Alpha Omega Wireless Blog

More Wireless Bandwidth - ISC West and CTIA Review

Posted by Joe Wargo on Fri, Mar 26, 2010 @ 10:55 AM

This week we attended two large trade shows in Las Vegas, the ISC West (focusing on the security and video surveillance industry) and CTIA (focusing on the telecommunication carriers and mobile industry).

The CTIA obviously is all about outdoor wireless backhaul. The main focus here was 4G, LTE and WiMax. Moving more application to mobile devices was the core theme. We didn't here much about anything really new or overly exciting though. This is probably because we hear so much about the mobile marketplace on a daily basis, so there wasn't any major unknown breakthroughs here.

Over the past few years the ISC West has become a hot bed of outdoor wireless backhaul integration. The Security and Video marketplace has moved to IP technologies. This is exciting to watch a complete industry, whether you are talking about Access Control, Video Surveillance, Asset Tracking, Perimeter Detection, etc. This move to IP has been taking place over the last several years and the industry is pretty much fully there. This year there wasn't many new innovative product announcements. Probably the best new items were fully POE powered camera housings from Video Alarm, using a single 802.3af powered CAT-5e cable to power both the IP camera and the heater / blower housing. Pretty cool and very effecient. 

Most every manufacture was incorporating Wi-Fi or 900MHz into their product lines. Again, nothing amazing since other industries have been using these frequencies for years.  There were a few interesting Perimeter Detection manufactures using microwave radio technology that was very interesting. 

This year nothing gave us the WOW factor, but it was nice to see more and more wireless technologies being incorporated into other industries and applications.

The main common theme though was that we need more bandwidth utilizing wireless backhaul technologies. This is extremely important in the mobile industry where everything is moving to the handset. The one thing though that was crystal clear is the need for more support from the FCC to open up some more spectrum. Everyone is throwing RF out there everywhere trying to create broadband wireless backhaul. The unlicensed wireless spectrum are going to get over used and saturated in the near future.

Tags: Licensed wireless, General, Un-lincesed Wireless, Wireless Industry