I’ve been in Telecom for 12 years or so, working on both the handset and the radio network side. What excites me now about mobility is the range of technologies and standards we have developed and are developing to provide bandwidth across an aggregate of many wireless and fixed technologies. What disappoints me the most technically is the difficulty we face in providing a seamless, clean handover between all these technologies – but that is a challenge to work on. For more discussions on managing mobile networks and mobile architecture fundamentals, visit the Service Provider Mobility Community at: https://communities.cisco.com/community/solutions/sp/mobility

1. New Guest Blogger: Kit Kilgour
Posted by kitkilgour on Dec 7, 2011 10:46:15 AM
By: Kit Kilgour
1. How long have you been in Telecom? What excites you the most about mobility? What
disappoints you the most about mobility?
I’ve been in Telecom for 12 years or so, working on both the handset and the radio network side. What
excites me now about mobility is the range of technologies and standards we have developed and are
developing to provide bandwidth across an aggregate of many wireless and fixed technologies. What
disappoints me the most technically is the difficulty we face in providing a seamless, clean handover
between all these technologies – but that is a challenge to work on.
2. In your opinion, what are the key market drivers, opportunities, and challenges for Service
Providers?
I believe that the key market drivers for Service Providers are cost, efficiency and delivering bandwidth
with a quality of service. They have a great opportunity to both enable and provide a compelling and
intelligent range of services by utilising the full range of tools and technologies now becoming available. I
feel that Service Providers will have to fight to own the customer and demonstrate their value-add over
OTT Application / 3rd party service providers. At the same time they will have to balance their desire to
optimize the user radio experience and their network loading over the user’s wish to utilize their
subscription to a range of services, possibly supplied by competitors or other application providers.
3. Where do you think mobility will be in 5-10 years from now?
I think that there will be a whole range of techniques in use across different radio technologies (3G, LTE,
LTE-A, WiFi, …) mainly in a HetNet configuration with sophisticated self-organisation, interference
coordination and control, and supporting 1000x the current data load with the assistance of many millions
of small cells. There will be a lot more effort on optimised routing of user data. I also see the increasing
use of locally shared radio spectrum where devices will take out a temporary lease on what they need to
use.
I look forward to sharing more blog posts in the near future
For more discussions on managing mobile networks and mobile architecture fundamentals, visit
the Service Provider Mobility Community at:
https://communities.cisco.com/community/solutions/sp/mobility