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June 15, 2013

Mobility Techzone Week in Review

We're going to begin our week's review by delivering a public service announcement - businesses of all stripes must start to take mobile enterprise mobile security much more seriously than many of them now do. Yes, many - if not most - companies do make efforts to secure their mobile operations, but we believe that too many are either just sliding by with minimal efforts and that most, even among large scale enterprises, simply do not know if they are adequately protected against all possible mobile security holes. What is the mobile enterprise to do about security?

This week began with Apple's World Wide Developers' Conference, a forward-looking event in which Apple introduced a number of new things, chief among them a significant update to iOS, which will launch sometime later this year. Given Apple's event this week, we do find it just a bit funny to hear about AT&T Wireless suddenly pushing a new Wi-Fi-based push to talk capability for the iPhone. Surely everyone remembers push to talk, of which T-Mobile was the most prominent supplier of in the mid-2000s. Well, if you are a business customer and can put it to use, AT&T now has an enhanced version for your iPhone users.

Meanwhile a new Accenture mobile survey was released this week, the results of which strongly suggest for the wireless carriers to keep extremely demanding consumers happy and satisfied they will need to increase their digital services and ramp up how fast we have ubiquitous access to high-performance networks. Perhaps AT&T Wireless is on the right track with new push to talk services after all.

The wireless carriers also need to contend with exploding numbers of wireless phone users of all sorts - from the high end to the lower end of the spectrum, where the majority of cell phone users now live. A new IDC mobile phone survey has just emerged that fully confirms the notion of exploding growth. What kind of numbers are we talking about here? How about 6.6 billion mobile phone users by the end of 2017? In 2013 IDC projects 1.86 billion mobile phones to be launched, with 53 percent of them projected to be smartphones. These numbers, coupled with the Accenture survey numbers, suggest a double edged sword for the wireless carriers - there is clearly a golden goose to be had, but trying to catch the goose may kill the wireless carrier chasers!

One thing wireless carriers must absolutely do - if they are to both capture new business and ensure that their existing and new customers remain satisfied is to assure that they are able to deliver wireless services that are relatively secure and guard against malware. But carriers must do more than that - they must also be able to guard against spam, and massive spam and text-messaging attacks. Doing so not only ensures that customers will be happy but that the carriers themselves can remain happy by way of reduced support costs and avoiding having phone numbers blacklisted. How to get there? Cloudmark has the answer.

The chasers of the golden goose include Dish Network, Softbank and Sprint/Clearwire. The IDC numbers noted above certainly support Softbank's desire to acquire Sprint - or at least 70 percent of it back when it made its initial bid for the company. Dish however has boldly inserted itself into the bidding for Sprint and is just as committed to landing the number three U.S. wireless carrier as Softbank is. Softbank, in fact, has had to significantly re-up its own bid this week, sweetening its original offer by $1.5 billion and shifting an additional $3 billion from a loan to Sprint into additional dollars for Sprint's shareholders. This is the price one must pay to chase the golden goose - all in the hope that the goose does indeed prove golden.

Finally this week, let's ask this: Are you still a 3G wireless user waiting to get on the LTE bandwagon? LTE is often touted as 4G though in fact it really isn't. The real 4G will arrive when carriers begin to deliver on LTE-Advanced, which significantly ups the uplink and downlink bandwidth for users. We may see that arrive sometime in the second half the current decade. Samsung on the other hand doesn't see a need to wait so long. In fact it is now touting what it believes is legitimate 5G technology? Is it?

Have a great weekend!





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