Mobility and Wireless: Interviews

Sprint CEO Dan Hesse shared the company's WiMAX plans last week at CTIA Wireless. The plan to build a fourth-generation wireless network is a risky one, but Hesse explained to Denise Dubie why it's a smart strategy for Sprint.

WeFi is hoping to do for Wi-Fi connectivity what Facebook has done for social networking.

Shortly after the iPhone launched earlier this year, the head of microprocessor maker ARM said the new handset will stimulate growth in the smartphone market because the hype around the product would pique people's interest. Since then, the iPhone, and the smartphone market overall, have taken off.

After Google released an initial set of details about its plans to alter how mobile applications are created and distributed, industry watchers are compiling a long list of follow-up questions about the Android platform and the Open Handset AlliancE.

Chip giants, Intel and AMD, are at the forefront of the mobile computing trend. AMD's technical manager, Michael Apthorpe, and Intel's channel sales manager, Andrew McLean, shared their thoughts on market direction.

Nokia, the world's largest handset maker, is well known for its consumer devices but maintains a range of enterprise products. Mary McDowell is executive vice president and general manager of Nokia's Enterprise Solutions, a division that deals with products from the E Series phones to security appliances to software such as the Intellisync Mobile Suite, designed to manage a fleet of enterprise devices. She spoke with Jeremy Kirk about Nokia's direction in several enterprise areas.

The race to define and build next-generation broadband wireless networks is in full swing. And though Qualcomm doesn't like to use the 4G (fourth-generation) term, the company -- a key supplier of chip technology for today's 3G (third-generation) networks -- is already moving to stake its claim in the emerging market for super-fast wireless services.

Aspiring entrepreneurs can only dream about a track record like Selina Lo's. First there was Centillion, a networking startup that Lo co-founded, and Bay Networks purchased for US$100 million in 1994. Lo's next act was Alteon, a maker of Gigabit Ethernet adapters that Lo joined in 1996 and transformed into Alteon WebSystems, a maker of content-aware switching hardware, before helping to sell Alteon to Nortel at the apex of the dot-com craze in July, 2000, for US$7.8 billion. It was a master stroke of good marketing and good timing that made Lo very wealthy.

With its US$2 billion (AUD$2.55 billion) acquisition of Redback Networks this week, Ericsson is now in direct competition with some of its biggest partners -- Cisco and Juniper -- in the red-hot carrier edge routing market. However, the company says the move is more of an effort to obtain IP and Ethernet technology it can use to pull its telecom and mobile infrastructure products forward into the IP-based future of telecom, says Karl Thedeen, vice president of wireline products for the Swedish vendor. But that's not to say Ericsson isn't looking to grow Redback's market share and technology itself. Thedeen expanded on the merger this week with Phil Hochmuth. [The following is an edited transcript.]

John Roese, who became chief technology officer at Nortel Networks in June, discusses WiMax wireless technology -- and Nortel's plans for it with both businesses and carriers.

On Aug. 29, the Wi-Fi Alliance unexpectedly announced it would reverse is oft-repeated decision to do no interoperability testing of 100+Mbps wireless LAN gear until final, formal ratification of the 802.11n standard. Instead, the industry group now plans to start testing in mid-2007 wireless LAN chipsets, components, NICs, and access points based on an emerging draft of the standard. Various vendors and industry analysts are predicting that the IEEE 11n task group will approve a 2.0 draft standard by early in 2007. WFA Managing Director Frank Hanzlik talks about this sudden change in the Alliance's position.