This post is the final in a series leading up to an upcoming Connected Planet feature story on open mobile. Read the cover story HERE. Road to Open: Read part 1 HERE, part 2 HERE, part 3 HERE, part 4 HERE, part 5 HERE and part 6 HERE.

How open is defined depends largely on who is giving the definition and their interest in the answer. To some it’s a buzzword, but to others it has been a game changer. Connected Planet asked several developers and industry analysts to take a shot at defining open. Here’s what they said: more

Ciena (NASDAQ:CIEN) has outbid Nokia Siemens Networks (NYSE:NOK; NYSE:SI) to win the auction for Nortel Networks’ (OTC:NRTLQ) metro Ethernet and optical business unit.

Ciena agreed to pay about $769 million for the assets — $530 million in cash and $239 million in 6% senior convertible notes due 2017. It had originally bid about $521 million in cash and stock.

The Nortel unit reported $988 million in revenue for the first nine months of this year, down 21% from last year, and $377 million in gross profit (down 20% from 2008).

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Ciena (NASDAQ:CIEN) called for a break in last Friday’s auction for Nortel Networks’ (OTC:NRTLQ) optical and Ethernet business unit, taking the bidding into a second day, Reuters reported Saturday.

UPDATE: On Sunday, Reuters reported — again, citing unnamed sources — that Ciena had raised its bid from about $522 million to about $714 million, a mix of $500 million in cash and $214 million in convertible notes.

It’s hard to imagine Ciena winning a bidding war against the other known participant: the much more well-heeled Nokia Siemens Networks (NYSE:NOK; NYSE:SI), which is reportedly bidding jointly with private equity firm One Equity Partners. But NSN has its own internal challenges — predicting larger than expected market share losses this year and announcing a new round of layoffs.

I wonder if Ciena would fare any better if it could pull its own private equity partner into this fight as well. What do you think? Leave a comment.

Oracle and consulting firm The Future Laboratory recently completed a study, “Capitalizing on the Digital Age”, which examines how the digital world and new communications services are changing consumer behavior. We talked with both companies to learn what service providers need to know about this vision of the future.

We’ve been cataloging the ways that open mobile is changing the wireless game (see the latest installment in Sarah Reedy’s blog run-up to our upcoming cover story). Add one more: a new free application in the Android store lets Motorola Droid users run the multimedia dock application without having to buy the $30 dock that up to now was required to enable the application.

So much for that accessories market, Motorola : > more

This post is part of a series leading up to an upcoming Connected Planet feature story on open mobile. Road to Open: Read part 1 HERE, part 2 HERE, part 3 HERE, part 4 HERE and part 5 HERE.

When popular card maker Hallmark decided to break into mobile, program manager Mike Adams knew it couldn’t do it alone. Having run into roadblocks when working with carriers in the past, the company decided to team up with Tarsin, a platform-agnostic development house. Adams said he wanted to create a greeting card delivery app that worked across carriers, something they were unaccustomed to doing at a time when most apps followed the ringtone or wallpaper carrier-specific model. more

Mobile backhaul equipment has been a hot sector in wireless this year and last as operators invest more in high-capacity data technologies, according to a new research report by Infonetics. Backhaul gear investment among carriers grew 59% in 2008 to $3.7 billion globally and will jump an additional 60% in 2009, making it a $5.7 billion industry, the report found. more

T-Mobile (NYSE:DT) has come a long way in competing on prepaid since releasing a half-hearted unlimited, contractless service available to some customers on a trial basis. Last month it launched two new Even More unlimited service plans, and today it announced that it would offer a BlackBerry Curve 8520 as part of a prepaid plan that applies to anyone who’d like to sign up. more

In an impressive seven-slot jump, Facebook became the number three site for video streaming, trailing only market-leader YouTube and Hulu in total streams. The ranking, part of Nielsen’s latest VideoCensus numbers, was based on the fact that Facebook generated nearly 218 million total streams in October to more than 31.5 million unique viewers. In September, it only streamed 110 million videos to 23 million viewers. more

The white spaces between TV signals have been hailed as potential bonanza of free broadband spectrum. But Spectrum Bridge co-founder and chief marketing officer Rick Rotondo isn’t so sure. Plenty of spectrum is available, but it’s mainly in rural areas, he said. For the big markets white spaces might wind up being useful tools for short-range wireless connectivity, but a big broadband wireless access or mobile overlay is unlikely. In this podcast Rotondo shares some of the findings in its TV white space trial in Virginia, and explains why a company that brokers license deals between operators is so interested in unlicensed spectrum.

Listen to this podcast HERE.