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Wireless Utopia

The journey towards a free wireless world.

Super Intelligent Devices

Tuesday, July 25, 2006

The July edition of MoMo Bangalore was held yesterday at the Aztec Soft. premises. It was a full house with a diverse group of participans from the Mobile Industry in Bangalore. We had two sepakers, Sujai Karampuri and Deepak Jaiswal speaking on Next Generation Networks and Mobile Value Added Services. And their talks led to an open discussion amongst participants which threw up quite a lot number of views and counterviews.

One of the most interesting discussion was about where the complexity and intelligence should reisde, the network or the terminal. People with a telecom network background will readily agree that all the intelligence lies at the network. The reason being, the devices were and are not really powerful yet. And it makes business sense to the telcos. to spend much more on a single box which serves a number of devices.

But the telco's also want to control the content and usage of these devices. Anything that cannot be charged or monitored is a strict no no for them. Recently this duel between the Telcos and OEM's have been highlighted by the dual mode phones that Nokia introduced. They can work either on a WiFi hotspot or a 3G network and handoff's are supported seamlessly. The telco's are not very happy about it.

This battle of where the intelligence lies has been fought and lost in the wired world. The cable companies prevailed because they were able to make money out of it. But the story is not over by any means. Cognitive radios using Mobile Adhoc Networks do not require any carrrier. It is currently the holy grail of telecom research and every university woth its name is working on it. It will percolate into commercial products one day.

The only question is can we find viable business models around it.

Update: Rajan's post on the same topic.

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posted by Rajiv, 7:15 AM

1 Comments:

You say that, "This battle of where the intelligence lies has been fought and lost in the wired world." By this I presume you imply that in the wired world, the intelligence can not lie in the end; in which case, I disagree. The PSTN is full of examples of intelligent devices at the end. Data/Fax modems, PBXs are all examples of intelligent devices. What about cordless phones. Indeed thanks to the modern technology, I could place my own "Class 5" switch (at the cost of a consumer good) in my home taking back the control from the phone company.

Yes the war was fought, but the consumer side won with the Carterfone decision. This was many years before the "end-to-end" paper was published.

Aswath
Said Anonymous Anonymous, 5:04 AM  

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