ISSUE 03 2014
MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS
37
I
t was the first time in 15 years that I didn’t make the annual pilgrimage to the Mobile World Congress. Some of the reasons for this were:
nThe hype and detachment from market reality of the GSMA which in turn impacts MWC.
nA ridiculously large event which means myself and others spend more time racing between meetings than actually in meetings.
nThe various optimistic ‘visions’ offered by a number of the major vendors – while industry revenues potentially enter terminal decline.
nThe dwindling of actual CSP involvement. Wasn’t the event supposed to be for them in the first place?
From the outside, looking in, it was a different experience. Being home was nice, as even someone like myself finds it tough confronting a full day of just talking telecoms – from breakfast at 7am through to the end of dinner at 11pm, and repeating that five times over.
This time I was able to dip in and out of the Twitter stream and summaries being generated. But the big thing I missed was all the small company innovations, the little things that get lost in the usually misdirected hot air that pumps out of MWC. These are often only discovered through chance introductions and talking with other small innovative companies, none of which make it into the stage-managed messages coming out of the show.
Jim Machi of Dialogic summed up the main themes of MWC well in his blog: 5G – the next generation of mobile broadband to begin deployment in 2018-2020; VoLTE (Voice over LTE), connected home, Digital Life, and IoT (Internet of Things).
While I didn’t see anything really new in devices, wearables did receive attention – but Fitbit was announced in 2008 (six years ago now) and where I live many Jersey Moms have them and its gone mass market already. Here, CSPs have only a limited role, if any, as it’s a peripheral just like a Bluetooth headset. This is the problem with MWC’s view on devices as it’s from the mobile network angle. This ignores the broader market, where I’d argue that CES makes more sense as an event where you can view the whole breadth of devices available.
The only thing in devices that did get my interest was the water resistance of the new Samsung S5, which after my drenching at the splash park in Singapore Zoo over Christmas certainly looks attractive. My soaked Samsung Note 2 was touch and go for a couple of hours, but it survived with all the precious videos of the kids feeding giraffes and elephants
intact. So, it’s a belated welcome to water resistance for a device that is taken everywhere by almost everybody and should be water-resistant like most watches.
What was clear from my outside-looking-in perspective is the carefully stage-managed misdirection we hear again and again on these topics: 5G, IoT, Digital Life, wearables, NFV/SDN/ Cloud, IoT, connected home and so on. Rarely did we hear about things like WebRTC; where’s RCS as it’s 2014 already; how are CSPs going to address peak voice, the decline in SMS revenues and aggressive Internet ‘partner’ competition;
If a CSP just wants to be an Internet Service Provider, then go and partner with Facebook and Whatsapp. If instead you want to be a true service provider, then they’re actually your competitors
Alan Quayle
Alan Quayle works at the bleeding edge of IT and telecoms, building new businesses and services. His work experience includes: BT, Lucent Technologies, Cambridge Technology Partners, founder of Teltier (sold to Cisco) and 10 years as an independent focused on the intersection of IT, Internet and telecoms. Customers range from global leaders like AT&T, Etisalat, M1, Telstra, Verizon, Huawei and Oracle to innovative start-ups like Apigee, AppTrigger (now Metaswitch), Camiant (now Oracle), Guavus, Layer 7 (now CA Technologies), OpenCloud, and Tropo.
Visit his blog at
alanquayle.com/blog to keep up to date with his latest insights into the telecoms industry.
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