TelecomTV has completed its usual exhilarating week at what used to be called 3GSM - now Mobile World Congress - at Barcelona. We were very busy. We filled hours of TV time with news, features, panels and interviews. And by about now it’s customary (once the exhaustion has subsided but before the memories have followed) to somehow wrap things up. Usually this involves leveraging (oops, nasty management-speak - still, I HAVE spent a week at MWC) disparate events and announcements into a rickety structure that just about stands up without assistance. However, this year, no such structure or theme suggests itself.
There were lots of phones of course. Nokia’s N96 is just a bit more impressive than its N95; Sony Ericsson caused a slight ripple by supporting Microsoft with its latest: there were several demonstrations of working Google Android prototypes (the mobile development environment) and a few more of LiMo (the open Linux-based rival).
There was a lot about mobile advertising and how it should or might be organised; there was lots about mobile TV as well, not all of it encouraging.
In fact mobile TV might just stand as some sort of metaphor for the state of the 3G mobile market overall: it is garnering a lot of interest from users, there are a lot of capabilities and options available (both for handsets and delivery networks), but no player, or group of players, seems to have found a combination that really works. Users sign up full of hope and expectation but then find the experience so underwhelming that many of them give up almost immediately.
And so it was with the broader picture. Instead of a compelling MWC theme the industry as a whole exhibited a sort of anti-structure: Barcelona seemed to be all about random little moves forward and potentialities... lots of them.
And if operators or equipment vendors are already taking large sets of these capabilities and combining them in an innovative fashion to produce something big and world-changing - like a new business model or a new technical framework - then they weren’t telling us.
Yes, OK, there was lots of thinking and exhorting going on at MWC, but we’d heard it all before. Operators were told that 3G, now properly equipped with HSDPA, is delivering real mobile broadband and that, consequently, the mobile Internet is here and data ARPU (of varying kinds) is where it 's all at. And they were told that innovation is a good thing (really?).
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