Mobile World Congress, MWC 2011, Barcelona

- overview of the Mobile World Congress, the world's largest cellular telecommunications conference , exhibition and congress which was held in Barcelona 14 - 17 Feb 2011.

The Mobile World Congress, MWC 2011, took place in Barcelona between 14th and 17th February 2011. As usual it provided the showcase for the latest of the World's mobile telecommunications offerings. With all the large players there it was a meeting place for anyone associated with the cellular industry.

This year's MWC will be seen as successful by many. It provided considerable interest in seeing how technology was moving forwards - there were some interesting keynote speeches by industry leaders, and there was some interesting news from some of the players in the mobile industry. Although the weather was not up to expectations, it was nevertheless an interesting and useful few days.

So what were the main messages from MWC?

Nokia news

Even before MWC 2011 had opened, there was some interesting news bubbling up from Nokia. First a leaked memo reporting that the CEO had made comments about his own company came to light. With Nokia finding competition in the mobile industry hard and seeing a reducing share of the mobile phone market, this was hardly the news that was wanted - or was it? Some said it could have been leaked - prior to an announcement that Nokia and Microsoft were partnering. It was later revealed that although Nokia had looked at using Android, another possibility, they had rejected its use in favour of the Microsoft OS.

With Nokia needing to retake the initiative, the decision to use Microsoft is brave, but in an industry that takes no prisoners and where Nokia are seeing a falling market share, they need to do something and quickly.

The question about the future of Symbian also needs to be raised. Nokia stated that they were continuing support of this platform, and this will be a relief to DoCoMo at least for the short term as they heavily rely on it. It will also be needed for Nokia for the short term while the Microsoft related developments come to market. Maintaining market share, let alone building it will be a major concern in the interim period.

To bring even more troubles to Nokia, unions were reported by the Financial times as stating that 6000 jobs would go at Nokia. While there appear to be no firm reports from the company, this could easily come to fruition.

Android at MWC

One of the biggest buzzes at MWC was about Android. With it now being the most popular OS with around 27% of the Smartphone market, this has been a real success story. Coming from nowhere in around two years this is a story of hitting the market just right - the right product working well at the right time.

There were many new releases of Android phones at MWC from a large number of different manufacturers.

LTE latest

With the launches of LTE during 2010, many eyes were looking at how the technology was working out. There was still a considerable amount of hype about the new technology, but how much is it really being used. Some said that 3G in its initial form was the biggest white elephant the industry could have. Will the same be true of LTE?

With a huge number of operators still using HSPA and HSPA+ and with HSPA+ giving virtually the same user performance as LTE, there is little incentive for many operators to make the change to LTE in the short term as there a considerable amount of investment to be made as the air interface is totally different and not just a software upgrade - unless full SDR technology is being used and this is highly unlikely.

So what are is the future for LTE. One supplier was heard to say, that he felt LTE would only be seen in some relatively small spots - HSPA would remain in deployment for a long time. The real change would be to LTE Advanced as the market matures and needs some of the advantages of the LTE family.

Small cells

The oncoming data explosion is actually not pie in the sky - current figures show it is already happening. LTE provides significant improvements in terms of spectral efficiency over GSM, but even with significant increases in spectrum allocations, this improvement is orders of magnitude short of the requirements to provide the data capacity anticipated. The only solution is to move to much smaller cells.

Cost is obviously a major issue. Therefore femtocells are seen as one of the major ways forwards. Currently the companies producing much of the real IP behind this are small - picoChip, Ubiquisys and others. While there are many bigger players in this area, much of the real work has been undertaken by small dynamic companies, and the larger ones are using their product.

A Femtocell from Ubiquisys

Now that Qualcomm has entered the market, things may change, but for the moment picoChip the silicon manufacturer has over 70% of the femtocell chip market and Ubiquisys, the femtocell equipment manufacturer is also doing well.

In response to the femtocell revolution, some of the larger network vendors are having to rethink - prior to MWC 2011, there was an Alcatel-Lucent announcement about their new low cost base stations. While these are still macrocells, they are much smaller and take much from the femtocell approach.

Mobile backhaul

With the impending data explosion and the drastic anticipated fall in the revenue per bit expected many operators are waking up to the need to update their infrastructure in a very cost effective manner. Current infrastructure will not be able to meet the demand, and also at the right cost so new infrastructure is needed.

As a result the number of companies in the backhaul market has considerably increased. No longer are E1 and T1 lines applicable - everything from optical networks to carrier Ethernet and free space wireless optical networks were in evidence from companies ranging from Aviat to fSONA and many more.

Inside one of the halls at MWC

Other ways of improving performance are also being introduced. Sycamore operate a scheme that optimises the data transmission. They state that their critical innovation is enabling their product called IQstream to operate directly in the backhaul network and optimize data plane traffic as it is transported across the encrypted RAN; the process is performed in real-time and with full transparency to the network and users. This form of approach can be adopted by simply adding software, so it is easy to implement and provides significant gains.

Overview

In terms of statistics, this year's Mobile World Congress appears to have been a great success. GSMA reported that there were over 60 000 attendees altogether. This is an increase of over 20% when compared to 2010.

GSMA also said that the MWC conference and exhibition had attracted executives from the world's largest and most influential mobile operators, software companies, equipment providers, Internet companies and media and entertainment organisations, as well as government delegations. 51 per cent of this year's Mobile World Congress attendees hold C-level positions, including more than 3,000 CEOs.,/p>

For 2012, the event is still being held in Barcelona, but the dates have changed somewhat. Mobile World Congress 2012 will be held between 27 February and 1 March - see you there.