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There are as many small base stations out in the world as there are large base stations attached to cell phone towers, according to an Informa Telecoms & Media report. That doubles the number of equipment telcos must monitor and manage to help deliver a crystal clear signal on your cell phone, but it also creates a management nightmare and perhaps, an opportunity.

The report states that between October and November 2012, the number of small cells reached 6.1 million with macrocells worldwide totaling 5.9 million. Most of the small cells at 80 percent are inside people’s homes helping improve the cell signal inside the house. But others are in crowded venues like offices and stadiums where the smaller cells act as a backup and signal booster for larger cell towers nearby. Sprint by the way has deployed a million of those small cells–up from 250,000 in 2011. For operators who now have up to four times as many base stations to manage, the network complexity can be daunting. Sure these small cells boost the quality of the subscriber experience but managing all of those end points comes at a cost. And who will pay it? Some operators charge users for their in-home femtocells, which can frustrate people who believe that the operator should provide quality coverage as part of the basic service.

Four years can change a lot in federal technology. As the Bush administration prepared to hand power to the Obama team in late-2008, no mission-critical government systems were housed in computer clouds, there were fewer than two dozen government-built mobile applications and the nation had never had a chief information officer. Now new systems are moving to or being built in the cloud every month, there are more than 100 government apps and as for federal chief information officers—there have been two.

There is no crystal ball into the future of federal technology, of course, but the short list of emerging trends includes a seismic shift in the role of chief information officers, more collaborative technologies and a workplace that moves beyond ‘bring your own device’ to ‘bring your own everything.’

• Trend 1: Empowering the CIO: First off, the next presidential term or two likely will shift the balance of power, both within the federal technology shop and between technologists and other workers. This could involve concentrating authority—including budget decisions—in the hands of agency CIOs.
• Trend 2: Collaborative Tools: The face of federal technology likely will be changed by collaborative systems developed in the consumer sphere that are just now making their way into government.
• Trend 3: Bring Your Own: The next four to eight years in federal IT will be defined by what workers increasingly lack, experts say, including agency-issued phones, tablets and even laptops for telework. “Bring your own device” policies already have been rolled out at some agencies, mostly on a voluntary basis. As the years go by and agency-issued BlackBerrys and other product lines wear out, those policies will become increasingly common and, in some cases, mandatory, experts say.

A Q&A with Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski.

He says: “We've focused the FCC on broadband because wired and wireless broadband, high speed Internet, is our central platform for economic growth and innovation for years to come. In many ways, things are going really well for the U.S. when it comes to broadband. Think about where we were four years ago: If we were talking about mobile broadband, we would have been talking about mobile innovation and we would have been saying, "Hey, in Japan and South Korea there's incredible mobile innovation. In Europe, they are ahead of us on 3G infrastructure." Flash forward to now, [and] the U.S. has regained global leadership in mobile broadband. [In terms of] infrastructure, the U.S. is the first country in the world getting to scale with 4G LTE, the next generation of mobile broadband. No one else is even close. So we are the world's test bed for 4G LTE applications and services. On the innovation side, it's a completely different world. You know, around the [globe] they are using American apps, whether it's Twitter or Facebook or Google -- that's what the rest of the world is using, a major change in four years. And then think about operating systems. Four years ago, the percentage of mobile devices globally that had American-made operating systems was under 20%. Today it's over 80%. That's a very, very fast change. And so we are strongly positioned to continue to lead the world when it comes to mobile broadband, an incredibly important platform for innovation and economic growth. But we have some real challenges in order to keep that going.”

If the chatter surrounding the mythical, eventual release of the true Apple TV is any indicator, consumers are dying for a bit of simplicity with their streaming video options. When will they get it? Not any time soon, says a chorus of online media makers, ranging from content creators to set-top box makers.

"There's no agreed upon standard format, bit-rate, codec, aspect ratio, player, protocol, or content protection technology," explains Daniel Rayburn, principal analyst for digital media at Frost & Sullivan and the executive vice president at Streamingmedia.com. According to Rayburn, because industry players like Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft all want their technologies to be the standard, no one is working together to bring cohesion to the online video world. It's like Betamax versus VHS all over again, only with a dozen more types of trapezoidal and rhombus-shaped cassettes vying for supremacy. "It's only going to continue fragmentation in the market," says Rayburn, "and it's only going to get worse over time."