I was recently talking to a new acquaintance and found that we had followed similar career paths up to a point. We had both spent some time developing mass-market consumer premises equipment, he in the cable-modem industry and myself in the DSL market. While I eventually moved to the dark side (Marketing), he now manages an R&D group for a cellular device manufacturer.

Somehow or other we started talking about the stresses of “launch day”. When you develop mass-market products, an error on your part doesn’t result in someone getting angry at you; it results in thousands or tens of thousands getting angry. On “launch day”, you know you might briefly step away from your desk and come back to dozens of emails and voice mails that essentially say, “Forget about sleeping for a few days or weeks.”

By all indications, the rising demand for ever-richer broadband services is unstoppable. And inevitable.

As consumers increasingly rely on smart phones, tablets and mobile-enabled laptops as their portals of choice, operators are compelled to evolve their systems to keep pace. Service providers must rethink and reconfigure network technologies to meet the demand for spectrum. Goodbye TDM/ATM based systems, hello converged packet infrastructures. Only transformed networks will ride the big wave.

Automobiles play a prominent role in our daily lives.  For example, when you consider the fact that Americans spend over 100 hours a year just driving to/from work, we can safely say that driving is a very time consuming activity.

Luckily, researchers have been working to decrease the inconveniences caused by automobiles. Vehicle automation is one solution. Car-to-car communication, a hot topic in the telecommunications industry right now, will allow us to enable automation and control traffic through communication networks.  The overall objective of car-to-car communication is to help increase automobile safety and improve the efficiency of traffic flow.