His message was that service providers won’t have time for traditional long-term planning and carefully controlled rollouts in the brave new world. So he advocated for the role of managed chaos provider. To back up the predictions, Stephenson cited 8,000% wireless growth since 2007 when the iPhone hit AT&T’s network. His conservative estimate of data traffic growth by 2015 is eight to 10 times what it is now.

To get to managed chaos, Stephenson linked a chain reaction of LTE network deployment to high-def video to tablet adoption to the cloud to cloud storage and finally to new services delivered to anyone just about anywhere. What’s coming at the industry in the next five years will be a different phenomenon than it has ever seen before, Stephenson said. “The next five years are not going to be planned and deliberate. The next five years will be characterized by chaos.”

So when it comes to handling this growth and the need for innovation, Stephenson’s message to the vendor and service provider audience was that he needs more spectrum now, and he needs a tax policy that offers the right incentives for investment in the AT&T and hopefully in the T-Mobile wireless networks, and oh, he needs an AT&T-friendly regulatory environment too.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. He was among friends asking the equipment vendors for help, because if the chaos gets too chaotic, the whole telecom ecosystem will fail together – or something to that effect. And besides, many of those equipment vendors are extremely effective lobbyists when it comes to a having a Washington agenda. This is a time for friends.

Stephenson is pleased that Obama administration (along with the FCC) has identified more wireless broadband spectrum to be released in the future, but indicated that it would be much better if the future were now. With more spectrum, AT&T could better encourage innovation and work with developers who will come up with those unplanned services we can’t imagine yet.

AT&T has already pledged to invest billions in its broadband networks, but Stephenson is willing to throw another $8 billion into LTE networks if it acquires T-Mobile’s spectrum and licenses. It’s a simple request, really. All he needs is a little cooperation.

And so Stephenson laid his wireless “city on a hill” message at the telecom industry’s feet. “I think time will show that when we have large amounts of spectrum and an environment conducive to investment, every facet of the ecosystem will drive the demand for bandwidth in a 10 to 15-year cycle of investment. That’s what we’re in for if we get this environment right.”

We’re all in it together, right?

It seems that few industry pundits saw this coming, as much of the chatter over the past two weeks has been about a possible merger between T-Mobile and Sprint. But that oft-rumored relationship reportedly stalled over how much Sprint was willing to pay for T-Mobile, which was most likely between $15 and $20 billion, according to Bloomberg News. AT&T has at least doubled that with its bid. Roger Etner over at FierceWireless also raises an interesting point — that this was the merger hiding in plain sight, seeing as AT&T and T-Mobile share more technology genetics than Sprint and T-Mobile.

The deal sets up AT&T to add 46.5 million more subscribers to its existing 247.5 million. The two networks would make coverage available to 95% of the entire U.S. population, according to AT&T. Whew.

What about those digs T-Mobile has been aggressively taking at AT&T in its marketing for HSPA+? Particularly those highlighting its ability to do video conferencing over 4G (well, T-Mobile’s definition of 4G).

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OK, fine. This probably isn’t as serious of an issue as what regulatory hurdles this deal may bump into, what it means for T-Mobile customers and the implications for Sprint’s future. But that first board meeting? Awwwkward.

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These thugs aren’t so much after you as they are your customers. But because carriers operate data centers for managed hosting, cloud or other managed IT services, service providers are once again caught in the crossfire.

Hackers are dishing out more frequent and ferocious distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against service providers — reaching the 100 Gbps DDoS attack barrier last year — according to a recent telecom security study we picked apart this week, which revealed some pretty scary stuff.

Half of the carriers surveyed conceded that their firewalls and intrusion prevention systems (IPS) — the very infrastructure there to protect data — had themselves been targeted and were taken offline due to DDoS attacks. An eye-popping 55% of mobile carriers reported outages in 2010 due to security incidents, and 59% confessed that they had limited or no visibility into packet core security threats. Eek. Wish we could say this was our April Fool’s edition, but unfortunately this telecom security bulletin is all too real.

People still talk, but voice isn’t edgy or interesting unless it’s over the top (OTT) or delivered over a 4G network that doesn’t have a circuit-switched voice channel for the first time in more than a century. That’s where the evolved packet core comes in to help enable voice over LTE, for example.

The tricky part is that service providers still have trillions tied up in the PSTN, and people still spend money to talk, so it’s financially critical to find a better path. Which brings me to my point. Telecom consultant Tom Nolle takes a hard look at the convergence of a handful of next-gen voice drivers that make voice an interesting business case for carriers: OTT competition, 4G evolution, enterprise pressure, femtocell maturation and fixed-mobile convergence.

The bottom line is that it all comes down to two basic carrier options for offering next-gen voice: using an IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) framework, or adopting essentially their own OTT model of packet voice service. Since there are decisions to be made, carriers are going to need to understand their options before the over-the-top gang takes over.

Here’s the rest of the details from NSN’s release:

Nokia Siemens Networks expects that based on revenue, with the addition of the Motorola wireless network infrastructure business, it will become the #3 wireless infrastructure vendor in the United States, the #1 foreign wireless vendor in Japan, and strengthen its current #2 position in the global infrastructure segment.

Motorola’s networks infrastructure business provides products and services for wireless networks, including GSM, CDMA, W-CDMA, WiMAX and LTE. This business is a market leader in WiMAX, with 41 contracts in 21 countries; has a strong global footprint in CDMA with 30 active networks in 22 countries; and a robust GSM installed base, with more than 80 active networks in 66 countries; and excellent traction with LTE early adopters.

NSN is licking its chops over the potential 50 operator customers it expects to acquire in the deal. The company also says the merger will “strengthen its position” with some of its existing customers, including China Mobile, Clearwire, KDDI, Sprint, Verizon Wireless and Vodafone. They expect the deal to close by the end of the year.

As MarketWatch points out, this moves Motorola a step closer to its assertion earlier this month that it would split the company in two. The pub also notes that this comes after NSN’s two failed attempts to buy similar assets from Nortel Networks, beaten out by Ericsson and Ciena Corp.

Don’t say we didn’t warn you. Although this merger includes a pretty broad portfolio, our story last month predicted lots of M&A activity in the LTE market. Bill Rubino, principal analyst at ACG Research, expects most of the action will be core infrastructure incumbents acquiring radio vendors.

The impressive early sales of the unit did have us wondering, though: What exactly sparked the demand? The crisp 4.3-inch display? The unique WiMAX capability? The fact that it runs on an Android OS 2.1? Or was it the catchy pro-EVO/anti-iPhone 4 hip-hop track? (Video after the jump.)

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What you’re watching is vlogger Tahir Jahi, “the mobile MC,” rhyming on what he says he believes to be “the first commercial rap video [made] using the HTC EVO.” Pretty slick, huh? Provided he’s telling the truth, the video and sound quality seem to come off darn well for a handset. And bonus points for keeping the song’s running time to about a minute — if he’d tried to tack on additional verses and shoehorn in a rhyme about a 1GHz Snapdragon processor or something, this would’ve felt like a bit much. (Let’s be honest: Most of the three-minute explanation/promotion/comedy bit could’ve been left on the cutting room floor, too.)

But he’s not just on-screen promoting his phone of choice; he’s also throwing shots at the EVO’s competitors, telling listeners to “lay that BlackBerry down” and calling out Apple’s iPhone 4. Check out the hook, circa the one-minute mark: “Breathe on ‘em and leave they minds blown / the EVO drops jaws like calls on iPhones.” Woof. Them’s fighting words where I come from.

Folks, if you’re anything like me, I’m sure you’re waiting with bated breath for some random Apple user to respond, because there’s nothing — and I mean nothing — more spellbinding than smartphone-centric hip-hop battles.

And it just got more grouchy: Despite an uptick in shipments, revenues in the point-to-point microwave equipment market declined 3% year-over-year in the first quarter of 2010 partly due to falling prices, according to a report by Dell’Oro Group released today.

It was an especially gloomy year for microwave in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), where revenues sunk 13% year-over-year, according to Jimmy Yu, senior director of microwave transmission research at Dell’Oro Group.

“Microwave market revenues declined in the first quarter partly due to heightened competition among vendors that resulted in steep price declines, [which] overrode the 14% growth in radio unit shipments,” Yu said. “In addition, demand in EMEA, especially Europe, was low as a result of the persistent economic distress affecting certain European countries.”

North America was “a bright spot for the market,” growing 50% year-over-year as a result of the large WiMAX deployment by Clearwire in the U.S., Yu said. The other good news came from the newest market segment, packet microwave (for which Huawei has a neat little primer), which grew 15% from the fourth quarter of 2009 to the first quarter of 2010.

Ericsson ranked No. 1 with 22% of the microwave market revenue share for 1Q10, followed by NEC at 15%, Huawei at 12% and Alcatel-Lucent picking up the rear at 10%.

Image courtesy of CNBC.

Let’s review. Verizon’ says FiOS is on track to pass 18 million homes by the end of 2010. The cost for that effort is $750 per customer to wire a neighborhood and another $600 to extend the fiber to an individual home. So with a per customer investment of $1,150 up front, Verizon FiOS has a 28% overall uptake rate. And its FTTH service can’t command higher prices because of DSL and cable competition.

How does FTTH work if you’re not Verizon? This week Hashman analyzes FTTH business models that might actually help the U.S. reach the FCC’s broadband goal of having 100 million homes with affordable access to to 100 Mbps of download speed. Hashman looks at the FTTH scenario for greenfield builds, government funding and municipal/private partnerships. Check out the numbers and the potential.

Wireless network planning is more critical now than ever, and telecom consultant Tom Nolle takes a thorough look at the issues and potential solutions in a two-part article on how the
mobile appliance explosion is changing mobile network planning, especially when operators have to calculate how much to invest in new technology if the ROI is marginal.

And things are getting curiouser and curiouser as the broadcast industry is hatching plans to target mobile devices with more content, which may take some of the pressure off wireless networks. Catch up on why broadcasters are suddenly embracing that idea.