May 5, 2008
COVER STORY
By the numbers
The telecom industry is changing and evolving so rapidly these days, it's sometimes hard to keep up. It's also difficult to separate hype from reality and real trends from blind alleys. For that reason, we thought we'd take a look at a (large) handful of key industry numbers, figures and metrics hard data or at least very strong, educated guesses to create a snapshot of where the industry is today, and where it's heading...
EDITOR'S LETTER
The numbers don't lie
Earnings reports are a study in spin -- read a press release announcing even the most dire earnings, and you'll be hard-pressed to find the gloom and doom among the highlighted statistics...
FORWARD MOTION
Breaking down NextWave's licenses
For the second time in its history, NextWave Wireless is engaging in a massive spectrum sale, clearing out its stores of broadband wireless and mobile licenses in the U.S....
The three-screen advantage
The cell phone -- highly personal and seemingly always at hand -- is inching closer to becoming a sought-after platform for advertisers...
Wireline erosion muddies AT&T, Verizon picture
Both AT&T and Verizon met Wall Street expectations with their first-quarter earnings, and neither reported any distressing impact of a slowing economy...
Big OSS projects go live
Operations support services projects are beginning to move off the drawing board and into production...
The bundled advantage
Consumer interest in the quadruple play has increased 55% from July 2007 to March of this year, according to a Compete survey of online shoppers...
New tech woos MDUs
Service providers at the Broadband Properties Summit in Dallas last week were eager to tell the audience of property owners about their progress in developing offerings to serve multidwelling units...
OPINION
Back office on the hot seat
When I sat down to chat with Kevin Hart, chief information officer for Level 3 Communications, this week at a trade show focused on back-office operations, I expected to talk about SOA, eTOM, CRM and an array of other tech/IT acronyms...
Wireless' Pivot point
The demise of Pivot, Sprint's joint venture with leading cable companies to offer subscribers wireless services, has had many ceding the market to telecom service providers...
INNOVATION
Computing comes to the cloud
The power of the World Wide Web was that for the first time computers -- clients and servers -- were linked together via networks on a very broad scale, literally billions of systems worldwide...
OSS/BSS
Rethinking the back office
Telco transformation (as usual), SOA/Web services and a new focus on the IT value chain top the OSS/BSS checklist these days...
MOBILE VIDEO
Biding time with mobile TV
PVR capabilities are coming to handsets and mobile networks, but DRM issues could hold them back...
WHAT'S NEXT
Net ushers in experiential TV
The past five years have presented major changes in the TV industry such as extensive, free video-on-demand catalogs and time-shifting with digital video recorders...
