Cloud Expected to Bring Dumber Phones, New Attacks, Cross-Industry Provider War

A cloud-based world means a new era in security challenges, said Vach Kompella, Alcatel-Lucent senior director-mobile gateways. “We're going to get hacked, there’s no denying that.” That problem brings new business opportunities, he said: “Network-based firewall services,” long awaited, may finally materialize.

By mid-2012, “a mobile cloud platform war” will be raging, said John Loughney, a Nokia product manager. The enormous opportunity will attract competitors from across industries and up and down the value chain, including for starters Apple, Facebook, Google and Nokia, he said. “As carriers deploy IMS and other cloud-based” offerings, “they will become a factor in this” market, too, Loughney said.

"Most of the mobile operators are not so happy that there is so much data usage” resulting from the smartphone and tablet explosion, because it’s so difficult to handle on their networks, Loughney said. He predicted a trend toward applications that are “really intelligent and send only the data that is needed,” saving a device’s battery life, as well as bandwidth. Complaints about battery life can only increase as the use of audio and video on phones increases, Kompella said.

LTE and accompanying new services will increase spectrum demand, which “is definitely going to outstrip supply,” Mallya said. He said Orange needs to add base stations. Tiered pricing will come to Europe in addition to the U.S. by 2012, to “monetize our investment in terms of capital expenditure,” he said.

Small cells, femtocells and Wi-Fi offload can aid spectrum efficiency, but “it’s not clear who pays for what,” Kompella said. “There has to be some tariff across that boundary” between wireless and wireline carriers, he said. Responsibility also must be fixed for securing these facilities, Kompella said. An unspecified carrier has gone in five years from making Nokia remove Wi-Fi reception from handsets to insisting on the technology’s inclusion, Loughney said. Cognitive or software-defined radio technology for making opportunistic use of capacity that’s available off and on “will help when spectrum is scarce,” he said. “That will come,” but a good deal of work remains to be done on the technology and it won’t make much practical difference until after 2015, Loughney said.

SDForum Notebook

T-Mobile and at least one other carrier will open their software environments to developers by disclosing their application programming interfaces, transforming the wireless landscape, predicted an investment manager for the T-Mobile Venture Fund. The manager, Brook Wessel, didn’t specify the other carrier or any timing. “The carriers are grappling with the change in the competitive landscape,” said Wessel, who worked five years for T-Mobile USA. They used to worry only about competing with each other, he said. Now they face threats from companies near the conference site, on a Microsoft campus, Wessel said. Apple’s headquarters is about 8 miles away and Google’s less than 2 miles. But it will take a long time for the cellular providers to change their ways, he said. This will create openings for upstart companies to grab customers and profits, Wessel said. It’s still hard for would-be partners “to play with the carriers,” Wessel acknowledged, saying “there’s a lot of navel-gazing” in Bellevue, Wash., the location of T-Mobile USA’s headquarters, “and maybe in Dallas and other places” where cellular executives are. Wessel said he’s “wary” of investing in a startup that’s dependent on carriers, “because it’s such a long slog” to deal with them. Multiple distribution channels are the way to go, he said. The T-Mobile fund has started making a few seed-round investments in startups, Wessel said. That’s an earlier stage than telcos had invested, he said.