'Open' SIMs, brain chips and Google's Nest: What to expect in wireless in 2015

We look at events that will shape the industry this year

JUNE

WWDC - a quiet revolution will chip away at iOS’s garden walls

Apple’s annual WWDC developer conference came at a time when the firm’s share price had been under pressure for a year (though it was – and is - still the world’s most valuable company); and whose recent products had been criticized for lack of innovation and magic.

The event showed the firm making some adjustments to the changes in its world, particularly the need to shift from native apps and a tightly walled garden, towards cloud services, streaming and openness. It then followed this up in the fall with its strongest new iPhones for several years, adding a large-screened model and restoring a great deal of confidence with innovations like Apple Pay.

WWDC laid the groundwork for that however. There were no new devices, but plenty of signs of significant changes to come, notably more openness in iOS, more convergence with OS X, and some indications of how Apple will handle the cloud and IoT.

And it really did live up to its name – as a developer conference, not a corporate marketing shindig. That was a sign, in itself, of Apple responding to the pressures it is under and acknowledging the need to listen to its developers and modernize its platform for a web-based age. Another announcement which may prove significant for the future was support for Wi-Fi Calling, which could be a powerful tool for Wi-Fi-first and over-the-top providers, not just for cellcos.

Cisco buys Tail-f as AT&T turns its world upside down

The network equipment vendors have to adapt to the slow but real transition to software defined networking (SDN), which could commoditise their hardware and transform their competitive landscape. Cisco has been responding on many fronts, but a quiet turning point came with the acquisition of privately held Tail-f Systems, a Swedish developer of multivendor orchestration systems for physical and virtualised networks, for $175m plus incentives.

It brings useful technology for Cisco’s significant, if reluctant, push into SDN, but more importantly, it buys the giant a slot in AT&T’s Domain 2.0 SDN/NFV (Network Functions Virtualization) project. As well as being a major investment in its own right, Domain 2.0 is also critical to vendors as a showcase for their software capabilities, since it is one of the earliest and most comprehensive telco SDN programs in the world and will be closely watched. The carrier has added to its supplier list through the year (see separate item) and is now the poster child for the new-look carrier network, and the squeeze that could put on equipment revenues.

JULY

Qualcomm’s Wilocity purchase wrests WiGig initiative from Intel

Many of the 5G conversations are about harnessing very high frequencies such as 60GHz to add wireless capacity. So an early technology in that band, WiGig (an implementation of Wi-Fi) is particularly significant, and has created a new battleground for Intel and Qualcomm. Qualcomm acquired 60GHz WiGig pioneer Wilocity and promised to take the emerging Wi-Fi-like technology from its current foothold in fast PC-peripheral connections, right into the handset experience.

This was a blow to Intel, which had driven WiGig and tied it into its Ultrabook reference platform. With its purchase of Wilocity (itself an Intel spinout) and its heavily mobile agenda, Qualcomm is moving the focus to the smartphone and stealing much of Intel’s thunder and ability to use WiGig as a key tool for its own wireless ambitions in areas like hotspots. However, this is a pointer towards more general interest and investment in high frequency spectrum in 2015 onwards.

AUGUST

Fire Phone just part of Amazon’s massive investment gamble

Amazon shipped its first handset, the Fire Phone, on the same day it announced a bigger than expected second quarter net loss. The connection was more than just one of calendar dates. The huge budget required to launch a smartphone into such a mature and price-sensitive market is one of the factors adding to Amazon’s losses, and causing some to question when its long technology investment cycle will start to pay off in profits – especially as the smartphone has subsequently been a sales failure and imposed huge inventory write-off charges on its owner.

However, as CEO Jeff Bezos has stressed, Amazon relies on a unique combination of ultra-low margins – which are becoming a reality for the smartphone segment, as Xiaomi’s profit figures show – and constant innovation, with some of those new ideas expected to fail. The approach is to drive more and more consumption of Amazon services, content and stores with friendly user experiences and low cost devices to optimise those. That worked well with ereaders and tablets, but the handset version was let down by wrong pricing and a mistaken exclusive deal with AT&T. But the overall principles remain, and we will see many more of Amazon’s expensive failures – and of course, successes – in the year to come.

SEPTEMBER

Operators put openness at heart of NFV phase 2

Some network vendors may still have dreams of keeping carrier virtualisation within their proprietary environments, but one of the key reasons why operators are interested is the chance to break away from technology lock-ins and implement truly interoperable, mix-and-match networks at last. This goal was clearly seen in the new mission statement issued by the operator-driven ETSI group which has been driving the specifications for NFV (network functions virtualisation), the key standard for bringing this technology to carrier environments.

The impact and success of NFV has been unexpectedly powerful, indicating that there is a pent-up demand for the benefits it promises – lower cost of ownership; an end to lock-ins; greater flexibility to allocate network resource where required and to improve quality of experience. At a meeting in Silicon Valley, attended by representatives from 37 operators, NFV Phase 2 was described as the implementation stage, and a new mission statement emphasized the goal of an "open, interoperable ecosystem, through specification, implementation and deployment experience”. This established, critically, that interoperability was the primary issue for service providers.