I'm a member of the IEEE and the IEEE Communications Society, and a member of the Executive Committee for the Boston Section of the Communications Society, and I urge anyone in the Boston area with a more than casual interest in communications systems and technologies to attend our monthly meetings, which are held at Verizon Labs in Waltham, MA. As a member of the ExecComm, I get to help in putting our annual program together, and, on occasion, I get to fill in at the last minute for a speaker who just can't make it. This just happened in February, and I decided to speak on Wireless and Mobile: Key Issues and Opportunities for 2014. I covered a lot of ground here, and the discussion was, as always, lively and interesting.
The slides from this talk have been posted (in a PDF); please feel free to grab these if you're interested. Among the topics I covered were 802.11ac, BYOD, mobility management, mobile devices, wearables, ecosystems, application strategies, virtualization, SDN, NFV, SDR, telematics, some exciting innovations in basic technologies, and then the key insoluble issues of security, privacy, quality of experience, and software development. My prediction for the most important area of activity in 2014 remains M2M and IoT, and if I had more time I would have covered SDN and analytics as well.
No sign, anyway, that innovation - or impact - in wireless and mobile are diminishing in any way. Indeed, quite the opposite remains true!