Qualcomm’s Jacobs Kicks Off CES with Focus on Small Cells
LAS VEGAS -- Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs kicked off the Consumer Electronics Show Monday evening with a preshow keynote on the future of mobility and a pitch for small-cell technologies as well as other products made by his firm. Jacobs highlighted a new generation of smartphones and tablets, which will put more demands than ever on wireless infrastructure, and announced a new generation of processors, the Snapdragon 800 for smartphones. He didn’t dwell on the widely feared spectrum crunch brought on by the kinds of smartphones and tablets he highlighted.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Communications Daily is required reading for senior executives at top telecom corporations, law firms, lobbying organizations, associations and government agencies (including the FCC). Join them today!
"I'm fired up to be here tonight, but this is the first time a mobile company has opened the Consumer Electronics Show,” said Jacobs. He took over the keynote slot previously occupied for years by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and later Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. Jacobs highlighted the growing importance of wireless and mobility in many of the products that will be highlighted on the CES show floors, which opened Tuesday.
"There’s more than 6.4 billion mobile connections worldwide, that’s almost as many mobile connections as there are people on Earth,” Jacobs said. “Pretty soon the mobile connections are going to outnumber us. If you think about it, almost a million new smartphone users are added every single day. That’s more than double the number of babies born worldwide.” People today are “born mobile,” he said. “We're really all part of what we're calling Gen M now."
Jacobs conceded that with smartphones and tablets getting smarter, all this traffic is going to have a major impact on the networks. Data demand could at some point be a thousand times what it is today, he said. “Keeping up with this exploding demand may seem impossible.” The key is small cells, he said. “Small cells are kind of like a Wi-Fi access point, but they also provide cellular connectivity,” he said. “They can be installed everywhere including homes and businesses. So the goal that we have is to bring the network closer to the users. That will ensure the best connections at the highest speeds."
Jacobs may have lacked the star power of Gates or even Ballmer, and the blogosphere was buzzing with Microsoft’s absence from CES. But the Qualcomm CEO offered a star-studded keynote, with Ballmer making a brief appearance to plug Microsoft’s new Windows RT and Windows 8 Phone product lines. Jacobs also called up Hollywood director Guillermo del Toro, of Hellboy, Pan’s Labyrinth and other films, who showed a clip of upcoming feature Pacific Rim, presented using a Snapdragon chip.
"Global mobile revenues are estimated to reach $1.5 trillion and that was last year, it will even be more this year, and that is about 2 percent of total GDP in the world,” said CEA President Gary Shapiro, who introduced Jacobs. “The momentum is absolutely incredible."
Meanwhile, at a session Monday, Mobile Future offered wireless highlights of 2012. Among them, at the Summer Olympics in London, Londoners “were asked to limit their tweets to urgent events lest wireless traffic crash the network,” and, at 31 million tweets, the presidential election was the most tweeted event in history. “Apple performed more like a country than a company,” the group said. “IPhone 5 sales could singlehandedly move the entire $15 trillion U.S. economy by up to half a percent. Apple sold more mobile devices in 2012 than they've sold computers, ever.”