Guest Blogger: Jeff Brown, Kineto Wireless

Thankful

During a long Thanksgiving weekend here in the US, I had time to reflect on Kineto's opportunity. I spent the previous three weeks in Europe and Asia visiting mobile operators of all shapes and sizes, and I realize Kineto has a lot to be thankful for.

To begin with, everywhere I went smartphones dominated the discussion. Product plans for 2011 were heavily weighted to smartphones, with feature phones quickly playing a marginalized role. Smartphones for the high-end; the mid-tier; even entry level; plus post and pre-paid…it seemed like everyone wanted to talk smartphones.

Of the platforms, Android continues to have an outsized share. I often refer to a Gartner report from November 2010 which shows Android growing from 3% to 25% of the total smartphone market share in just one year. This is staggering growth, made even more impressive because the overall market doubled in the same timeframe.

And finally, mobile operators have fully embraced Wi-Fi. It seemed that any discussion about smartphones and/or Android included Wi-Fi. It isn't a question of whether Wi-Fi technology will play a role in the mobile internet, it's just a question of how big the role will be.

With this foundation, Kineto's Smart Wi-Fi products are being embraced with open arms. Smart Wi-Fi takes the benefits of Wi-Fi to the next level, enabling operators to deliver improved coverage to their subscribers -- something that isn't available with basic Wi-Fi.

Kineto's Smart Wi-Fi Application is now available on 10 different handsets from operators in North America and Europe. Smart Wi-Fi is the right product at the right time, and Kineto has plenty to be thankful for.

Smartphone handsets surge

Gartner released some figures on the mobile phone market, and smartphones in general. The information was covered in this article in Total Telecoms.

Last year we picked up a report by RBS projecting a full 50% of all handsets sold in the world in 2014 would be smartphones. They projected something like 1.6b units, and 800m are predicted to be smartphones.

Along comes this report to show that the world is well on it's way. While Gartner is projecting the global handset market to grow 11-13% in 2010, they are reporting 49% year over year actual growth for smartphones. With 54.3m smartphones shipped in the first quarter of 2010, it's easy to project 325m units in 2010, easily extrapolated to 800m units in 2014.

However, consider the implications of 800m smartphones shipped in 2014. Today networks are groaning under the impact of a tiny fraction of that many smartphones. And one trend which I haven't seen reported, but seems to be true in my focus group of one, is that the longer people have smartphones, the more data they use.

I think consumers become confortable with email, then venture into different elements of the smartphone experience, moving pictures, recording videos, hitting Facebook, watching YouTube videos and streaming Pandora. These last two are particular new favorites of mine.

I don't listen to the radio in the car anymore, I just start Pandora and let my smartphone deliver internet radio to my car. And YouTube has become a very easy way to kill time when I'm waiting... for the kids at soccer practice or at the airport or whereever.

The need for Smart Wi-Fi is growing as fast as the shipment of smartphones.

VoLGA = Operator’s response to Mobile VoIP

The ‘skype-hype’ is reaching a new level, and for good reason. By some accounts, Skype (through Skype Out or point to point) now accounts for 30% of the massive international calling market today.

And now VoIP is going mobile. Gartner just released a report suggesting that in the next 10 years, more than half of mobile voice traffic will be VoIP based, with much of that enabled through the introduction of LTE. It seems to me that launching an LTE service without voice is inviting mobile VoIP into your network.

This is why the voice over LTE ‘problem’ is so critical for mobile operators, and why more and more operators are investigating VoLGA.

VoLGA lets mobile operators leverage the voice infrastructure already in place to compete directly with Mobile VoIP. With VoLGA, mobile operators can weave their voice service into the myriad of Web 2.0 applications, leveraging the unbridled innovation of the Internet while embedding their core revenue generating service.

In addition, VoLGA lets mobile operators take their voice service beyond handsets, turning it into a VoIP object which can be downloaded to laptops, ultra-mobile PCs, mobile internet devices, or embedded into LTE home gateways.

From the beginning, the power of the UMA/GAN specification has been to extend the mobile operator’s core service to the internet. Now more than ever, mobile operators are turning to UMA/GAN to solve this problem.