Introducing the CTIA Live Blog

CTIA Wireless is just a mere 7 days away, and while the global recession is sure to put a damper on this year’s event, there’s still a lot going on in the mobile industry in North America: Verizon’s long-term evolution deployments, Clearwire’s nationwide WiMAX rollout, the proliferation of femtocells and the dramatic increase in mobile data services, to name a few. While this year at CTIA Wireless we’ll probably encounter a more frugal, more cautious wireless industry, I doubt we’ll witness one that’s merely hunkering down to ride out the economic storm.

With that, I’d like to draw attention to how Telephony’s coverage is changing this year. Instead of distributing CTIA’s coverage among news stores, features, blogs and columns throughout the site, we’re consolidating all of our coverage into a single CTIA Live Blog. The idea this year is to be a bit more nimble with our coverage. We’ll be providing insight and depth, but we wanted our coverage to be timelier and pursue a broader range of news this year. And we wanted to give our readers a single repository of information where they can access that content.

The pre-CTIA news already has started trickling in. Perhaps the major pre-CTIA story of note is Zer01’s plans to launch its voice-over-IP (VoIP) mobile service at the show next week. Unlike many of the other VoIP services launched on mobile phones of late, Zer01’s isn’t dependent on a local number to connect to an IP network, nor does it depend on Wi-Fi or another access technology to bypass the cellular network. Zer01 is using 3G, EGDE and even lowly GPRS connections to initiate end-to-end VoIP calls — and its doing its as a mobile operator, though CEO Ben Piilani is loathe to call his hybrid operator an MVNO.

Check back this week for regular updates to the Live Blog, not to mention during the show itself. And don’t just read the blog entries; comment on them, too. Not everyone can attend the show this year due to financial constraints, but at least we can all participate in the discussion.

E-mail me at kfitchard@telephonyonline.com.