Disbelieving…
…that work is almost done.
Its nearly 9pm, am at the office contemplating going through notes or just writing on here.
Came back from Spore last week, where a whole lot of stuff happened at Shangri-La hotel for 3 days in a row.
Is it just me, but because it was a WiMAX event, everybody I met was espousing the virtues of Wimax over 3G? This was unheard of just months ago, and now all of a sudden… 3G wont scale, 3G cant handle data-rich apps, 3G expansion plans would involve “cell splitting till our eyeballs bleed” (according to one operator) etc etc etc.
On the other hand, because its more comfortable to maintain circuit-switched networks, operators will maintain their upgrade path till about 3.9G in 2010 whereby quadplay services will theoretically start to exist.
Apparently the 3 main camps 3G LTE, UMB and 802.11m (mobile WiMax II) are converging around OFDMA and MIMO…. hence the pressure for vendors to consolidate and combine their portfolios.
Nortel’s done it, comfortable about selling off UMTS (to Lucent btw) and pooling all resources into WCDMA and WiMAX.
Nokia-Siemens and Alcatel-Lucent merged and consolidated literally. Ericsson expressed somewhat disinterest to jump on WiMax (at least equipment-making side), and Motorola wants to turn the whole globe into one big hotspot. Cisco’s turned around and announced interest via combo-ing with Alvarion etc etc.
Its far from over.
