Some weeks, I am lucky and I just have to reflect on the conversations I have without revealing the people and their current employers.

I take my job of being a trend spotter seriously, and when I my friends tell me what they are looking for in the market I try to point them in the right direction.

The first conversation was a former Apple (News - Alert) evangelist who has worked in and with the broadcast industry for a number of years. Like my brother he hated the fact that VHS won the home TV war and was a broadcast quality or at least Beta advocate a decade ago.

Given we had not talked in awhile I suspected that he was not an HD fan. I was right. As video quality goes he wants wireless to deliver 135 MB (roughly broadcast-quality video) in the future.

However, he recognizes what he wants and the economics of what he gets are not the same thing.

And he also informed me that there are lot of false hopes out there for 4G wireless to deliver the 100 MB pipe specified for IMT 2000 and LTE (News - Alert) Advanced.

The hype of the standard and the marketing of LTE are completely disconnected and for his community of broadcast content producers they are looking for the Fat Pipes of 4G. This is not what Verizon (News - Alert) Wireless is promising and no amount of bonding or QoS is going to deliver this at the present time.

In another industry the conversation was on transportation and specifically the requirements for Rail.

Rail has a lot of issues they are trying to manage that would represent customer services (delivering WiFi (News - Alert)), logistics management for freight (2D barcidesm RFID and sensors) and then security (video surveillance, alarms and other sensors).

The requirements are so vast and the need for coverage so expansive the industry is looking for their own spectrum allocations for called LTE-R. They already have designations for GSMR so it’s a logical idea. Another reason for their requirements to be separated is that they are normally coping with higher speeds than automobiles.

They also deal with long stretches of just them and maybe the power grid, and then incredibly dense urban areas that have a lot of interference. In other words a microcosm of the rest of the issues on speed.

Now for Fat Chance pipe dream. Right now they have a single gateway for accessing all the carriers. The dream is that a single gateway could be specified again to support HSPA, LTE and WiMAX (News - Alert) feels optimistic to me. Particularly given the state of interoperability we are at in the market.

One final thought. IMHO a low power solution might be interesting to try. What if the rail was hooked up to battery like telephone lines were? There must be some history of trying to do a Wheatstone Bride on Rail? Let me know if you have ever heard of such a thing. If you have this knowledge, I will invite you Lost Angeles to focus on M2M October 5^th as my guest and to shoot a video with you.

Learn more about M2M at ITEXPO West 2010, to be held October 4-6, 2010, in Los Angeles.