AWS-3 had some aggressive bidding – perhaps just to run up the price and extract revenge for previous M&A grievances, but who knows.  Below is a view of the provisional bids shortly before the auction closed.  As expected, the 2x10 MHz spectrum carries about a 10% premium over 2x5 MHz spectrum.  1x10 TD-LTE is worth less, and there are some real bottom feeders for the 1x5 MHz TD-LTE.   Given the low valuation placed on the 1x5 MHz TD spectrum, one wonders why the FCC didn’t bundle that to make a 1x15 MHz block, as that would certainly be worth more than the current yields. 

International Telecommunication Union (ITU) announced final approval of G.fast broadband standard on 5^th December. 

Microsoft announced an update to their Bing Pulse product which brings a second screen interactivity and analytics toolkit to broadcasters.  

In case you didn’t see it yet, we published our latest Internet of Things Application Enablement Platform Middleware Market Research Report recently. You can check the key findings from here, after you have recovered from the inevitable awe of witnessing a total of eight upper-case nouns in a row. I’ve understood that I can finally call myself a proper industry analyst when I pull off a full ten without batting an eyelid. This time round it was within my reach, but that humble “of” in there disqualified me.

Here’s a development I considered outright ground-breaking: a Calgary-based law firm is using its client’s Fitbit data to back up her personal injury case in court. The point is to prove that the person’s activity levels have been negatively affected by an injury she suffered in an accident four years ago. The used data isn’t raw data from the Fitbit band, but it’s first crunched by Vivametrica, which matches it against that of the general population.

 The consumption of mobile telecom services by consumers is no longer proportional to the revenue generated for mobile operators. In many countries, 4G LTE tariff plans have been introduced at the same price points as their 3G tariff plans. According to ABI Research, the global average traffic generated per user per month will expand from 275 megabytes in 3Q 2014 to 1.85 gigabytes in 2019. Video traffic is expected to reach 65% within 5 years.

I’m fond of acquisition news. Corporate acquisitions can serve as handy checkpoints for the state of the involved industry, since they by definition require companies putting their money where their mouths are. See for example Huawei’s recent purchase of Neul, whose reported valuation was a healthy reality check amid the otherwise overdriven IoT hype narrative.

I recently received an email from IEEE announcing its search for an editor for an upcoming series on green communications.   In a previous life I determined that LTE was much “greener” than 3G for delivering the bits to the mass-market mobile broadband.   Today you can use exploratory tools like Alcatel-Lucent’s G.W.A.T.T. where you can push the buttons and twist the knobs and get directionally correct guidance on where to focus your attention.   Hint:  Think LTE and Data-Centers as pointing to the biggest bang for the buck. 

Continuing, Einstein says knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand – that is the sand in the gears for many pundits.  Ask them about advanced technologies such as LTE Broadcast or Voice over LTE, and they cannot imagine anything new because tomorrow is like yesterday.  LTE Broadcast?  Qualcomm tried that with MediaFlo.  VoLTE?  Same-old voice but with a new coat of paint.  Been there, done that, no business case.  Move along please, nothing here to see. 

I had the pleasure of finally attending Black Hat this year; the European iteration which took place in Amsterdam on 16-17 October. From my understanding, the event is a much smaller and more reserved version of its Vegas counterpart, and primarily stocked by European-based researchers and attendees; although a few of the speakers had previously presented in the U.S. The briefings are mostly very technical -as they should be- although a few provided higher-level overviews (that were still however firmly focused on proofs and vulnerabilities of their specific subject-matter). Two of interest were the opening keynote by Adi Shamir (the S in RSA) and another by Veracode’s Erik Peterson (Bringing a Machete to the Amazon).