Generational overlap

Telephony's editors will be all over the map this week: Carol Wilson, Jason Meyers, Tim McElligott and Ed Gubbins are in Boston hosting Telephony's one-day IPTV Workshop and also covering pulvermedia's Fall VON event. Kevin Fitchard will be in Los Angeles covering the CTIA's IT and Entertainment show. Joan Engebretson, our new contributing editor, will be in Chicago at work on a first round of stories that you can expect to see soon on www.telephonyonline.com and in these pages. Me? I'll be bunkered at an undisclosed location, but I'll be thinking of you.

Sending our editors far and wide is what we have to do to keep up with the industry and its newest technology innovations. But I also sometimes wonder if in the rush to keep up with what's new, you end up not taking full advantage of your existing opportunities. If you devote every resource at your disposal to staying on the bleeding edge, are you in danger of not following other ventures through to maturity?

Sprint last month said it was ready to migrate its mobile network to 4G beginning next year. 4G for Sprint is Mobile WiMAX, but if you ask multiple people in the mobile industry what 4G really is, you would get many different answers. If you are having a sense of déjà vu reading that, it's because we said something very similar not so long ago about 3G. And that's because sometimes the industry jumps ahead of itself, deploying new technologies to support service trends that may take years to play out, while investors scratch their heads wondering what the rush is to spend so much more money.

Maybe 4G just represents the ability to support a lot more of everything — more music, more video, more social networking applications, more entertainment content in general. Although consumption of that type of mobile content is at such an early stage, how could we already be in need of new technology to support it? Doesn't 3G — only 3 years old if you go all the way back to the first market launches by Verizon Wireless — have more than a little life left in it?

I recently interviewed Kris Rinne, the chief technology officer of Cingular Wireless, who thinks there still is a lot more we can learn from and do with 3G technology. Our cover story Q&A presentation of that interview is on page 26.

Elsewhere in this issue, you'll find the mobile multimedia-themed Wireless Review supplement, a story by Ed Gubbins on page 8 about the increasingly heated vendor price wars, a piece of breaking news on page 16 about a vendor acquisition to be announced at VON — and much more.

Also, as much as I'd like to say that a podcast will pop out of these print pages somewhere, it's just not going to happen. But if you visit our Web site, you'll find that podcasts are a new venture of ours. Listen to our recent podcasts on business continuity and on IPTV and consumer habits and look for more podcast postings from us in the weeks and months ahead.