On September 20th through 22nd, Huawei held its 2nd annual Mobile Broadband Forum. This year, the event took place in Berlin, but the purpose of the GSMA-sponsored event remained the same as its inaugural edition in Oslo: to gather mobile operators to discuss their mobile broadband deployments and pain points…and how vendors like Huawei might help meet their demands.
From the outset of the conference, Huawei peppered its presentation language with mention of “Giga World” demands. While the term smacked of awkward, Chinese-English fusion (reminiscent more of a theme park or cartoon than a telecom concept) the message was straightforward. Over the past decade, mobile subscriber data rates have quickly evolved from 10s of Kbps, to 100’s of Kbps, to single digit Mbps and now 10+ Mbps with the introduction of HSPA+ and LTE. In the same way that represents a thousand-fold increase in performance, operators need to be prepared to address another thousand-fold demand increase as new users, new applications, new devices and new bandwidth demands come online. This is the reality of the so-called Giga World.
As part of this messaging, Huawei launched its GigaSite solution. Unfortunately, “launched” is somewhat of a misnomer. Beyond the generalities of what GigaSite will offer (high power output, small volume) and its alignment with Huawei’s SingleRAN (multi-standard, multi-band), no product details are given. Is this a completely new solution? A new base station? Base station family? A new concept a la SingleRAN?
Luckily, as one of the keynote presenters at the Mobile Broadband Forum (presenting on “Mobile Broadband: What Isn’t Driving the Market”), we had an opportunity to discuss the new solution and how it fits into Huawei’s strategy. In short, it’s a marketing exercise – a work in progress that will span three different launches from now up through Mobile World Congress. To the extent that it essentially sets out the vendor’s mobile infrastructure marketing agenda for the next year, however, it cannot be dismissed as nothing more than messaging.
What follows is a conversation between Peter Jarich (Service Director, Service Provider Infrastructure) and Ron Westfall (Research Director, Service Provider Infrastructure) exploring the key takeaways from the event. |
