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To frame the discussion, several questions guided the investigation into our analysis of this year’s MWC, each generating different responses from each specific practice area:
Not surprisingly, given the focus of the show and our analysts, various trends and technologies were treated, ranging from the obvious to the obscure:
Recommended Vendor Actions - Services• Fixed broadband providers with mobile operations need to align their content services roll out with their mobile data and roaming tariff reduction schedule to ensure that they can meet new customer interest in lower-cost mobility services. MWC clearly showed that the field for mobile content services is expanding into integrated fixed-mobile service delivery. • Fixed broadband services providing access to strong Internet content brands such as BBC, Google and Yahoo! need to add a mobile access option. Working with specific mobile operators, as well as possibly handset makers, can ensure a share of content revenues from new unified communications services in the aggregated social networking and converged messaging markets. Several business models presented at MWC showed the way forward. • Internet advertising is going mobile, but it is still difficult to track and predict. MWC demonstrated the value of an integrated fixed-mobile approach. Operators must work with the advertisers for a multimedia, multi-device strategy combining interactivity and competitions with opt-in ‘hit me’ services. They should also pay attention to the development of standardized and transparent statistics to provide advertisers with better comparative data. • The downplaying of IMS by infrastructure vendors is not helpful to the overall development of the NGN infrastructure. Carriers need to align their IMS-SDL-OSS-BSS to ensure their capability to launch many new services quickly and coherently and to be able to bill for them. Recommended Vendor Actions - Wireless Services - Europe• Mobile operators should recognize that ‘the mobile Internet’ was the most dominant trend of MWC this year, and they should anticipate the way announcements such as T-Mobile’s new collaboration with Yahoo! and Orange’s extended VAS alliance with Nokia will change the competitive landscape in 2008. T-Mobile’s collaboration with Yahoo!, for example, will serve to change the Web’n’walk proposition from an ‘open Internet’ experience to a more mobile-centric, location-centric and context-sensitive service. Orange’s collaboration with Nokia will proliferate the operator’s VAS portfolio. • MCW was surprisingly short on new service initiatives to improve customer satisfaction. Beyond initiatives to simplify the mobile Internet end-user experience, the only real announcement of note in this area was Vodafone’s partnership with SNAPin. Mobile operators should not allow themselves to be blinded by the mobile Internet; innovation in customer satisfaction deserves the same level of attention. • Many post-MWC obituaries have attempted to claim that ‘mobile advertising’ was a key, or even leading, show topic; however, the mobile operator community is still moving with care and caution in this area. The most significant announcement on this front was that of the GSMA’s co-operation with five Tier 1 operators to form a working group to define common mobile advertising metrics. Mobile advertising is still very much a mid-to-long term opportunity that requires careful, local-market, long-term planning. • All European mobile operators should now widen their service innovation monitoring focus to other industry shows, such as CeBIT. It is becoming increasingly clear that mobile operators are reluctant to showcase all their new service innovations at once. MWC is no longer the one-stop learning shop it once was. Recommended Vendor Actions - Infrastructure• All wireless vendors pushing 4G need to continue their focus on proving the value of the technology. Despite the fact that most operators still haven’t learned how to make money from 3G, interest in 4G is running high. To turn this interest into meaningful deployments, vendors will need to prove that money can be made from 4G – factoring in investments that run from the RAN through the core, including application infrastructure. • Wireless infrastructure vendors should consider banding together and forming an organization dedicated to driving environmentally friendly telecom practices. While most vendors have individually talked up their focus on “green telecom,” a concerted effort backed by multiple wireless vendors could send a louder – more credible – message, while helping to convey the benefits of wireless and best practices for green business with multiple examples from operators around the world. • Alcatel-Lucent, Huawei, Motorola, Nortel and ZTE all need to go public with their LTE product plans (in the RAN and core). Like every other major telecom vendor, each one had LTE demonstrations running at MWC. All were ready to talk about how LTE would get integrated into their portfolios. In the face of Ericsson and NSN actually announcing and detailing their LTE product roadmaps, they need to take the next step and highlight their LTE offers more loudly. • With CTIA Wireless on the horizon, wireless vendors should be prepared to highlight their mobile video solutions and momentum. Much like mobile data, mobile video is a service that hasn’t yet lived up to its promise. Regardless, to the extent that vendors see a future in mobile video (including mobile TV) they need to showcase successful deployments and the broader revenue potential. Despite demos from most vendors at MWC, mobile video was far from a major focus; to drive new momentum and business models, it needs to be. • Emerging markets have driven mobile network sales for several years, based mostly on 2G technologies. With 4G solutions on the horizon, technologies such as LTE are now being positioned as appropriate for emerging markets – providing an opportunity to skip 3G. Other than Nortel, however, few vendors have gone into detail on how they will help with this type of transition. Even simply highlighting the value of multi-purpose core solutions and multi-mode devices would help to sell the value of emerging market 4G. • On the topic of the core, mobile networking vendors should not be afraid to talk about IMS. Compared with the past several years, IMS was conspicuously absent from most vendors’ MWC marketing this year. Having failed to live up to the hype surrounding it, this isn’t totally surprising. However, most operators still understand that IMS has a role to play in their networks going forward. While it makes sense to take the intense spotlight off the technology, it’s still important to show how it’s progressing – at the very least pointing to voice applications. CLIENTS ONLY | Client access - Full report in Consumer Broadband Services - Europe | More information |
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