In early December, industry, government, and academic telecom leaders met in Austin for the Telecommunications Industry Association’s (TIA) 2013 CTO Council Roundtable. TIA Now’s Post-Show video offers a post-event analysis among InterDigital's James Nolan, Executive Vice President, Research & Development; Franklin Flint, Global Telecommunications Strategist & Marketing Lead at Dell OEM Solutions; and Jonathan King, VP of Cloud Strategy & Business Development at CenturyLink.

After sharing general impressions of the Roundtable, the panel dives into a discussion of new NFV (Network Functions Virtualizations) and spectrum sharing technologies, touching on everything today’s CTO and CIO wants to know about NFV—from the advantages and cost benefits to hardware and software issues; impacts on Service Level Agreements to privacy concerns. They also take a brief look of the proliferation of unregulated NFV technologies and how they affect the industry.

From NFV, the group jumps to spectrum sharing, responding to a comment made earlier during the Roundtable that it’s a “pipe dream.” Watch the video to get their reactions, insights into advances in spectrum technology, and thoughts about current delays in spectrum auctions.

Check out the InterDigital Vault for more videos, white papers, and resources on the future of wireless technology.

When hunkering down to binge watch videos on their phones, consumers want quick and easy streaming; cellular network operators want to make their wish come true.

These operators are scrambling for solutions to congestion and coverage holes that drive more of their users to Wi-Fi—and they need solutions that will apply to today’s legacy and tomorrow’s Hotspot 2.0 networks and devices. In this video, RCR Wireless News’ Editor-in-Chief Dan Meyer talks with InterDigital’s Vanja Subotic, senior manager of solutions management, about the growing Wi-Fi offload market and increased need among consumers for seamless connectivity.

Watch to get Vanja’s insider perspective on how the proliferation of smartphones and rising bandwidth usage in general is driving a demand for better connectivity. She discusses how operators seek to maintain offload control, and, at the same time, meet consumer need—and how those carriers that have invested in a Wi-Fi infrastructure can use offload in creative, revenue generating ways. She and Dan even touch on hot-topic 5G.

Vanja is part of the InterDigital Solutions group, which is responsible for our Smart Access Manager (SAM), a leading device client for Wi-Fi offload (and onload). Designed for Android and iOS, SAM enables mobile devices to make intelligent network selection and traffic management decisions—based on real time conditions at a device—among Wi-Fi, 3G, and LTE networks. A future proof solution, SAM is ANDSF standards compliant, supports both legacy networks and devices and Hotspot 2.0, and is interoperable with multiple Tier 1 infrastructure vendors.

To learn more about our Smart Access Manager, visit the InterDigital Vault, and search for SAM.

In an interview with Brian Dolby of bnetTV, Allen Proithis, EVP, Solutions Group at InterDigital, talks about our Smart Access Manager (SAM) demonstration at this year’s Broadband World Forum.   At the October event, the support for both iOS and Android devices was demonstrated.  As mentioned in our October 22, 2013 press release, the SAM solution for Android is currently in operator trials and has been successfully interoperated with tier 1 network vendor policy servers and device management platforms.  In the interview, Allen goes on to talk briefly about our User Adaptive Video (UAV) streaming solutions, and our vision for 5G and what we’re calling The Living Network, which were both also on display at this year’s forum.

Also at the event was Bob Gazda, Senior Director of Technology Development, and he took some time to walk through our SAM demonstration, highlighting some of the key features.  You can watch that video below, or learn more by searching for SAM on the InterDigtal Vault.

This week, Narayan Menon, Vice President of Innovation Labs at InterDigital, will be speaking at the Geoweb Summit #7 in New York City.  The summit will cover such topics as proximity marketing, indoor positioning and navigation, augmented reality, and one of Narayan’s areas of expertise, the internet of things (IoT).  Narayan will be part of an IoT panel that will discuss the future of M2M and IoT.

To get a preview of the discussion, and learn more about InterDigital, watch Narayan’s video featured on the Geoweb site.  In the video, Narayan briefly talks about InterDigital’s ability to innovate ahead of the curve, and answers some questions about the OneM2M specification.

To learn more about our vision of M2M/IoT, search for “M2M” on the InterDigital Vault.

In a VentureBeat article that discusses the first major “white space” trial in the UK, InterDigital is described as one of several “Probable Winners” with our Dynamic Spectrum Management System.  The trial, expected to begin later this year, will use these signals to test various public service monitoring systems, such as traffic congestion sensors.  The article goes on to say that the “definite winner” will be end-users as the terms “bad connection” and “dropped call” could be excuses that the next generation will not comprehend.

InterDigital’s Dynamic Spectrum Management (DSM) is a suite of standards-based hardware and software solutions that exploit and aggregate the capacity of underutilized bands, such as radio spectrum and TV white space.  As a result, commercial LTE and Wi-Fi systems gain more capacity.

To learn more about our Dynamic Spectrum Management technologies and our white space research, visit the InterDIgital Vault at http://vault.interdigital.com, and search “DSM” and/or “white space.”

In the Innovation Insights Blog on Wired.com, Bill Merritt, President and CEO of InterDigital, examines the patent process, and how companies like InterDigital have collectively invested billions of dollars in wireless research. Some complain that the patent process is broken, but we think nothing could be further from the truth.

As Bill states in his post, America’s strength lies in our innovative and adventurous spirit, and our openness and attractiveness to the brightest minds around the world. By strengthening our commitment to protecting and valuing innovation, we’re ensuring that America remains at the leading edge of innovations in all fields, from technology to manufacturing to agriculture, and all other industries.

Read the full article on Wired.com now. To see what areas InterDigital is currently focused on, visit the InterDigital Vault.

Martha DeGrasse, Editor for RCR Wireless, interviews Bill Crean, Director of Product Management at InterDigital, about our User Adaptive Video Solution while attending the TC3 Summit.  They discuss how our solution reduces the amount of bandwidth required to stream video to end-users.  By understanding the science behind watching a video, and the ability for the human eye to detect imperfections based on environmental factors, InterDigital is able to reduce the amount of required bandwidth.

The TC3 Summit, held September 18-19, 2013, is the premier telecom innovation event of the year, which highlights the relationship between the companies building communication networks, with the people and ideas that are creating it.

To learn more about our User Adaptive Video solution, and other video-related research, visit the InterDigital Vault and enter “video streaming” or “user-aware video” as search terms.

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the prestigious global engineering and standards body, will be launching a new publication called the IoT Journal (IoT-J) in 2014… and has appointed our own Chonggang Wang, a senior staff engineer in InterDigital Labs, as its inaugural Editor-in-Chief. The IEEE IoT-J will publish articles on the latest advances in, as well as review articles on, the various aspects of the Internet of Things (IoT), through open calls for articles as well as special issues on various topics. Areas will include IoT system architecture, enabling technologies, communication and networking protocols, services and applications, and even the social implications of IoT.

Another senior staff engineer in InterDigital Labs, Diana Pani, has been named the Vice Chair of 3GPP RAN working group 2. RAN2 is in charge of the Radio Interface architecture and protocols (MAC, RLC, PDCP), the specification of the Radio Resource Control protocol, the strategies of Radio Resource Management, and the services provided by the physical layer to the upper layers. Working on both UMTS (3G) and LTE (4G), Diana will chair the UMTS session while participating in LTE and other leadership discussions.

InterDigital has been a leader in research for standards-based solutions to UMTS, LTE, machine-to-machine and IoT challenges for many years, and is also the co-founder of the Convida Wireless M2M-focused joint venture with Sony. For a view of some of our research, please visit the InterDigital Vault at http://vault.interdigital.com and search for “M2M”, “UMTS”, or “LTE”.

In a recent post on the wireless technology site, RCRWireless, Angelo Cuffaro, Senior Engineer, InterDigital Labs discusses the utilization of TV white space and unlicensed spectrum for potential machine-to-machine (M2M) applications.  With the expected growth in M2M connections, most of them wireless, a number of use cases for TVWS have emerged.

Along with others in the wireless industry, InterDigital has done a lot of research, and developed a number of solutions that take advantage of TVWS and unlicensed spectrum.  Smart meters, M2M communications, and Wi-Fi offload are just a few examples of research by InterDigital, and covered by Angelo in the article.

Read the full article on the RCRWireless site, and learn more about our M2M research by visiting the InterDigital Vault and entering “M2M” and/or “spectrum” as search terms.

In his ongoing blog series, Waveforms on the technology website EDN, Jim Nolan, Executive Vice President of Research and Development and head of InterDigital Labs, shares his views on solving the 5G spectrum challenge and Samsung’s recent “5G” announcement.

As a wireless R&D company, InterDigital works to solve many of the inherent issues associated with network speed and capacity, often a decade ahead of market deployment, and mmWave and “5G” technologies have been a focus area for a few years.  In this post, Jim discusses the reality of 5G, and the problems that InterDigital, and others, are working to solve before becoming consumer ready.

Read the full article on the EDN website now. Also, to see what InterDigital is busy with in terms of 5G and mmWave research, go to the InterDigital Vault at http://vault.interdigital.com and enter “5G” as a search term.