12
CAMBRIDGE WIRELESS
ISSUE 05 2014
As CW does not lobby or represent particular industry interests, this makes it easier to bring together different parts of the industry who need to work together but who have apparently different objectives on the surface.
Examples would be events where broadcasters and mobile broadband and two-way radio communities get together to discuss and debate technical and market coexistence challenges, or where different members of a particular supply chain discuss cost, risk and performance issues. These discussions may include performance and conformance test requirements where the support of the test equipment community is particularly effective and appreciated.
Big events over the past few years have included Cellular 25, a conference and dinner at the Science Museum to mark the 25th anniversary of the cellular industry in the UK. The ongoing success of the annual Discovering Start Ups competition (DS) continues to unearth startling technical and market wireless innovations, many of which have evolved into sustainable high growth businesses:
www.cambridgewireless.co.uk/dsu/
In common with the industry in general, one challenge for CW has been the constant need to respond to a broadening application base, including the need to interface with other industries not traditionally associated with telecoms such as healthcare and automotive.
The recent inaugural meeting of the Automotive & Transport SIG at the Hethel Innovation Centre in Norwich provides an example of this need to comprehend potentially seismic shifts in the ways that wireless is deployed in everyday life.
Real business is done between people It is of course legitimate to question the need for an organisation whose main function is to provide opportunities for people to meet together face-to-face in an age where it is progressively easier and less costly to connect in other ways.
The answer is that face-to-face meetings need to be positioned as being complementary rather than competitive to other forms of communication and more specifically these other forms of social communication – including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn – must be closely coupled together with traditional networking opportunities.
The atmosphere of a face-to-face group meeting can easily be ruined by an overt sales pitch and CW endlessly points out that an over-commercial approach to a subject almost always generates the opposite effect to the one intended. The best events are the ones where subject experts talk about their subject openly and honestly.
The other lesson learnt over the past 10 years is that organisations such as CW have to be proactive rather than reactive, working out which topics are going to be important in the future rather than which topics are important now.
Setting the future agenda – and making predictions Given that CW events are planned on a rolling 12-month basis, this can be challenging, but the SIG structure provides a robust mechanism for lifting genuinely important topics out of the general industry white noise. A current example is the planning for the CW-TEC conference for March 2015 and FWIC in June/July 2015.
One challenge for Cambridge Wireless has been the constant need to respond to a broadening application base, including the need to interface with other industries not traditionally associated with telecoms
This might at first seem intimidating but in practice we know that a number of events will happen in 2015 that will determine the interest agenda in the industry. These include the UK election – now on a five-year cycle – and the ITU World Radio Congress, on a three year cycle.
The outcome of WRC 2012 was something of a surprise for many delegates with the Asia Pacific telecommunity achieving adoption of a 700 MHZ LTE band plan with potential applicability to almost all emerging markets in Asia, Latin America and Africa.
Similar surprise outcomes are possible in 2015 and may be geographic or sector related. Sector related examples could include initiatives to deploy LTE into unlicensed spectrum (LTE U), dedicated spectrum for machine-to- machine (LTE Category 0), or dedicated spectrum for
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