Nortel Buzzboard

My teammate Miranda MacDonald was able to sit in on some of the keynote sessions at CTIA Wireless 2008 on Wednesday, including an executive panel session that Nortel CEO Mike Zafirovski participated in. The “infrastructure roundtable” was moderated by Lowell McAdam, Verizon Wireless President & CEO and also the Chairman of CTIA.  In addition to Mike Z, Alcatel Lucent CEO Patricia Russo and Ericsson President & CEO Carl-Henric Svanberg were also on the panel.

The main focus of the panel discussion (as well as the other keynotes) was around mobility and 4G.  The common theme was that customers want fast, wireless broadband that is simple, easy and cheap.

One question that Mike Z was asked was “Will LTE be the 4G standard?”  See the short video below for Mike’s answer.  Also there’s more good stuff below past the video….

Other comments from the panel session:

• The first question of the panel was “What is 4G” which Mike jumped in answering first saying that he believes that 4G will be 3-5x faster than anything today.
• Some interesting questions from the audience came up like “How many infrastructure suppliers can this industry sustain,” to which Mike joked “Only three!” referring to himself, Pat and Carl. This got a nice chuckle out of the audience. On a more serious note though, all three agreed that there will be fewer and fewer suppliers as companies consolidate.
• There were also some questions around the 700 MHz auction, seamless handoffs between different 4G technologies and network health (ie: network management).

Before the panel session, the day’s keynotes kicked off with a tribute to Marty Cooper, the so-called “Father of the Mobile Phone.” Marty was the engineer behind the first wireless call which took place 35 years ago. To acknowledge this amazing milestone, they awarded him with a trophy that resembled an old school cell phone. (You know, those giant, brick-like ones?)

After that, Arun Sarin, CEO of Vodafone did a keynote speech, followed by Marco Boerries, the President of Yahoo! Mobile, who did some demonstrations of their cool wireless search capabilities with an application called OneSearch.

Below are some more pictures from the day’s events….

Mike Z, Pat Russo and Carl-Henric Svanberg in a roundtable hosted by Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam

Another view of the CTIA infrastructure roundtable

Mobile industry legend Martin Cooper accepts an achievement award at CTIA

Yahoo! Mobile President Marco Boerries demonstrates Yahoo! OneSearch