This year’s theme sounded a bit like the innovation is going on somewhere ‘over there’ and we are on the edge of it looking in. Anyhow, the show gets bigger and bigger and this year saw 93,000 attendees. And it felt like it.

2,100 companies were exhibiting. How many of them can any one person get round in four days? This was the 10th year in Barcelona and it’s beginning to feel the strain of so many people descending on the city. It was also the 20th edition of the Global Mobile Awards

The cycle of life (in the Telco Universe)

The general mood amongst analysts, journalists and scribblers was that Europe’s big telecom operators are back to rude health, and few CEOs here were disagreeing with that. Of course every good news story has to have its downside so they were also concluded that this was in fact bad news for their upstart rivals.

Looking at the reasoning behind the upturn gives different outcomes: 4G is delivering (on lower costs and improved customer experience); the regulatory mood is moving on to encourage forward investment in 5G and Fibre and away from MTR caps and Roaming charges; consolidation is being viewed positively by investors, and – for incumbents – the ability to charge more for access to their infrastructure. It’s the latter that has the new breed crying foul.

I think the unrelenting message that the Tier 1 Telcos have been directing at Bruxelles finally got home. “We aren’t the bad guys, we pay Corporation taxes, we pay employment taxes, we gather VAT, we contribute to national GDP, we are a vital part of national infrastructure, stop picking on us and go figure out how to make the internet providers play by your rules.’

Timotheus Hoettges, Deutsche Telekom Group CEO, said Facebook was a communication service, yet not regulated as one. He then argued there was a “clash of business models” between network operators and internet firms, and that network players were left holding the short straw.

“We are an asset-heavy industry, where everything is interoperable and open,” pointing out that interoperability even extended to “closed networks”, such as Google and Facebook. He wanted to remind regulators that internet giants were asset light and could offer services for free. “How can you compete with a voice, SMS or video service which costs nothing?”

More M&A and Convergence on the way

Reuters also gave a briefing saying that bankers and industry executives predict more mergers and acquisitions in Europe, perhaps eventually across borders. Incumbents won’t have a clear playing field either it seems. The likes of Altice, Hutchison and Iliad, were better placed to buy assets because they had billionaire founders behind them with big ambitions and were unafraid to load up on debt. The evidence being recent deals in Portugal, Britain and Switzerland respectively.

As if to emphasise this point Cisco boss John Chambers said half of today’s service providers will be “irrelevant” within a decade. He expected sweeping changes in the operator landscape, with 50 per cent of today’s service providers becoming irrelevant in ten years’ time as they fail to adapt in a fast-moving digital world.
The traditional incumbents won’t have it all their own way of course. Vodafone boss Vittorio Colao led the ‘worried majority’. “Some operators can use their networks as a fortress, we cannot afford to have re-monopolisation in Europe.”

One thing is for sure, the landscape is going to be forever changing and sometimes very rapidly in our industry.

Quad Play

There are two schools of thought on this. Two extremes in fact. One says quad players will rule and content is king, the other says access quality and pricing is what the customer wants. One thing is for sure, the battle grounds are being drawn and the Tier 1 Telcos must certainly see quad as the way to protect themselves from upstarts and to lock in customers. I think considerations around Quad play are already shaping the M&A and consolidation environment and that will continue.

Deutsche Telekom Chief Executive Tim Hoettges said; “It is the convergence that makes the incumbents fly.”

The major vendors are leaning this way; they are good at seeing what way the wind is blowing from those that sign the biggest cheques. Much of their talk this year was on how to support the Quad play for Telcos.

5G

Inevitably, before 4G is anything like a universal reality, in developed markets let alone elsewhere, 5G is being hyped up. One could hear stories about it being here by 2018. This before the ITU, or anyone else for that matter, have even defined what it is! Of course faster, bigger and better access for sure but 5G has to be a lot more than that. I am left asking ‘exactly what is 5G?’ Helpfully, the Next Generation Mobile Network Alliance published a paper saying a lot more work is required and its years away from standardisation. Don’t confuse ‘pre 5G’ with the real thing. OK, that’s clear then.

TDD and 3500MHz gets serious traction

After many years of pondering, TDD is starting to make real headway and not just in China. In Japan and Korea, ambitious plans to use the unpaired spectrum were now well underway and 3500MHz spectrum seems to have been the catalyst. Will this spread from Asia?

China on the march

There was a very notable increased presence (again) from China at MWC. I wonder if this show won’t be in Shanghai in 5 years’ time.

This year’s Buzz

There were three candidates for the hype prize this year. NFV is everywhere, in every hall, in every PR, in the Cloud, in the core, and in your face. This is looking like a crowded space now. Coupled with SON most of the time, it was hard to get away from it. Similarly, IoT was with you wherever you went. Maybe this is what is meant by IoT! We shouldn’t forget Wearables as well I suppose. I wish we could, but we can’t!

Devices

Of course Apple kept away, arrogant as ever. Still, everyone else was here and the trend for launching devices at the show continued: Samsung unveiled its latest flagship devices, with its Galaxy S6 joined by the Galaxy S6 edge – a smartphone with a curved display on both sides. HTC debuted its latest flagship device, One M9. Alcatel launched the new OneTouch and says it aims to become a top 3 handset player. For clarity the Alcatel phone is not made by Alcatel but by Chinese manufacturer TCL, so maybe it does stand a chance of that number 3 spot. Microsoft announced a couple of new Lumias, the Lumia 640) and the (much) larger 640 XL – armed with Snapdragon 400 processors, 1GB of RAM and 8GB of on board storage. Both with the new Windows 10 OS. Will that make us rush out and buy one? BlackBerry launched their new smartphone called Leap. Ominously, nothing new from Sony accept a pledge to stay in mobile. Tough times ahead for them I fear.

Device OS

Nothing is shaping the mobile market quite like the device OS so it’s worth a good look at what is going on here. Is there life beyond iOS and Android? Would that be good or bad for the industry? A lot of mixed views on this. I rather hope that one or both of Ubuntu or Firefox can get some market penetration and start to give some competition to the duopoly we have today. I might be a bit unfair on Windows when I call it a duopoly but I am not (sadly) being unfair on BB OS 10.

Of course no new OS can enter the market without the cooperation of the device OEMs and what manufacturer is going to put a brand new OS on their device with no proven eco-system? Samsung see Tizen as their alternative so are they going to embrace another OS? Unlikely, and this then only leaves the next tier of device manufacturers and for them to go ‘left field’’ on an OS would be brave.

So it’s left to the wannabes to find a new manufacturer with no market share and nothing to lose to play with or to build their own device. So Ubuntu have now launched the BQ Aquaris E4.5 device. It is a rather nifty sub £130 smartphone that actually is very clever and very cool. Made in Spain it runs on the Ubuntu, open source, Linux based OS. It has no App store of course but what it has done is really neat. Instead of Apps it uses ‘Scopes’ which are user defined home screens dedicated to one topic — for instance music, video or news — that pull together content from various sources. For example, instead of having a YouTube app for watching online videos and a separate app for watching the videos saved on your phone, the video scope pulls them all together in one place. Each service on that aggregated home page — like YouTube or Vimeo — can then build its own branded scope, which is more like a traditional app. The phone and OS deserve serious consideration. The phone will only be on sale in Europe. Ubuntu has done deals with GiffGaff in the UK, Three in Sweden, Amena in Spain and Portugal Telecom to offer SIM bundles when customers buy the phone. It’s unlocked, so you can use it on any network supported by the phone. The other thing going in its favour is that the OS is totally compatible with your PC as well as well as your mobile.

And then there is Jolla and they have set themselves the rather ambitious target of forming the third mobile ecosystem after Android and Apple iOS, ousting Windows Phone from the top three. “We expect to be the third,” said Marc Dillon, co-founder and COO of the company, which is in the process of rolling out the second generation of the Sailfish OS and the first Jolla Tablet. Jolla believes it will be able to achieve its targets with Sailfish 2.0 because the OS offers something different from what Dillon described as the monopolistic tendencies of the two dominant players.

Dillon was particularly critical of what he described as the anti-competitive practices of Google, also noting that Android was designed to capture data from users and profit from it.

Not to forget Mozilla, they have lined up with leading operators KDDI, LG U+, Telefonica and Verizon Wireless on what it’s billing as a new category of Firefox OS phones, with a planned launch date of 2016.

Maybe we are seeing the first signs of a shift away from the iOS Android duopoly but a quick reality check is in order. The wannabes have their work cut out: Android and iOS accounted for 96.3 per cent of all smartphone shipments in 2014, with Android’s share at over 80 per cent. Windows Phone accounted for a relatively small share of 2.7 per cent. It’s a very big mountain to climb for the new entrants.

 I did my last Global Mobile awards

Yes, this time really is the last. I have been involved in these awards since 2002 and chairing the judge’s panel since 2005. It’s come a long way in that time. This year we had 40 categories, 800 entrants and nearly 250 judges. I created the CTO panel and this year we had 23 CTOs on board to pick the ‘best-in-show’ technology.

This year it was the turn of John Cleese to be seen with me and have the pleasure if sharing a stage with the good and mighty from the mobile world.

There were two new big awards this year. Connected Women – Leaders in Industry. The award went to an operator, Ooredoo, for growing the female digital economy in Myanmar. The other was the Young Mobile Innovator of the Year. The winner in the end was Ted Nash (Tapdaq) from the UK.

One last thought which struck home given my long marriage with this industry was that BBC Click’s entire MWC report for 2105 was filmed on mobile phones. How far the industry has come!