With offices in Israel and Palo Alto, Calif., ConteXtream was founded in 2007 and focuses on using software to help service providers virtualize network functions. It has picked up investments from Comcast Ventures and Verizon Ventures, among others. “You can imagine that those two investment arms are very interested in what we do,” said Nachman Shelef, ConteXtream’s CEO and a co-founder.

The customer’s total subscriber base is least double the number that the virtualized network covers, Shelef said, meaning that it could be either AT&T or Verizon, and given that Verizon has invested in ContexTream, it seems hard to imagine it would be selling services to its investor’s biggest rival, although Shelef wouldn’t say one way or the other.

Running ConteXtream’s Grid software on servers would allow a wireless carrier to more quickly roll out new revenue-generating features while also looking at traffic flows and directing certain subscribers only to the services they need, such as content filtering, customized billing, video optimization and subscriber statistics. “The old way of doing this was all the traffic goes through all functions, whether it needs to or not, without identifying each flow,” Shelef said. As a result, network appliances can be used more efficiently.

It’s a step toward the future of running all network functions as software on servers. “That vision is still very far off,” Shelef said.

Early SDN deployments have come from managed-hosting providers. Webscale deployments from Amazon and Facebook appear to be in the works. Enterprises have been slower to jump on board, even though many have expressed interest in SDN.

ConteXtream and other SDN vendors are eager to capitalize on the continuing hype cycle, and VMware is no exception to that, following its $1.26 billion acquisition last year of Nicira. Using software to virtualize networks is one component of VMware’s software-defined data center vision, which VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger will discuss with my colleague Om Malik at GigaOM’s Structure conference in San Francisco on June 19. Also at Structure, Juniper Networks executive Bob Muglia will talk SDN with GigaOM Research Analyst David Linthicum.

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From what few details Samsung has released about the tests, the feat sounds impressive, and its adaptive array transceiver technology could very well make it into the future networks we’ll one day call 5G. But for Samsung to call its technology 5G today is very disingenuous. Quite frankly a huge global vendor vendor and researcher like Samsung should know better than to play so fast and loose with media and technology perceptions. Samsung is grubbing for headlines, and it appears to have succeeded. A search of Google News for “Samsung” and “5G” yielded 97 separate stories.

The fact is, 5G only exists as barest concept today. Groups like METIS have just started investigating the technologies and network architectures that will comprise 5G networks a decade down the road. There is certainly no standards-based definition of 5G, and anyone who claims other is frankly making crap up.

Yet we’ve been witnessing a growing number of companies and tech media outlets start tossing the term 5G about, just as we saw the industry warp the definition of 4G years ago and are seeing carriers abuse the term LTE-Advanced today. Samsung certainly isn’t the first or worst offender. Broadcom attached the term 5G to its 802.11ac Wi-Fi gear — which isn’t even a mobile cellular technology – over a year ago. But Samsung and the rest of the industry aren’t doing anyone any favors by adding to the confusion.

That said, Samsung appears to have done something impressive in these tests. Packing 1 Gbps into a millimeter-wave transmission (A minor technical point: Samsung calls it millimeter, but the 28 GHz Ka-band frequencies it uses straddles the millimeter and microwave bands) is nothing new. Backhaul specialists for years have been cramming loads of capacity into broad swathes of high-frequency spectrum. The problem is those frequencies have been useless for mobile communications because they have no range. Shorter wavelengths can’t propagate at the power levels used for cellular transmission.

Samsung, however, seems to have solved that problem by using a boatload of antennas – 64 to be exact. It’s the same principle behind the MIMO antennas used in our Wi-Fi routers and LTE phones: if instead of a single high-powered transmission, you send several low-power transmissions that reinforce one another, your signal will propagate farther. Samsung claims that by using this technique it’s produced a link in the 28 GHz band that can travel 2 km and deliver a connection speed of just over 1 Gbps.

If Samsung and the mobile industry can commercialize this technology for cellular, it could open up whole new hunks of spectrum for wide area network use. There are plenty of obstacles to making such technology viable, not the least of which is shoving 64 antennas into a mobile phone, but it’s a start.

So kudos to Samsung for pushing the bounds of wireless technology, but shame on Samsung for conflating that accomplishment with its ridiculous pretensions to 5G. “Adaptive array transceiver” may not have the same ring on a press release as “5G”, but at least it’s honest.

Pinocchio image courtesy of Shutterstock user neven

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It’s not my intention here to to attack my peers, but I think it’s necessary to point out we’re descending a slippery slope if we start tossing around the term 5G loosely. 5G doesn’t exist except as the barest concept. It hasn’t been defined by any standards body. The mobile industry only recently began addressing what constitutes 5G, assigning its biggest brains to investigate the technologies that might make up 5G networks in the future.

I understand the frustration of my fellow tech bloggers. Presented with a bunch of byzantine acronyms, how do you explain to the average reader the differences between an HSPA network and HSPA+ network, or between an LTE and an LTE-Advanced network, in a single sentence? When dealing in headlines of limited length and Twitter posts of 140 characters, it’s easy to fall into the comfortable trap of using terms like 4G and 5G to explain the differences in technologies (I’m guilty of falling into that same trap as well).

But I think we owe it to our readers to spell out those nuances. Otherwise we’re not truly explaining mobile technology. Instead, we’re just repeating the marketing messages of carriers and vendors that have every interest in exaggerating the capabilities of their networks.

To my knowledge, T-Mobile isn’t publicly labeling its forthcoming network as 5G, but the operator has a reputation for this kind of technology inflation. In 2010, T-Mobile relabeled its HSPA+ service as 4G out of the blue. I had some sympathy for T-Mobile at the time, because it was presented with a quandary: Sprint had long used the term 4G to describe its WiMAX network, but T-Mobile’s ostensible 3G network was routinely beating Sprint in raw speed tests.

Instead of trying to explain the differences to its customers – which admittedly would have been quite difficult — T-Mobile took the easy way out and simply claimed 4G as its own. Of course, that led AT&T to do the same for its even slower 14.4 Mbps HSPA+ network. Eventually, the standards body responsible for defining the various ‘G’s, the International Telecommunication Union, caved to industry pressure and retroactively defined 4G as pretty much whatever carriers wanted it be.

4G became a meaningless term, and we tech journalists reinforced its meaninglessness by swallowing the terminology carriers fed us. If carriers get their hooks into the acronym 5G, you can bet the exact same thing will happen. Once one carrier succumbs, others will race to redefine their perfectly serviceable 4G networks as 5G networks. An the next operator to gain the slightest technical edge will start bandying about the term 6G.

I’m not dissing T-Mobile’s technical accomplishments. As I’ve written before, T-Mobile’s new LTE network, by virtue of its newness, has definite advantages over other carriers’ networks. T-Mobile will be able to upgrade to new LTE-Advanced technologies faster and cheaper than its competitors. But T-Mobile certainly doesn’t have an LTE-Advanced network today, it won’t have one in the near future and it will be years before it can legitimately make the claim to owning one. LTE-Advanced is an incremental technology, and many of its key techniques aren’t even commercially available to carriers yet.

In my opinion, carriers are already abusing the term LTE-Advanced. They haven’t started compounding that abuse by advertising their current or forthcoming LTE networks as 5G, but it’s only a matter of time. Let’s not help them along by doing their marketing for them.

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Here are the new markets receiving LTE services: Albemarle, N.C.; Bloomington, Ind.; Charlotte, N.C.; Contra Costa County, Calif.; Denison, Texas; Greeneville, Tenn.; Joplin, Mo.; Kerrville, Texas; Lafayette, Ind.; Lincolnton, N.C.; Los Angeles; Mankato/North Mankato, Minn.; Memphis, Tenn.; Norfolk/Virginia Beach/Newport News, Va.; Palm Bay, Fla.; Port St. Lucie, Fla.; Rochelle, Ill.; Salisbury, N.C.; Shelby, N.C.; Tullahoma, Tenn.; West Palm Beach, Fla.

Sprint now has LTE service in 88 markets (you can see the complete list here), and while many of them are on the small side, the operator is readying some major cities for launch. The operator called out New York City, San Francisco and Washington in Thursday’s announcement, saying customers are already starting to get LTE signals in those cities. In the coming months, Sprint said, it will officially unveil networks in additional 120 cities and towns in coming months.

Sprint is trying to catch up to Verizon Wireless and AT&T, both of which got more than a year’s head start on the No. 3 U.S. operator. Verizon is pretty much finished with its primary LTE network — in its earnings call today that it revealed it has built 4G in 95 percent of its 3G footprint — and it is set to break ground on its second network this year.

Recently AT&T has been turning on new LTE markets in small increments. For instance, on Thursday it said the 4G service has expanded to Cheyenne, Wyo.; Cushing, Okla.; and Florence, S.C. But it plans to make a big push this summer as well, launching in 77 new markets. By the end of the year it plans to have 250 million people under its LTE umbrella, which would put it about 50 million shy of Verizon’s footprint.

Meanwhile T-Mobile’s LTE build is just starting. Its first seven 4G cities went live in March.

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In February, Oracle announced it would buy VoIP signaling vendor Acme Packet for $1.7 billion. The terms of the Tekelec deal weren’t disclosed. Once it closes on both investments, Oracle is set to become a signaling powerhouse.

Tekelec specializes in the signaling protocols and load balancing technologies that prevent mobile networks from getting overloaded. For instance, the outages Verizon experienced on its LTE network in late 2011 were partially attributable to signaling overload. Meanwhile, Acme Packet makes session border controllers (SBCs), which manages VoIP and multimedia control traffic that pass between carrier and enterprise networks.

Oracle, however, will get more out of Tekelec than just signaling expertise. Tekelec is also a big player in the traffic-shaping world. Mobile operators use its policy servers to prioritize bits from certain type of applications – and certain subscribers’ – over others. The result is a bunch of things most of you don’t often find pleasant, such as throttling back your data speeds when you exceed your monthly cap or detecting when you use your phone as a mobile hotspot and charging you extra for it.

But eventually those same policy management features will be used for a much broader range of features and tailored data plans. Jasper Wireless is using Tekelec traffic shaping technology to make data flow more smoothly in the internet of things, for example. And operators are weighing new types of tiered data plans that allow customers to customize their network connections based on the types of apps they use.

“Oracle has in the past partnered to provide these capabilities, but by bringing them in-house it will have more opportunity to shape the roadmap and combine the capabilities in a more tightly-coupled solution,” Ovum Principal Analyst Dana Cooperson said in a research note. “Expect Oracle’s telecom-focused competitors (Alcatel-Lucent, Huawei, Ericsson, etc.) and it’s IT-focused competitors (HP, SAP, SAS Institute) to do more strategic soul-searching and, as their financial situation allows, to pursue acquisitions of their own.”

Many of them already have. Cisco Systems bought policy management firm BroadHop in December, while Citrix System acquired ByteMobile.

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This week Broadcom unveiled its first LTE chipset for mobile devices, but it wasn’t just any LTE chip, it was an LTE-Advanced chip. Sprint and T-Mobile were late to the LTE party, but that’s okay. They aren’t building any old LTE networks. They’re building LTE-Advanced networks.

Everywhere you look, some infrastructure vendor is bragging about its LTE-Advanced base station or some carrier is talking up its LTE-Advanced-capable network. With these claims, it’s hard to imagine that just two years ago plain-Jane LTE was on the cutting edge of mobile technology.

It’s all hogwash.

There are no true LTE-Advanced networks, chips or devices in the market today and there won’t be for many years. The mobile industry is playing an old game: technology inflation.

You may remember that a few years back T-Mobile and AT&T magically transformed their HSPA networks from 3G systems into 4G systems by waving their marketing wands. That technology inflation, however, began years began years before when Sprint first attached the 4G moniker to its WiMAX networks.

Even today, mobile technology purists would argue the world has yet to see its first 4G network, since no carrier system yet meets the original 4G guidelines established by the International Telecommunication Union. Instead of condemning the industry’s fast-and-loose play with the term, the ITU simply caved, retroactively defining 4G as pretty much anything the carriers wanted it to be. 4G has always been an iffy term, but after the ITU dropped the ball it became a meaningless one.

Now the same thing is happening with LTE. In an effort to seem more progressive than their competitors, carriers, infrastructure vendors and chipset makers are finding loopholes in the technical standards to elevate their LTE technologies to the rarified status of LTE-Advanced. Basically, the industry is carrying around a Cadillac keychain but it’s really driving a Buick.

For a more detailed explanation of what LTE-Advanced actually is, you can check out these posts from Stacey Higginbotham and me about the technology’s nuts and bolts (If you’re a GigaOM Pro subscriber there’s also this more in-depth piece). Here’s the general twist: LTE is an iterative technology much like 3G HSPA before it. Just as the industry started out with slower UMTS networks and migrated to faster HSPA and HSPA+ systems, LTE will go through the same evolution process over the next decade or so.

Nokia Siemens Networks’ conception of a heterogeneous network

With each new step on that evolutionary path, downlink and uplink speeds will get faster and more resilient, latency levels will drop and overall network capacity will balloon. At some point we’ll follow that path into a set of technologies and techniques that the mobile standards bodies have defined as LTE-Advanced.

We’ll start seeing big changes in how cellular networks and devices are designed. Infrastructure and handset makers will start bolting multiple pairs of antennas onto their towers and devices. Carriers will be able to bond disparate bands of spectrum together to create super-connections. Small cells and Wi-Fi access points will merge into the fabric of our big umbrella cellular grids creating the heterogeneous network. But we’re nowhere near that point today.

The devil is in the technical specs

It’s important to note that LTE-Advanced isn’t a monolithic technology, it’s really a collection of technologies. You can think of LTE-Advanced as a menu, from which carriers will order from depending on their needs. Some will order up the improved air interfaces, while others will munch on multiple antenna or advanced interference mitigation techniques — many operators will do all of the above.

One operator’s LTE-Advanced is going to look very different from another operator’s LTE-Advanced, but there are some minimum guidelines. One of those guidelines is the amount of capacity the network will support over a single 20 MHz swathe, or “carrier,” of spectrum. According to the standards group that defines these things — the 3GPP — at the very least an LTE-Advanced carrier should deliver more than 300 Mbps of downlink capacity or more than 50 Mbps of uplink capacity.

I’m going to pick on Broadcom for a minute, only because it happens to be the most recent offender. In its materials, Broadcom clearly states its super-chip supports 150 Mbps on the downlink and 50 Mbps on the uplink. Impressive, yes, but it’s not LTE-Advanced. What Broadcom has built is known in industry parlance as an LTE user equipment category 4 chip. LTE-Advanced doesn’t start until category 6. This is fairly technical, but take a look at this chart of user equipment categories compiled by Wikipedia editors (A quick reference guide: Release 8 is LTE and Release 10 is LTE-Advanced):

Broadcom is only halfway to even the minimum definition of LTE-Advanced’s speed specs of 300 Mbps. The same goes for Qualcomm and any other LTE chip vendor. In fact, today’s networks are right smack in the middle of the regular LTE standard (maxing out at 100-150 Mbps on the downlink), and they’re probably going to remain that way for some time.

So how is everyone getting away with calling their products LTE-Advanced? Why, through marketing of course. They’ve latched onto a single spec in the LTE-Advanced standards, a technique called carrier aggregation. Carrier aggregation is the super-connection technology I mentioned earlier, and in truth it’s older than the hills. T-Mobile and many other global carriers already use it in their networks to support their 42 Mbps services.

By boasting technical support for carrier aggregation on LTE networks, marketers have made the huge leap to LTE-Advanced, which is ridiculously misleading. It’s the equivalent of ordering a Coke and then claiming you’ve indulged in a full meal.

We’re going to get to LTE-Advanced eventually, and those networks will be truly awesome. But the industry isn’t doing itself any favors by promising us technology it can never deliver. It’s 4G’s overhype all over again, and it needs to stop.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user B & T Media Group Inc.

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What’s interesting about Verizon’s approach is it isn’t making its recommendations based on how entertaining, useful or fun a particular app is. Instead a team of Verizon engineers is looking at each app’s impact on the phone’s battery life, its drain on a customer’s data plan and how loosely it plays with security and customer privacy.

Basically, Verizon is compiling a series of regularly updated recommendation lists. The first is a list of 20 apps available either for Android or iOS that Verizon claims deliver a “best in class” experience on smartphones and tablets. As you might expect, Verizon isn’t being entirely objective in its choices, but it never claimed to be. One of the apps is even Verizon’s own AppLuvr software, which recommends other apps based on what’s already installed on smartphones.

The second list applies a much more visible methodology, rating the top 25 free and top 25 paid apps in Google Play based on three criteria: security, battery consumption and data usage. The third set of reviews is essentially Verizon’s naughty list: 13 apps – all games – that will drain your battery or eat up your data plan at a rapid clip.

Verizon isn’t making any friends here among the game development shops. Enormously popular games like Halfbrick’s Fruit Ninja Free and OMGPOP’s Draw Something got bad marks because of their battery drain. Other apps like Facebook Messenger and eBay scored relatively high but were penalized because of their high data consumption.

That may come us a surprise to many users since Facebook and eBay wouldn’t appear to consume that much data, especially compared to streaming multimedia apps like Pandora and Netflix, which received the highest possible Verizon ratings. But what Verizon is likely highlighting here is the persistence of those two apps’ connections. While Facebook might consume only a tiny fraction of the data in a single hour than, say, a Netflix video stream, the social networking app is always running in the background – transmitting a constant stream of signaling traffic over the network and whittling away at your data plan.

Alcatel-Lucent recently analyzed the enormous impact Facebook has on mobile networks through that signaling traffic. On Nov. 15, the social networking giant updated its iOS and Android apps, precipitating a 60 percent boost in Facebook signal load on mobile networks, even though the number of new Facebook mobile users increased only 4 percent in the same time frame. Alcatel-Lucent now estimates that Facebook is responsible for more than 15 percent of all mobile signaling traffic and accounts for more than 20 percent of all network airtime.

Carriers have long implored developers to keep the constraints of mobile networks in mind and build more efficient apps. With these rankings Verizon could be upping that pressure, punishing developers who keep developing unnecessarily chatty software.

As you might expect, neither Facebook Messenger or the main Facebook app made Verizon’s list of “must have apps” (though eBay did). Verizon, however, named Facebook’s much more network-efficient Instagram photo-sharing app in its top 20. I doubt Facebook cares either way.

Any time a carrier produces a must-have list you should take it with a grain of salt, but I will give Verizon credit. It actually recommended Tango, an over-the-top voice, video and messaging app that competes directly with Verizon’s core voice and SMS services.

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Starting his summer Ericsson, the world’s largest mobile infrastructure vendor, will begin shipping its first commercially viable small-cell base stations and remote radio heads, Wibergh said in an interview with GigaOM. He wouldn’t name any particular customers, but in the U.S. at least, it’s not hard to guess. Both Sprint and AT&T have committed to large-scale small cell rollouts starting this year (Ma Bell has already begun experimenting with the technology in Missouri and Wisconsin). Both are major Ericsson customers, as is Verizon Wireless, which has also talked up small cells in the past.

Before we go any further, I should probably explain what Wibergh means when he says small cell. There are a lot of things out there that are called small cells such as home femtocells and distributed antenna networks. Also, carriers have been deploying the building blocks of small cell networks, picocells and microcells, for years. But ultimately those have been coverage solutions, injecting mobile signals into nooks and crannies where big tower-based macrocells can’t reach.

What the true small cells networks of our near future will bring is the creation of an alternate yet complimentary high-capacity network. Instead of cramming picocells onto cellular gaps, carriers will mount picocells on lampposts and buildings, right under the gaze of towers with which they’ll share the same airwaves. That’s a hard feat to pull off because any time two signals use the same frequency in the same space, you get interference. For the last several years, Ericsson and rest of the mobile industry have been trying to figure how to mitigate that interference. That’s why it’s taken so long to convert an ordinary picocell into a true small cell.

The industry, however, appears to be the ready, at least it better be. AT&T has promised to have 40,000 small cells transmitting away by the end of 2015. Ericsson probably doesn’t want to leave egg on the face of one of its most important customers.

Wibergh, however, cautioned that small cell technologies still have some evolving to do. At first, small cell network will function much like an extension of the large cell counterparts. The network will pass us from big cell to small and vice versa. The key difference is that when we occupy that small cell we’ll have a lot more bandwidth at our disposal.

But as cellular standards evolve networks will be able to pull off an even neater trick. Our devices will be able to link to multiple cells simultaneously, Wibergh said. The same signals that once interfered with one another will reinforce one another creating an even more powerful connection. High-capacity Wi-Fi will get layered in, creating into a heterogeneous network in which our devices can establish multiple simultaneous connections using multiple radio technologies. What that boils down to is an awful lot of bandwidth.

Density image courtesy of Shutterstock user higyou

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Today’s mobile networks are rife with various forms of traffic shaping and optimization platforms, from transcoding/transrating technologies that cull out extraneous video bits to policy enforcement engines that prioritize certain types of traffic — or certain subscribers — through the length and breadth of the network.

Those technologies all differ in the techniques used and the specific traffic they target, but they all share the goal of trying to ease the mounting deluge of mobile traffic piling up on carrier airwaves. Where Vasona distinguishes itself from the lot is in the level of precision it can target with its traffic shaping techniques, said Biren Sood, CEO of the Santa Clara, Calif.,-based company.

Most optimization technologies apply the work across entire classes of data in the network core, or they follow specific subscribers as they move to and fro, throttling back their speeds or compressing their videos regardless of the prevailing network conditions.

But Sood said that the network should be treated as a collection of its parts, rather than as a unified whole. Congestion occurs at the individual cell, so carriers should optimize their networks accordingly, applying traffic management techniques only where congestion dictates, Sood said.

“We understand the nature of the cell, and we understand the capacity of the cell,” Sood said. “With that understanding we can get the right bits to the right applications in the most efficient way.”

Vasona’s kit sits in between the radio and core networks where it monitors the congestion level of its associated cells as well as all of the inbound and outbound traffic streams to those cells. If a cell starts getting crowded, Vasona will start tinkering with mix of traffic going to that cell, for instance prioritizing streaming bits over a file download or tossing out extraneous information in a video, Sood said. Once the congestion in a particular clears, Vasona’s tinker stops, Sood said.

While the company has been flying under the radar for the last few years, it has been busy raising funds and talking to potential customers. So far it has raised $9.8 million from Bessemer Venture Partners and New Venture Partners, and according to Sood its technology is already in a handful of global mobile networks, though he wouldn’t reveal specific customers.

Vasona is playing in a very crowded space. As smartphones proliferate, and consumers and app developers start increasing their mobile data usage, carriers are looking for ways to alleviate to alleviate that demand. In many cases they’re targeting their customers’ habits directly, introducing stricter data caps, throttling back speeds or banning specific applications. But behind the scenes tweaking their networks with bandwidth optimization technologies.

All of the major infrastructure vendors have either developed or bought their own traffic shaping platforms — most recently Cisco Systems bought BroadHop and Citrix(ctrx) bought ByteMobile — joining an already large field of traffic management specialists like Aircom International, Allot Communications, Sandvine and Openet (which recently raised $21 million). A growing number of startups like Vantrix and Skyfire are specifically targeting the problem of mobile video.

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