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"Future of Wireless" examined at Atlanta Enterprise Forum

ATLANTA – The Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg & AT&T's Ralph de La Vega Opine about the "Future of Wireless" in New MITEF-Atlanta Broadcast

In a new online broadcast available through the MIT Enterprise Forum of Atlanta, you can learn about the future of wireless while laughing at some of the off-the-cuff remarks exchanged between the technology media's most infamous pundit and the leader of the company that helped revolutionize the industry with its distribution of the iPhone....

During the show, Walt Mossberg, Personal Technology Columnist for the Wall Street Journal, questioned Ralph de la Vega, CEO of AT&T Mobility and Consumer Markets, about everything from dropped calls to AT&T's partnership with Apple on the iPhone, to the future of the performance of wireless networks....

Following the one-on-one interview, Mossberg welcomed Philip Alvelda, founder of Mobi.tv and Joy Laskar, the Schlumberger Chair in Microelectronics in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech. After some tough love, the discussion turned to the experts' predictions about the future of wireless and the factors driving wireless device usage here in the US....

All panelists agreed that the old mentality of using wireless devices exclusively for voice is changing and that consumers are greatly expanding their usage. Mossberg noted, "People are using these things like laptops." And usage is expected to grow exponentially over the coming months and years.

Asked to paint a picture of the future of wireless, the panel described a myriad of futuristic functions. Laskar pointed out that mobile Internet usage will be driven by consumer demand for high-bandwidth and rich media.

"UTube today drives as much Internet traffic as the whole Internet did in 2000," noted Laskar. He sees a day when smart phones will have seamless interconnectivity with other technologies in the home.

Wireless-HD technology will enable mobile devices with gigabits or terabits of storage capacity to stream video to a television screen in the home. Laskar's new company, for example, will allow for the beaming of content and games wirelessly, from device-to-device at close range, projecting screens from applications on the phone onto TV screens at home.

Discussion then revolved around the transformation of the phone into a single source for identification and banking capabilities.

Loud applause emerged from the audience as Alvelda described that the thing he most missed using his iPhone was "cut and paste" functionality.

MITEF Atlanta hosted the panel with partners Atlanta Telecommunication Professionals and the Wireless Technology Forum.

The MIT Forum will host its next exciting event on February 12, 2009, featuring Charles Phillips, President of Oracle, as the keynote speaker. For more information, visit the MIT Enterprise Forum of Atlanta website at http://www.mitforum-atlanta.org/.

To view the complete broadcast of the MIT Forum's Wireless event see: mms://mediam1.gpb.org/np/2008/MIT2008_FutureWireless.wmv.