the call because Wateen sits at the bleeding edge of two next generation service and access network technologies, WiMAX and IMS.  Wateen also represents one of a small handful of operators with the combination of both technologies in commerical operation. 

As of today, there are approximately 25K Wateen subscribers who are using their WiMAX connections for both Internet connectivity and voice services.  That voice services are served up over an IMS control plane is a watershed moment for an industry that has seen some negative press on the viabilty of delivering voice over IP services over WiMAX.  So far, so good for Wateen and its WiMAX partner Motorola.  They are excited about ramping up the subscriber base even quicker when the next generation of CPE devices become available in the next half year.

I inquired as to what has made them successful and Mr. Tiwana boiled it down to this; setting realistic expectations and thorough network design and testing.  As he succinctly puts it…”WiMAX is not GSM or CDMA, you can’t just throw up towers and expect blanket coverage.”   Instead, they have taken pains to educate their users on what to expect in terms of coverage and ensure their sales channels also set realistic expectations in the market.  Its good to see a success story like this for WiMAX and IMS and I hope Sprint/Clearwire are paying attention. 

Checking in from the sunny and 107 degree Las Vegas, Nevada where the NXTComm tradeshow was held this week. All of the usual suspects carted their fancy booths, big staffs [armed with the latest and greatest corporate messages], various SWAG items, press kits and demo equipment into the heart of Sin City.

Word from vendors is that overall show attendance was a “mixed bag” and while the show seemed busy, several exhibiting vendors lamented that the quality of attendee or for short–QoA–left something to be desired. I suspect that this means that average foot traffic is approximately 15-20% “true” prospects for the solution that vendor happens to be trying to sell. The rest of the human traffic includes competing vendors [dressed incognito sans the normal logo’d golf shirts], business development folks, partners, staff, press/analysts and various other riff-raff. I saw an adorable older couple, must’ve been in their mid-80s, laboring around from booth to booth collecting vendor SWAG items including those squishy stress balls, flashing lapel pins, pens, and boxes of mints…..I guess it’s more interesting than walking around a mall.

My personal opinion is that smaller vendors with scarce marketing resources can find much better bang for the buck out there to drive lead generation. Educational webinars come to mind here, Yankee Group often has several hundred attendees show up and even more register with their contact details and interest areas. At NXTComm, the no-frills exhibitors are promptly rewarded with awful floor location and non-descript signage which in turn guarantees that they are left wanting for any traffic at all. Even this guy. Not sure how to fix this, but another strategy I’ve seen work well is making the lower-cost investment in an adjacent hotel suite or meeting room which allows the advantage of the common assembly of partners, customers, press and analysts without incurring the big expenses of an actual exhibit.

I’m betting that this show survives, if only because its among the last games in town which a singular focus on the telecom industry. A piece of advice for show organizers that one of my colleagues pointed out—get rid of the 3rd show day, its overkill and three days is too long to be away from the office/real job. Keep an eye out for my show re-cap which will be published for Yankee Group clients within a couple days.

Just a quick check-in from Shenzhen, China where the weather is a balmy 85 degrees and what feels like 120% humidity. I have endured 18 hours of flying [in coach] and the aforementioned soupy weather to attend Huawei’s Global Industry Analyst Summit. I was compelled to attend this conference given the colossal impact Huawei’s market presence has on the carrier equipment and services market and was eager to hear an update from their execs on corporate strategy and a review of 2007 results. What we saw and heard was clearly impressive…however, Huawei still has some growing up to do if it wants to crack into the top 3. Read the rest of this entry »

Las Vegas is a strange place, so much noise and excitement; it’s literally pure sensory overload. The barrage of people, noise, and lights usually makes me long for a quiet place after a short amount of time. To my surprise I actually stumbled upon that very place yesterday right smack in the middle of the CTIA tradeshow! I carved an hour out in my ridiculously busy schedule to attend a session dedicated to an industry status check on IMS, or the IP multimedia subsystem. A few things struck me before the session even started; attendance was sparse [especially taken against other sessions such as Yankee Group’s own standing room only M2M track], and the assembled panel of experts was 100% on the carrier infrastructure side of things.

Now as an analyst, part of the job description is to assemble panels and when we take on that task vendors are usually the first to raise their hands to participate given their natural inclination to “get their story out”. However, a good panel usually balances the “vendor speak” with some demand side representation, in this case I would’ve expected to see at least an operator or two.

The lack of operators on this panel was telling. After some introductions, the panel got down to the business of admitting what we at Yankee Group have been saying for some time. The IMS movement has been severely over-hyped and is presently mired in various obstacles ranging from the technical [too complex, security concerns] to the business side [service providers are still very siloed, lack of killer applications create a business chicken and egg syndrome]. Does the tail between the legs routine from the vendors mean IMS is dead? Surely not, it will happen in fits and starts and operators are currently deploying different parts of IMS to suit their needs. There are clearly some interesting pockets of sunshine which include a strong cable multi-service operator interest in the platform along with AT&T, NTT and BT’s public roll-outs.

What it does mean is that unabashed hype cycle is officially over and we are now in the more pragmatic and difficult phase of building viable business cases and actually making it work.

Have you begun to think that the Verizon TV spots with the “can you hear me now” dude are getting tiresome?

I have. Verizon takes pains to test the availability of their nationwide network and they have made sure that we all know it. But is it that much better than AT&T, Sprint or T-Mobile’s? Maybe a little, but for the most part the ability to make a clear voice call anywhere you want has become a non-differentiating aspect of service. So now what?

This question, in one form or another, is asked of our analysts every day. I believe that a long menu of subscriber-centric services will supplant reliable mobile voice service as the killer network application over the next several years. For this reason, the “crown jewel” asset under an operator’s control will rapidly shift from the network itself to the subscriber-centric data it contains. We define this valuable data as rich subscriber context; and it can generally include information that the network provides such as a user location and their current state of presence. It can also include information about a subscriber’s usage rights, individual preferences, credit worthiness, etc. As most network operators are set up today, the data described is found in various nooks and crannies throughout the various network and application stovepipes. We have begun to explore the strategies available to bring all of those data sources together, either logically or physically, to provide a centralized view of the subscriber.

The appropriate use of rich subscriber context, once/if it can be obtained, offers infinite possibilities for new revenue streams by enabling new services including those enabled by 3rd parties and advertising-based business models. [Check out the U.K. based Blyk if you want to read about an interesting mobile advertising business model which offers a limited amount of free service for its members in exchange for advertising exposure.] Blyk

The question remains….will they get it right?? The possibilities to screw this up are seemingly as numerous as the opportunities to cash in. Will the CEO of a Tier 1 operator have to “pull a Facebook” and send a mass apology to its users for violating their privacy? Will they sell our/their information to highest bidder to create a new revenue stream and the equivalent of mobile spam on our handsets? These are roads that demand to be treaded very lightly but you can almost hear the tanks firing up in the background.