MWC celebrated its 7th year in Barcelona but its first at the new 220,000 square meter Euro Fira. Located in some remote and distant part of Barcelona, far from civilisation, the daily trip to and from the centre was something that will stay in the memory for some time!  The facility itself is fine – every bit of that 220,000 square metre of space was needed this year because we needed space for three large elephants. Well, the first was actually more like a Wooly Mammoth really – yes, truly – one of them! 

What’s wrong with this picture?

Here’s a clue. It was taken at the GSMA Mobile World Congress – so, at the annual gathering of the biggest cellular gathering of the planet, the communication vehicle of choice was……………………………….Wi-Fi. 

Now call me picky but I find it more than a bit odd that at the world’s premier gathering of the 2G, 3G and 4G industry, we don’t use our own product! Hey, if we don’t, why do we think our customers will? Is it simply down to pricing (and outrageous roaming charges)? Is it a convenience thing? Is it users just think Wi-Fi is better? Whatever it is, shouldn’t we be worried about it?  The strangest thing of all is that no one in the industry seemed to bat and eyelid or even stop to think about this!  

The next Elephant is more of the common-or-garden variety

Add to this the need to assure consistent quality to customers, interworking between networks and roaming, one can begin to see that offering voice on LTE networks is far from straightforward. The final conundrum is how will Operators charge for a voice call or will they even be able to charge for voice? If voice is just part of the data package then recouping all the costs on voice is going to be very challenging for MNOs. This elephant seems to me to be getting bigger by the month.

And so to the last Elephant and this one was another biggy but the difference being this one looks a bit like a white elephant.

It’s RCS or bust. There is no plan B, no other option, and not a lot of imagination being applied to countering the OTT threat. If RCS is the answer, then someone has asked the wrong question. On the upside, and clutching at straws, if an MNO has dug deep into the pocket for an IMS core for VoLTE then at least RCS will help with the investment case. The real issue for me is that it’s too little, too late and all still happening far too slowly. The concept was around in the early part of the last decade but MNOs dragged their heels, thought they could go it alone and eventually wasted the best part of 10 years. Had RCS been deployed 5 years ago it would have been an effective counter to OTT challengers but having it finally arrive as a fully interoperable global platform in 5 years from now seems to me like the horse will have bolted and the white elephant still struggling for balance.

So how about some good things from MWC? Plenty of them, we should not be too despondent.

• NFC is gathering pace nicely with good device support from all the leading manufacturers (Apple apart) and lots of ways to use it being demonstrated here at MWC. We could even use NFC to gain entry to the halls each day.
• Connected Life and Connect City is coming together. The life changing and enhancing things happening around what we call mHealth, mEducation, mFinance and we had a good demo of the futuristic connected city which was good fun.
• Also new this year was the Mobile World Capital Centre which is nicely located on the lovely Plaça de Cataluña. This is well worth a visit. It’s a very impressive exhibition of all things mobile both past and present.

My final reflection is that MWC continues to get bigger and bigger every year – the mobile industry continues to spread well beyond the boundaries we all became familiar with over the years. A wander round the halls is evidence enough. I counted countless exhibitors that I would never have dreamt I would be seeing at MWC when it first came to Barcelona in 2006.  The mobile ride might be a bit bumpy these days and it might continue to have some dips on its collective roller-coaster ride but one thing is for sure. We are nowhere near the top of the ride yet.