A few observations from meetings, exhibition and atmosphere at the 2009 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
Less hype, fewer people, less money, less WiMax, more of the same.
- Network spending in slowdown; mobile operators looking to get more from existing assets and less capex.
- More agreement on that the roadmap from 3G through HSPA and its Revisions, then on to LTE (maybe initiall for hotspots, rather like initial 3G). Much less talk of WiMax as an alternative to LTE in mature mobile markets.
- Although the direction towards LTE has larger consensus, there is also agreement that capex limitations will push its implementation out further
- Telstra in Australia making a big play of running 3G over 850MHz, so giving greater coverage, and upgrading rapidly through the gears of HSPA
- Good explanation by Telstra of cost comparison between LTE and GPRS (LTE is approx 2% cost/bit of GPRS). Also a possible new measure of base station efficiency: kilograms per square metre per bit per second!
- Telstra now claims SMS as less than 50% of data traffic
- China Mobile pushing their TD-SCMA by trying to stress the importance of a roadmap of unpaired spectrum (on towards TD-LT(E))
- Femtocells still something of a religion, led by faith rather than (yet by) reason
- Blood on the carpet – a real sense of space and fewer people in the main exhibition hall for vendors
- Chinese (Huawei, ZTE) even more of a presence than ever before. This makes life awfully difficult for western-based vendors. A quick Porter five-field analysis shows that the combination of intense industry (vendor) competition and strong customer (mobile operator) power puts great pressure on vendors’ volumes and commercial terms
- Some vendors deciding to save cost and focus their activities via their pavilions, without taking up stand space in the halls (eg Cisco, HP)
- All the consumer devices still in the shadow of the iPhone – which wasn’t even there. Samsung (again) had a well set-out exhibition stand by theme (highdef multimedia, camera, music, comms)
- Nokia starting to take a pop at BlackBerry (eg “BlackBerry tax” [the RIM relay]) to mask its own lagging in push email
- Microsoft saying (again) it’s about to come good in mobile. A slight irony that it is promoting itself as the platform of choice (slightly less ironic that a lot of appdev stands said “we’ve got our app working first on Windows Mobile, because that is easiest)
- MS promoting Windows Mobile 6.5, partly in holding pattern till WM7
- MS said that RIM’s and Apple’s vulnerability was the integrated nature of their hardware and software, and that the “open” Microsoft approach allowed more and more rapid innovation of device formfactor, price and features
- MS claiming that Linux Mobile isn’t really “free”: you incur costs for extra elements of the OS stack, eg photography, instant messaging. These make it more expensive than paying the WM royalty (“which is less than the cost of the glass on the device”)
- Market for devices is more sustainable at the moment at>$200 ex-factory cost. This is growing a lot faster than cheaper featurephones
- Qualcomm and Nokia have buried the hatchet on patent suits.
- Hyundai entering the featurephone market?? They had a stand. Maybe their satnav had broken down on the way to the Frankfurt Motor Show?
- Lots more booths with map-based applications (mainly GPS, rather than network-based)
- More space (or maybe it seemed like that) with developers and providers of network optimising solutions and products, eg radioplanning, network management, sitebuild – ie reducing networks’ capex and opex
- A sense that a lot of developers are at the same financial stage as last year
- The nearest thing to hype at this year’s event was: if you haven’t got an AppStore of your own, you’re in the wrong gang (at least for this year).
- Very quiet on the Monday. More energy on the Tuesday, mainly in the developers’ halls
- No sense of any major meaningful announcements
- Could be some challenges next year for GSMA to persuade sponsors and booth-holders to stump up as much money
- Very pleasant weather, so a relaxed atmosphere on the main outside areas
