4G Trends

Mobile and application services are the future of the Internet. They will run on smart devices such as Mobile Internet Devices (MID) and smart phones. They will leverage an intelligent network, deploying solutions over an open and common platform. The mobile Internet represents access to an abundance of contextually relevant information from a number of devices across a variety of networks. It incorporates data-optimized wireless networks and leverages the web as an execution platform.

Content itself will originate from the web and other service providers, from personal collections and from sensory data. The presentation of this content will adapt to accommodate multi-modal, multi-device interactions enabled by edge gateways.

“What is 4G wireless?” Ask this question of any five people you know in the mobile broadband industry. It’s highly probable that you’ll receive five very different answers. In fact, ask ten or even twenty people and the outcome is likely to be the same.

The number of definitions of 4G wireless that exist today seems only to be limited by the number of opinions one seeks. Definitions might just include technologies such as HSPA, HSPA+, LTE, LTE Advanced and WiMAX. And in some cases the definition may even reference IMT-Advanced.

"As the most advanced technologies currently defined for global wireless mobile broadband communications, IMT-Advanced is considered as '4G,' although it is recognized that this term, while undefined, may also be applied to the forerunners of these technologies, LTE and WiMAX, and to other evolved 3G technologies providing a substantial level of improvement in performance and capabilities with respect to the initial third generation systems now deployed," espoused the ITU in a PR released in December of 2010.

IT should view the bring-your-own-device phenomenon as less of a threat and more as an opportunity. Here's why.

In a webinar on BYOD that I just did, a survey of the 500-plus participants showed that security is the way-out-in-front, lead concern of IT managers when it comes to implementing a bring-your-own-device program. More than 60% of those people voting reiterated what I hear every day. "Is it safe? Can we really trust users and their personal handsets with enterprise secrets?"

Security is, of course, the one part of IT where one can never be "done". Each week brings new concerns, new threats, and some previously unknown and unforeseeable challenge. Perhaps it's news of yet another IT breach, or, even worse, a discovery, not yet public, that something has gone terribly wrong and confidential information might be compromised. With security constantly under fire, then, aren't we just making things worse by allowing essentially any device on the corporate network? Aren't we just waving the proverbial red flag in front of the hacker community, daring them to do their worst once again?