Monday, March 23, 2009

Sprint Looks Beyond Cellphones

Very interesting piece in the WSJ about Sprint's strategy to offset its inability to sign up enough new cellphone subscribers. The main idea is to sell wi-fi capacity to manufacturers of gadgets e.g, GPS devices, automobile dashboard computers, etc.

A largely unknown factoid, reported in this piece, is that Sprint handles wi-fi book downloads for the Kindle reader at Amazon.com.

From another perspective, it's interesting to note that the same capacity planning paradigms (e.g., queueing theory, scheduling algorithms, game theory) can be applied to both data networks and manufacturing systems. The umbrella term is operations research.

No comments: