Observations from the 2012 Mobile World Congress inBarcelona

Yan GrunenbergerTelefonica I&Dyan@tid.es

Jonathan M SmithUniversity of Pennsylvaniajms@cis.upenn.edu

ABSTRACTWe attended the 2012 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona,Spain. This note reports on some of our observations thatwe believe might be relevant to the SIGCOMM community.

Categories and Subject DescriptorsC.2 [COMPUTER COMMUNICATION NET-WORKS]: Wireless communication

General TermsDesign, Economics, Human Factors

KeywordsMobility, Mobile Telephony, Security, Wireless Networking,Mobile Applications

1. INTRODUCTIONThe 2012 Mobile World Congress (MWC) was held Febru-

ary 27th-March 1st [1, 2, 3, 4] in Barcelona, Spain. We at-tended MWC separately, but our after-the-fact observationswere similar and consistent.

For background, MWC is primarily a trade show. SIG-COMM types may have been lurking (or more likely, havebeen behind some of the technology being displayed...), butproduct definitely was front and center.

Nonetheless, there were some interesting technologies andtechnology trends, which we cover in the following sections.

2. SMARTPHONES, FEATURE-PHONESAND OTHER DEVICES

Figure 1: Waterproof mobile devices from Fujitsu

There were a wide variety of mobile handset makers, withvarious levels of presence at the show, ranging from majorpresences (e.g., Sony Ericsson, HTC, Samsung and Nokia)to small booths in the “national” areas sponsored by min-istries of trade (such as China’s). Sony Ericsson were demon-strating near-field communication (NFC) smart tags (e.g.,to define customized phone personalities for kitchen, garageand sleeping areas) and a smart watch. HTC presented HTCOne, and is working on an Android 4 partnership with Drop-box. Mozilla and Telefonica announced an effort to developHTML5-based smartphone technologies. Among the moreunusual offerings were the waterproof phones and tabletsfrom Fujitsu (see Figure 1).

Nokia was demonstrating the N808 smartphone, with a41 Mpixel sensor. For an increasing number of users, theircellphone has become their primary photographic device,including for motion video. In principle, the N808 devicecan stream full HD video, and applications such as Oonair’smight be able to use such capabilities. The implicationsof photographs and ubiquitous video at this quality levelfor wireless infrastructures are substantial. There are in-teresting contrasts for shared spectrum usage between theQoS required for stored video (where buffering can be usedto overcome many network problems) and interactive video(where it cannot).

On the other end of the product range, at the MWC manybooths are still dedicated to feature phones of different sizes,shapes and form factors adapted to various niche markets.For example, there were rugged designs for extreme condi-tions (including clumsiness...), big keypads and large screenfonts for the elderly, etc. ). With the smartphone mar-ket aggressively pushing to lower the entry price point withHTML5 technologies, or with ever-decreasing low-range An-droid phones, these feature phones might have less of a pres-ence at the next MWC event.

Other devices had a limited but strong presence. First,smart TVs, presented in some booths, such as those of Sam-sung or Sony as part of their global digital strategies, wereintegrated with their smartphones. Second, the “connectedcar”, with demonstration of on-board communications de-vices from Blackberry and Porsche or Ford’s presentationof the B-MAX at the MWC, is clearly a crossover that willlikely occur more often in the future as people carry theirdigital environment with them everywhere. Today, though,these efforts still feel like an exercise in technology integra-tion, rather than a real re-think of the car or TV industrybased on ICT contributions.

ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review 43 Volume 43, Number 1, January 2013

Figure 2: Integrated small cell basestations, for in-tegration close to the urban user.

3. WIRELESS INFRASTRUCTURETechnology innovation to address the pressure on the wire-

less infrastructure at the edge of the network was evidentfrom the product offerings. The easiest way to get morecapacity to users (by increasing bits/Hertz/meter3) is todecrease the volume in which bandwidth is shared, leadingto picocells and femtocells. Vendors such as Ruckus andAzcom were displaying edge solutions. Chipsets availableto vendors included Mindspeed’s Transcede PC3008 Systemon a Chip (SoC) HSPA+ solutions, which are intended forresidential femtocells.

Placing femtocells as customer premises equipment (CPE)is an interesting strategy, both because it preserves the valueto carriers of infrastructure such as cabling and fibers (toreach the CPE providing customer service) and because itcreates some interesting challenges in remote administrationof unattended infrastructure. Interestingly, and somewhatsurprisingly to us, there was less emphasis on femtocells thisyear at MWC than at last year’s show.

One possible explanation of this shift in technology em-phasis are announcements related to LTE technology withsmall-cell base stations. For example, Alcatel-Lucent waspresenting its lightRadio technology, with cells designed for30 users browsing simultaneously at an average speed of30Mbps. With a compact, integrated form factor (see Fig-ure 2), small cells, with small footprints, may be more ac-ceptable and deployable by operators, e.g., on a per use-casebasis for more efficiency. This is consistent with the viewthat, in spite of the immediate benefit of deploying fem-tocells in the home the complexity of self-deployment (e.g.,from a frequency management and security perspective) andassociated operations overhead might not pay off.

4. MONETIZATION“Monetization” was one of the most popular keywords

amongst the MWC booths, especially in the MWC 2012App Planet hall that concentrated much of the interestsof software and mobile developers. A simple look at theproducts and services directory of the MWC catalogue re-veals an astonishing number of relevant categories such asMobile advertising, Mobile Marketing, Mobile financial ser-vices, etc.). Traditional telecommunications industry play-ers present at MWC in this area are carrier billing and mo-bile commerce solutions providers, but this year a broaderpanel was present thanks to mobile data.

Indeed, it is worth mentioning that mobile advertising has

Figure 3: Augmented Reality, by Blippar.

definitely shifted from feature phones (e.g., via SMS, WAPpush, etc.). It is now either app-based through push no-tifications, or via dedicated software frameworks providedby companies such as InMobi and Millenial Media that aredesigned to cope with market fragmentation caused by dif-ferent platforms (iOS, Android), different screen resolutionsand software capabilities (Android Framework), etc.. Theseframeworks are currently the focus of mobile researchers asthey may impact the battery life of end users, but at theMWC, the interest was more in the capacity of these frame-works to drive customers to products. Some companies (likeBlippar; see Figure 3) are providing new solutions such asAugmented Reality to bring further innovation to mobilemarketing, in the case of Blippar providing overlay contenton a live capture of a physical product.

Finally, some providers of probing and technical tools(such as Textronix) were presenting new tools to exploitthe analytics related to the data centric nature of mod-ern wireless networks, in order to have insight on consumerexperience, subscriber activity, and provide some basis formonetizing spectrum and equipment investments. The telcoproviders’ “Holy Grail” of exploiting subscriber data stilleludes the MWC at the moment. The availability of newsources and combinations of data may change this in the fu-ture, and researchers will be looking into these new possibledata sources.

5. SECURITY TECHNOLOGIES FOR MO-BILE PAYMENT

Aside from monetization aspects, considerable effortis being spent to form the right alliances in the mobilepayment space. Near-field communications (NFC) wasbeing emphasized by the handset vendors (notably viathe issued name badges, with ZTE technology). Verifone,the smartcard vendors, Visa, Nokia, Google Wallet andprocessor vendors (e.g., ARM’s TrustZone) are trying todefine solutions and capture some of the mobile paymentmarket. The smartcard vendors see themselves as a centralelement in the credit card / payment space; each ofGemalto, Oberthur, Safran/Morpho and G&D) supportedan NFC payment scheme. Nokia and other smartphonevendors demonstrated payment systems.

A question this gives rise to is how does a network providerparticipate in the payment stream? For example, Visa willlikely extract per-transaction fees for using their authoriza-tion schemes. Other technology suppliers such as Googlemay forgo per-transaction revenues, in exchange for beingable to connect the dots between advertisements and asso-ciated purchases and purchasers.

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6. NOTABLE ABSENCESWe were surprised to see little or no:

• Software radio: The absence of software radio tech-nologies was surprising, as the technology is widelyused by researchers and amateur radio enthusiasts.The closest approximation to a general purpose pro-grammable device was a Texas Instruments DigitalSignal Processor.

• Cognitive radio: The absence of cognitive radiodevices (those that adaptively use unoccupied “whitespace” made available by freeing up spectrum used byanalog broadcast television) was surprising, as consid-erable spectrum (e.g., in the 700 Mhz range) is beingfreed up that is well-suited to cognitive radio.

• Satellite telephony: This was surprising, as therestill seem to be substantial areas of the Earth’s surfacewithout cellular coverage. While it is not clear thatsatellite telephony is a dead market, perhaps it is nota mass market, as are those most of the MWC vendorsare targeting.

While we are unsure of the reasons why these technolo-gies were not represented, the cost of a booth (or even thecost of attendance) at MWC may have been a barrier toresearchers and early stage start-ups. An attendee regis-tration was 875 euros, a small booth in a “National” area(France, UK, China, etc.) was about 3,000 euros, and largevendor areas could cost several million euros!

7. CONCLUSIONWe believe the technology changes most relevant to net-

working were increasing smartphone capabilities (especiallyin image and video capture), the use of more localized wire-less infrastructures to gain capacity, and the creation of newmarkets (e.g., phones replacing credit cards) that will placegreater demands on networks for security.

8. ACKNOWLEDGMENTSJonathan Smith wishes to thank Telefonica I&D for spon-

soring his participation in MWC 2012.

9. REFERENCES[1] Mobile World Daily. http:

//mwdaily.mobileworldlive.com/monday/index.html,February 2012.

[2] Mobile World Daily. http://mwdaily.mobileworldlive.com/tuesday/index.html, February2012.

[3] Mobile World Daily. http://mwdaily.mobileworldlive.com/wednesday/index.html,February 2012.

[4] Mobile World Daily. http://mwdaily.mobileworldlive.com/thursday/index.html, March2012.

ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review 45 Volume 43, Number 1, January 2013