Each year, the Austin Wireless Alliance (AWA) sponsors the Texas Wireless Summit in cooperation with the Wireless Networking & Communications Group (WNCG) at the University of Texas. It’s a pretty small conference in terms of attendance, with about 225 this year. But the number of big-name speakers is just as impressive as any of the larger wireless conferences.

The Texas Wireless Summit is a great place to get the latest inside information from top wireless carriers, semiconductor companies, and wireless manufacturers. Held at the Hilton in Austin on Oct. 15 and 16, this year’s show focused on “open” technologies. You probably have been hearing this term a lot over the past year or so, and this conference attempted to define “open” and explain what it means. As it turns out, defining it isn’t an easy thing to do.

The First Day

Michael Bayle, senior director of global mobile advertising at Yahoo, opened the conference. His job is to develop Yahoo’s global mobile search and advertising opportunities. He talked about Yahoo’s multiple efforts in the forthcoming booming mobile search efforts, including oneSearch as offered by AT&T MEdiaNet, which is a way to get better answers faster with less links. It fits the content to the screen and also has voice search capability.

Bayle also discussed oneConnect, Yahoo’s social network, which manages your contacts. Yahoo’s Blueprint is a mobile platform to create mobile apps and content. It isn’t an operating system (OS) but a development platform to create games and other multimedia content. With more than 3 billion worldwide mobile subscribers, Bayle is positive about the future search and applications possibilities in an open environment.

A greatly interested audience was happy to hear a panel discuss open OSs. One of the barriers, perceived or actual, in getting smart-phone applications to market has been the large number of OSs available. The industry goal is to reduce the number of OSs to a smaller total so developers can rally around one or two that can be supported without excessive cost.

The panel included Hitesh Anand of Nokia, Sayeed Choudhury of Qualcomm, Brent Gaskamp of Yahoo, Faraz Syed of Device Anywhere, and Raj Singh of Skyfire. The moderator used Unix as an example of an open OS but went on to explain how almost every company had acquired Unix only to develop extensions and enhancements of their own, making each a closed system. This appears to be happening to open smart-phone OSs as well.

Most of the panelists agreed that an open cell-phone system was one that could work with many third-party handsets while accepting and supporting open browsers, OSs, and application software. Users could customize their phones. Openness is about customer choices. The downside to all this is a can of worms from the support angle.

Will carriers support third-party applications, and will open-related problems impact the phone or carrier reputation or brand? No one seemed to be able to say what the impact of a lack of a common hardware platform or multiple open OSs would be. While most panelists agreed that open systems would be a benefit to carriers and OEMs as well as customers, most thought that carriers would not support a full open condition.

Obviously, open is not binary, meaning full open or full closed. Instead, open is going to be variable according to the carrier. Some carrier testing and certification is going to determine what apps and phones get adopted and supported. Partially open is better than not open at all, I think.

Tony Lewis, the vice president of open development at Verizon Wireless, presented the next keynote. The fact that Verizon has an “open” VP means that the company is serious about the open movement. Lewis began his presentation with an audience survey of how many of the keynote’s attendees had more than two or three cell phones in the family.

About 98% had three, and many had six or seven cell phones in their family. Lewis then went on to say that Verizon was responding to the changing paradigm where the future of cell phones lies in broadband and Internet access. Verizon’s rising data revenue indicates the trend clearly.

Lewis summarized Verizon’s plans in cellular. First, he did confirm that the company is going to implement Long Term Evolution (LTE) as its 4G solution. Second, Verizon also is working on developing new services in the 700-MHz spectrum it acquired in the recent FCC auction. At 700 MHz, fewer cell sites are needed because the signals travel farther for a given power level. And, in-building coverage is better. Look for LTE 700-MHz service down the road.