Signs point to 2008 as the kickoff year for a truly open mobile Internet environment, with Internet giants entering wireless and faster networks being deployed. The wireless Internet promises to change the culture as fully and completely as the wired Internet, iPod or social networking has. That is, provided certain criteria are met, with open access being chief among them.

A new report by Juniper Research calculates the number of mobile WIMAX subscribers will exceed 80 million by 2013. The biggest surge in growth, says the research firm, will happen after 2010. Juniper’s projections assume a wide range of attractive devices will be available on the market within three years (at competitive prices), and mobile WiMAX operators will achieve service differentiation from mobile operators.

With increasingly complex convergent services, the incidence of “outages” is expected to grow. In 2007, there were a variety of high-profile out-ages that were difficult to resolve because of a lack of consistency in language and data among stakeholders in the delivery of services.

Persistent problems with outages and reporting of network outages drove AT&T, Alcatel Lucent, Qwest, Sprint, T-Mobile, U.S. Cellular and Verizon to participate in the ATIS Network Reliability Steering Committee (NRSC). After 18 months of concentrated work, the NRSC has released its Outage Classifi-cation Standard (https://www.atis.org/docstore/default.aspx).

The standard is designed to provide carriers, vendors and the FCC a template for uniformity in outage data and reporting models. The hope is to resolve inconsistencies that plague network analysis and reporting.

Time Warner Cable and its rivals are in the early stages of a torrid campaign to win the latest battle for America's dens: high-definition programming.

With thousands of new sets installed in the past year, satellite and cable service providers are touting plans to multiply the number of HD channels they offer. Until recently, Time Warner had the edge in the Triangle. Now, armed with new satellites, DirecTV can claim the most high-definition programming.

In recent years, Cisco has been turning up the volume on its promotion of the benefits of optical and IP integration in its CRS-1 carrier core routing platform. But it’s unknown to what extent carriers are buying that pitch. Two big U.S. carriers who recently announced major deployments of the CRS-1--AT&T and XO Communications--opted not to take Cisco’s suggestion of integrating the gear’s optical and IP functions.

Sprint Nextel Corp. on Tuesday named Dan Hesse its new president and CEO, replacing Gary Forsee, who resigned in October.
Hesse, 54, had been working as chairman, president and CEO of Sprint’s landline spin-off, Embarq Corp.

Every vendor has a new femtocell home base station to hawk, but in the last few months, the market has been flooded with femtocells targeting every conceivable radio interface and frequency. The rash of new products would seem to signify that the femtocell market is finally heating up and that we’ll start to see commercial deployments following hot on the heels of Sprint’s pilot launch last summer.

Modern life has arrived noisily in India's most tradition-bound communities, but for many of its poorest inhabitants the shrill ring of a mobile phone is still an alien sound.