CTIA Super Mobility Week 2016: Wireless is Key to a ‘Smart’ Experience

September 27, 2016

September 27, 2016

By Ernest Worthman

Executive Editor
AGL Small Cell Magazine

EDITORS’ NOTE: This is the last segment in our four-part series deep diving the technology exhibited at the CTIA Super Mobility 2016.

Augmented/virtual reality is slowly coming into its own. While much of this segment is still mounting smartphone inside goggles, the leaders, like Ericsson, Samsung, Oculus, and some others, are raising the bar.

Ericsson had a media room that presented some interesting, cutting-edge reality. Ericsson set up a very life-like proof of concept demonstration of what its MediaFirst TV viewing experience could look like in a Virtual Reality world.

Source: CTIA

And, in a really cool interactive experience, guests will be able to control, virtually, construction hardware just like there were on the construction site. This experience uses the Oculus Rift goggles and puts the user in the cab of an excavator. Using very low latency M2M it allows the user to experience instant remote control of the excavator program running at their lab in Plano, Texas.

What makes this novel is the bandwidth required to make this happen in real time. Between that and the low latency, the experience is very realistic. There were others, including Samsung, that offered similar experience.

M2M and the Connected Car

There was a great deal of activity around the connected car. Ford had an ominous presence, highlighting their developer program. Ford’s ISYNC 3 offers developers a ton of new opportunity for bringing content into Ford vehicles. This platform uses vehicle-generated data from sources such as GPS, speed, fuel, oil temperature sensors and more to access data and turn it into driver-friendly content using the SYNC 3 8-inch color touch screen and voice commands.

And around that pavilion were a number of vendors with connected car solutions. Mostly M2M-based, these included a novel presentation of a smart car, calling it a smarter phone on wheels, intimating that this smart car can do anything a phone can, and more.

Summit’s VoLTE/RCS-enabled connected car is capable of supporting features like enriched calling, social presence, a heads-up display, seamless roaming, location intelligence, gesture control, on-board diagnostics and APIs for third-party devices.

And, of course, there has to be a mention of the original smart car, KITT, from the 1982 TV show Knight Rider, which was brought in by the show management to enlighten the younger generation.

In Closing

KITT, the car used in the TV show Knight Rider

There were some interesting, fledgling areas. Like the startup lab that had startup vendors with emerging or developing platforms to present them to attendees and other vendors. CTIA is a good place for getting some visibility on them. There was also a China pavilion, showcasing vendors from China. In fact, many of the retail and consumer vendors were connected to China in one way or another.

And of course, the carriers had their presence, showing what they have in their wheelhouse.

Today, CTIA Super Mobility is a show in transition, as is CTIA. The platform that CTIA was built on has been gone for a while now. The new platform is everything wireless and CTIA has taken the right steps to move into the future.

The partnership with GSMA is a great thing. It will expand CTIA’s reach into the mobile world and begin to move away from the traditional “cell phone case show” that it has been its perception for the past few years.

I have to admit; I will miss the “glam” that the consumer element has been part of the show for a while (can’t wait to see how this goes for next year). But I am so looking forward to the cutting edge wireless technologies that will now play prominently in future generations of wireless technology.

And, finally, no more Vegas!