Smartphones with MIMO for Wi-Fi will increase rapidly.  This could have taken off with 802.11n, since 802.11n first supported MIMO, but did not because of the increased cost of adding MIMO combined with the complexity of antenna placements in small devices.  The closer MIMO antennas are placed, the less of a benefit there is to use MIMO.  But this is changing rapidly, even though at first 802.11ac (1X1) was seen as a way to provide an increased data rate over the wider channels used in 5 GHz without having the added cost or complexity of MIMO.  There are a few reasons for this change:

On May 20, 2014, Telstra, Australia’s leading fixed and mobile network operator announced that it will invest more than AU$100 million to create “one of the world’s largest Wi-Fi networks” for use by its home broadband subscribers and the general public. In addition, Telstra’s Wi-Fi network which will become available early next year will also be able to extend overseas thanks to an agreement with Fon – the Spanish Wi-Fi provider, which will allow subscribers to connect to more than 12 million hotspots worldwide.

Intel has announced a partnership with SoC-maker Rockchip to develop a SoC + 3G solution based on Intel’s SoFIA technologies.  The Rockchip marked chipset is expected to be commercialized during the first half of 2015.

Visualize This! Fixing a Telecom Global Services Business

In February this year CCS – formerly Cambridge Communication Systems – announced that its small cell backhaul technology is in live operation with China Mobile. CCS followed this with an announcement in May of successful completion of trials with China Telecom.

The In-Building Wireless market is hyper-competitive, and since 2012, there have been several changes to the equipment vendor ecosystem. Alvarion and Powerwave are now out of business. Axell was acquired by Cobham and InnerWireless was acquired by Blackbox. Also CSI sold its services business, the CSI Solutions Group, to Goodman Networks.

In case you missed it, Google purchased BYOD enabler Divide on Monday. Divide is a workspace management vendor, enabling enterprises to separate work and personal profiles on a personal device.

The prospect of YouTube (and by extension Google) purchasing Twitch (the “world’s leading video platform and community for gamers”) for a reported $1 billion has caused some to sound the anticompetitive alarm.  But is this really a case of a giant squashing a promising upstart?   Perhaps…but let’s put this into perspective.

Historically, the weapon of choice in reaching analog shutoff (ASO) goals set alongside digital terrestrial (DTT) programming launches has been the digital transport adapter - a relatively low cost ($20-$40) box that receives digital signals and converts it to an analog format (Coaxial or composite video) to deliver to an existing TV.