Armed and dangerous

After all these years, the wireless industry remains on the cutting edge. It's a difficult place to live, maintaining your balance on a razor (not RAZR) blade for almost 25 years. The wireless industry has done it through a lot of hard work, investing huge amounts of money into network buildouts; marketing the heck out of services to pay off the debt; constantly honing device design; improving the entire supply chain; encouraging new application creation; and insistently pursuing new standards and next-generation network technologies well ahead of obvious market need, knowing full well that technology debates and product developments can have longer-than-expected life cycles. So much work, so many semi-colons.

Of course, there has been and still is a good bit of fate involved. Wireless forms of communication have represented the future for as long as people have been predicting the future. For wireless to become the dominant mode of not only communication but also entertainment seems inevitable and always has.

But as the traditional wireless players visit the CTIA's Wireless 2007 trade show in Orlando later this month, they shouldn't rest on their laurels or take their good fortune at being in the right place at the right time in history for granted. In a world going wireless, they may be serious competition to the rest of the telecom industry, but whether the wireless carriers know it or not, the rest of the telecom industry got that memo, read it and is prepared to respond aggressively. Around the globe, traditional wireline operators are pursuing fixed/mobile convergence and alternative wireless technologies like WiMAX at a pretty alarming rate. Meanwhile, don't be surprised if cable TV companies, which seemed to accept MVNOs as enough for marginal wireless participation not long ago, become more actively involved in providing wireless services and integrating wireless capabilities into their existing cable TV and phone offerings.

The wireless industry is indeed armed and dangerous, and ready for combat, but so is everyone else.