Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-t5pn6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-20T03:27:42.579Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

9 - Connecting the wireless networks of the world

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2012

Henry Kressel
Affiliation:
Warburg Pincus LLC
Get access

Summary

The money from hauling data, things like video and texts instead of calls, is now 35.9 percent of total service revenue [in the US] … The phone networks carried 341.2 billion megabits of traffic in the first half of 2011, according to the survey, up 111 percent from a year earlier … Talk, meantime, may be falling slightly out of fashion … The average length of a call was 1.83 minutes … As recently as 2007, the average call was near or above three minutes. Who’s got time to talk, when there’s all that video to watch?

Mobile data service is more than a booming business; it is a global phenomenon. Teenagers text each other on their Droids as obsessively as business people check email and corporate data on their iPhone® or BlackBerry® smartphones. TV stations show video clips of everything from cute babies to the rebellion in Libya, captured and sent by people on cell phones. We take it all for granted. Yet none of these capabilities was available as little as a dozen years ago.

Just as remarkably, Aicent, a Silicon Valley startup founded in 2000 by an entrepreneur born in Taiwan, is a world leader in providing the data interconnections among the international wireless carriers that enable these functions across their networks. For example, if you are visiting China or Indonesia and access your emails on your BlackBerry, the chances are that you are using a network connection managed by Aicent.

Type
Chapter
Information
Entrepreneurship in the Global Economy
Engine for Economic Growth
, pp. 210 - 226
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×