Wireline, wireless meet up at home

Another Mobile World Congress is set to begin, but as the wireline guy at FierceMarkets, I'm being left at home yet again. No paella for me. Every year, I think: Maybe telecom networks and services finally have sufficiently converged enough that they'll let the wireline guy go, too. Haven't the powers-that-be heard that we now live in a bi-partisan world? You know what that is; it's a world where wireline and wireless work together for the benefit of Joe the Consumer.

In the recent past, wireline and wireless have appeared to be foes, which is bound to happen when customers are canceling one type of service in favor of the other. But, technology innovation and strategic thinking are catching up with that trend, and none too soon.

In the U.S., Verizon Communications and AT&T, the two biggest telcos offering both wireline and wireless, are embracing femtocells for the consumer home. It's a decision made long ago by their purely wireless competition, T-Mobile USA and Sprint (to be clear, Sprint has wireline, too, just not for consumer households). Perhaps both telcos could have and should have moved sooner, since it has been clear for a while that the wireless replacement trend was not going to move in reverse.

However, it may have been that both AT&T and Verizon were trying to figure out exactly what femtocells would mean for the consumer home networks they are increasingly becoming responsible for managing. The pursuit of wireless home service by Verizon and AT&T could be just a first step toward a re-imagining of the entire consumer home network. Having only recently pushed fiber toward those homes, those service providers are still just beginning to explore the extent of the opportunities the home network holds.

Just as the home network evolution has been inching along, with carriers dabbling in both wireline and wireless technologies to deliver new capabilities inside the home, the femtocell evolution will not exactly happen at the speed of light either. Telcos need to rectify the addition of another piece of gear to an already crowded home network environment. There already have been reports that AT&T is exploring the integration of a femtocell and an IPTV set-top box, and other telcos envision media hubs that can support a variety of network and service delivery functions, so maybe the evolution will gain speed.

What's clear is that to make it happen, these carriers will need to leverage their wireline broadband networks in balance with the wireless evolution inside the home. The world of services that awaits goes far beyond the transfer of voice from one network to another. Maybe I'll get my paella next year.

Mobile broadband and the 4G evolution

What would a trade show be without a little discussion of the future. And in the wireless world that means the topic of the day is 4G or the next iteration of the wireless network that means significantly more bandwidth and much faster data speeds.

With Verizon Communications executive vice president and CTO Dick Lynch taking the stage on Wednesday to talk about mobile broadband you can expect that the conversation will most likely focus on LTE. Verizon, which announced last year that it would deploy LTE, is committed to making the technology a global standard. It will be the first time a Verizon executive has participated in a keynote address at the Mobile World Congress, which has always been a platform for GSM carriers.

Major vendors will be demonstrating LTE and talking about the technology in their booths and press conferences but that doesn't mean that HSPA is old hat. We expect to hear lots of debate about HSPA and HSPA+ and whether carriers need to migrate to LTE when they haven't fully exploited the capabilities of HSPA. Of course, key to this debate is spectrum availability. The GSMA is going to be launching an initiative to make spectrum available for mobile broadband services. Look for the specifics of that plan to be announced during the association's press conference Monday, Feb. 16.

Of course, key to mobile broadband coverage is the deployment of femtocells. The Femto Forum, which supports worldwide femtocell deployment, has created the FemtoZone in the Fira (Stand 2 1B34) where operators and vendors will be demonstrating femtocell products as well as discussing the latest research.

With mobile broadband networks becoming more pervasive many operators are looking to embedded devices for additional revenue growth. The GSMA launched an initiative to jumpstart this industry segment last November and we expect to hear more about embedded from initiative leaders such as Vodafone, Telstra, Telefonica, KTF, Huawei and others.