Dec 1, 2004 12:00 PM,

Ken Kolderup, VP of Marketing, Kineto Wireless

By Vince Vittore

Ken Kolderup has been here before: on the cutting edge of technology, acting as marketing chief for a vendor that seems to have a can't-lose proposition. But he insists that this time it's different.

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In the midst of the telecom boom in 1999 and 2000, Kolderup was the head of marketing and chief advocate for Jetstream Communications, a company that seemed destined to be one of the major players in the then-emerging voice-over-DSL market. Then the bottom fell out, the vast majority of the CLECs went belly up and Jetstream went kaput.

In his current role as vice president of marketing for Kineto Wireless, Kolderup is again one of the main cheerleaders for an emerging technology — mobile/Wi-Fi integration — but one that is in a much better position than voice over DSL. For one, mobile/Wi-Fi integration has the backing of carriers with actual money in the bank. Second, despite the apparent surface difference, there actually are similarities between the two technologies.

“I was actually sitting around thinking that there has got to be a way the mobile operators and the broadband operators can leverage each other's technology,” he said of his time after Jetstream. “Then a recruiter called me about this job, and all of sudden the chocolate and peanut butter light went off in my head.”

Perhaps just as important is that mobile Wi-Fi — in particular the specifications developed by the Unlicensed Mobile Alliance — is being developed as a flexible architecture that can encompass multiple deployment schemes.

“UMA is not just a voice perspective and a circuit-switched perspective,” he said. “It's about a seamless experience across the service menu. A lot of carriers are looking to UMA as a way to drive SIP deployment.”

And unlike voice over DSL, which had somewhat limited geographic appeal, mobile/Wi-Fi integration is finding fans in virtually every developed telecom market, Kolderup said.

“It's a horse race. There are operators in North America, Europe and Asia that say if the technology were ready, they'd be deploying today.”
— Vince Vittore