Written by: Eric Peterson

Per definition, a leader is out in front, taking you forward (ahead of the competition), a trailblazer, pioneer, innovator, groundbreaker, and trendsetter. In a word, that’s Ericsson, a leader of telecommunications technology since 1876. And for the past 82 years, Ericsson Review has been on hand to report on the company’s achievements in research, development and production. Obviously to take and hold the lead, one must steadily press forward and continually adapt to and deal with the unexpected, with change.

One of my tasks is to ensure that Ericsson Review keeps pace with the rest of the company and with you. With this issue, therefore, you should have received a letter from our publisher urging you to update your contact information via our website. This information will be used to establish a new subscriber register in order to improve our dialog with you – for example, through a readership survey. We’re already very proud of the journal, but we believe your input will help make it even better.

This issue contains four excellent articles, but I will only address one of them: Rural WCDMA – Aiming for nationwide coverage with one network, one technology, and one service offering. Helping people to communicate is rewarding and generally quite fun. But helping entire communities of people – or even whole countries – to improve their minds and interact with or contribute to a broader realm is more than “fun”; it borders on greatness! Such is the potential ofEricsson’s Rural WCDMA solution. Moreover, if hit rates are an indication of maturity and acceptance, then the timing of this solution is perfect – a search (Google) for distance learning, for example, returns approximately 97,400,000 hits; likewise, telework and telecommute return approximately 7,660,000 and 3,370,000 hits. Clearly, these concepts have matured and are coming into their own.

Today, vast distances to learning institutions, medical institutions and commercial centers constitute a disadvantage for people who live in rural parts of the world. But who knows, as telecommunications technology continues to evolve and improve, city-dwellers might one day be considered “the underprivileged.”

A few interesting facts about teleworking from the Telework Coalition (source: www.telcoa.org):

• According to the Society for Human Resource Management’s 2005 benefits survey, 37 percent of companies allow some sort of teleworking or telecommuting.
• According to a huge compensation survey of 1400 CFOs conducted by Robert Half International, 46 percent said telecommuting is second only to salary as the best way to attract top talent, whereas 33 percent said telecommuting was the top draw.
• Some 33 percent of Canadians would prefer to telework rather than receive a 10 percent wage increase. Likewise, 43 percent of Canadians would change jobs to an employer allowing telework.
• Fewer than 1 percent of telecommuters want to stop telecommuting once they have started.

Eric Peterson
Editor, Ericsson Review