I recently attended the GSMA mobile world congress in Barcelona. Rather than try to summarise it here, I will allow Martyn Warwick of Telcom TV give you his summary of the event.
As 3GSM has evolved into the Mobile World Congress, this year’s Barcelona event was the biggest best-attended, and, quite literally, the brightest ever. Indeed, it has been said that you could probably see some of the big outdoor screens from the moon! MWC really is the global showcase and debating chamber for an entire world-changing industry. Several themes emerged over the course of the show, not the least being the very evident and fruitful convergence of mobile technologies, services and applications with the content, media and entertainment industries.
Five years ago who could have imagined the day when film stars of the calibre and fame of Robert Redford and Isabella Rossellini would attend a mobile telecoms conference and extol the virtues of cellular handsets as viable and vital medium for the development of cinema? Well, it happened this year.
Apart from lime-lighting the industry’s new love affair with the movies, Mobile World Congress also threw into stark relief the levels of fragmentation in the mobile device market. Leading the chorus of operators appealing to manufacturers and vendors to consolidate diverse operating systems and simplify application platforms was none other than Arun Sarin, the chief executive of Vodafone. When he says something is wrong, vendors really do need to sit up and take notice. How quickly they will make much needed changes remains to be seen, but ignoring calls for a new inter-operative approach is not a long- term option given that the likes of Google are going to elbow their way into the market with massively disruptive technologies and business models. The existing vendors can do nothing to stop it and those that stick their heads in the sand and pretend everything is alright really, will soon be dead.
Another hot topic at MWC was mobile advertising as it moves beyond industry hype and into juvenile reality. The model has not solidified and set yet but many manufacturers, media companies, operators and, of course, those spectres at the feast, Google and Yahoo, were extolling the virtues of mobile advertising, talking-up its economic potential and, most importantly, demonstrating applications. However, before the sector can mature into adulthood, operators and service providers will have to devise secure and robust systems able to collect traffic data and then correlate it with information on subscribers drawn from a plethora of management information systems.
Furthermore, the information will have to be carefully mined for the benefit of advertisers but without antagonising and alienating consumers. That will be a difficult tightrope to walk. As usual, there was also much emphasis on the “real” mobile Internet and the potential of mobile broadband was again a core theme at MWC this year as it has been for several years past. Allowing mobile users to experience the “real” Internet is a dream that has taken far longer to come to realisation than was ever expected. It’s hard to do and consumers have been somewhat put off by early efforts such as WAP, that certainly didn’t fulfill the airy promises that had been made for them. However, and at last, there is a technology able to do what it says on the tin. This is HSPA. It is a real success and, the GSMA revealed, currently is in live usage by 163 operators in 74 countries whilst a further 288 carriers in another 94 countries have committed to roll-out HSPA services this year. The mobile Internet now has real momentum. As usual, Telecom TV was on the ground in force at Barcelona, and you can see all our coverage of Mobile World Congress at www.telecomtv.com/mobileworldtv.
