Mobile World Congress 2013
More questions than answers
With a brand new venue Mobile World Congress attracted over 72,000 visitors and over 1700 exhibitors. Neil Tyler takes a look back at this year’s show but wonders whether the industry in Europe is as well placed as its competitors to make money in the social media age
T
his year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona was held in a new venue, Fira Gran Via, and attracted 1700
exhibitors from over 100 different countries. According to the organisers a record 72,000 people attended the event. The main themes at the show remain much as they have been in the past few years: LTE, Near Field Communications, the Internet-of-Things, the connected city, mobile money, the mobile cloud, the OneAPI Exchange - a GSA initiative designed to encourage closer cooperation between mobile operators and app developers - and virtualisation. All jostled for the limelight.
As is traditional at MWC stand size took
precedence over content for several leading players. Huawei basically had a Hall to itself, while Samsung had stands almost everywhere displaying a host of different phones and tablets.
Samsung unveiled the Galaxy Note 8.0 tablet - a direct competitor to the Apple iPad mini - and with an 8-inch screen is Samsung's smallest Note product to date. Samsung also introduced the Samsung Wallet, an app which like Apple’s Passbook, has been designed as a central repository for coupons, travel details and tickets.
Huawei unveiled what it claimed was the world’s fastest smartphone and took the opportunity to announce that it had seen a 60% annual rise in shipments of its mobile devices.
The Ascend P2 connects to the web two
or three times faster than other smartphones when using Wi-Fi, according to the company, downloading high-
14 April 2013
definition films in minutes and videos and ebooks in just seconds.
Huawei has overtaken Blackberry to become the world’s third largest smartphone manufacturer and with shipments of 127m devices last year is growing fast.
While the big names dominated there
were around 60 country-specific pavilions, enabling smaller start-ups to participate. Among some of the smaller companies attending the Congress was Devicescape a ‘Wi-Fi offload company’ that was offering MagniFi MWC, an application that automatically connected users’ mobile devices to Wi-Fi networks for free. Devicescape used the service to demonstrate its proximity marketing service ‘PopWiFi’. This is a marketing service that enables Wi-Fi providers - such as bars, shop owners etc - to send messages to customers who are connected to their in- store Wi-Fi networks.
Devicescape has developed a Curated
Virtual Network (CVN) of over 12 million amenity Wi-Fi hotspots, enabling mobile operators to boost their reach while providing users with an enhanced connected experience. It used its stand to highlight both the composition and growth patterns of its CVN, and the impact of CVN in terms of capacity when used in conjunction with small cells and base stations.
As has been the case for a number of
years LTE remains the main area of capital investment for mobile operators. There was a lot of talk at the show about the take-up of these services and according to the Global mobile Suppliers Association
Components in Electronics
(GSA), by the end of 2012 there were 145 commercial LTE networks operating across 55 countries, with about 48 million subscribers. Troy Bailey, director of marketing at LSI, said that much of the discussion from the mobile networks standpoint focussed on the introduction of 4G/LTE services and how global networks are managing the explosive growth in network traffic. “With growth outpacing infrastructure investment, operators need solutions that will enable them to drive more intelligent
to be successful and highly complex handsets are a key component in the mix. Rodd Novak, Chief Marketing Officer
with Peregrine Semiconductor Corporation agreed.
“This Congress was all about solving the highly-complex challenges of designing 4G LTE handsets. “For Peregrine it was a chance to meet with our customers, the media and analysts to showcase our expanded portfolio of DuNE digitally tunable capacitors and tunable control switches,
products to maximise existing infrastructure. Power is also becoming more of an issue with the need to improve performance while minimising power consumption.”
The UK operator Everything Everywhere (EE), who launched their LTE service last year using existing spectrum, said that 25% of their users had upgraded to LTE while only 43% of the UK population is covered with EE LTE service. There was certainly discussion about the recent LTE auction in the UK. Some believed the money raised - around £2.3bn, well below the £3.5bn anticipated - was due to operators being a lot smarter and being more careful with their cash. As suggested above more intelligent products will be needed if LTE services are
which have been designed to optimise handset efficiency, data rate, call integrity, and battery life in 4G LTE smartphones.“ Peregrine was also able to announce a collaboration with Intel who are using its multidimensional tunable network solutions for its LTE platform reference design. “We also announced the latest generation of our UltraCMOS technology—Semiconductor Technology Platform 8 (STeP8). STeP8 shows a 36% improvement in RonCoff performance over STeP5 technology announced just one year ago—dramatically improving the linearity, insertion loss, and isolation capabilities of our Radio Frequency Integrated Circuit (RFIC) products.”
Near Field Communications had a very
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