From a mobile infrastructure perspective, Mobile World Congress 2013 was a relatively quiet event.There were not as many market changing announcements as in previous years, such as when Alcatel-Lucent announced lightRadio at MWC 2012. The closest we came this year was Cisco’s series of service provider mobility announcements related to products and software.
However, the lack of announcements did not mean that the show lacked activity.
As one member of the Alcatel-Lucent team put it: “this year’s show was about rolling up one’s sleeves and getting work done.”
Vendors used MWC 2013 to demonstrate progress on objectives that were laid out at past industry events. Alcatel-Lucent continued to move forward on its lightRadio co-creation program with China Mobile with the announcement of a TD-LTE metro cell.
Samsung built upon previous statements on growing its infrastructure business by announcing a win with Telefonica in Chile. Ericsson continued towards its goal of 50 billion mobile connections by announcing that it was working with SAP on M2M.
Of course, there were many more examples of announcements and work undertaken by infrastructure vendors than what we have listed here.
One area that got special attention by network vendors at this year’s event was data analytics. Work in this area will feed improved network optimization and monetization, which are important areas for network equipment vendors to differentiate themselves. While it is still early days for many of these efforts, we fully expect to see significant progress in the coming years.
Daryl Schoolar is a principal analyst for network infrastructure at Ovum. For more information, visit www.ovum.com/