News

2009 Bright Spots
By Rhonda Wickham
Wireless Week - December 1, 2008
Click here to see the full article

The article is a collection of predictions for 2009 from around the wireless industry. The excerpt below is attributed to Stoke VP of marketing, Barry Hill. Use the link above to view the full article.

"Open Sesame
Operators will resist closed vendor solutions in favor of economy and scalability. Nowhere will this be more evident than in the femtocell space. Vendors will attempt to lock in the femtocell itself together with the aggregation equipment. However, standard protocols and interfaces allow specialist companies to offer massively better scalability for operators and supporting multiple femtocells. This enables operators to drive the cost out of femtocell CPE and keep service prices low and profitable.

Large-scale adoption of WiMAX will cause pain for incumbent 3G operators and force their migration to 4G sooner than originally planned. With dramatically different cost points and an open all-IP infrastructure, WiMAX operators will offer better mobile broadband data service experience at a lower price. Data-hungry subscribers will flock to these services, stealing key ARPU from cellular data service offerings. LTE rollout plans will be accelerated in response, putting pressure on vendors to deliver deployment-ready solutions. Timing could not be worse since the economy at large is forcing cutbacks at most large network equipment suppliers, moving LTE delivery schedules in the opposite direction.

With venture capital all but drying up in the networking industry and the rash of recent acquisitions in the industry, the pool of innovative independent infrastructure vendors is shrinking rapidly. Competition will drive continued spending to deliver mobile broadband services. Having cash in the bank, but stagnating value propositions and revenues, NEPs will zealously compete for startup assets along with competing for customers.

Barry Hill, Vice President of Marketing, Stoke"