Mobile World Congress 2013

Despite some recent pessimism, small cells were big talk in Barcelona, with the Small Cell Forum taking up residence in Hall 7 and an abundance of vendors, including BLiNQ, Altobridge, Celcite, JDSU, and InfoVista, sitting down with Pipeline to talk about the technology and its importance to service providers as an integral piece of the traffic-management and backhaul solution.

InfoVista and its newly integrated Mentum team were also doing their part to help LTE operators stay ahead of the capacity crunch with their latest offerings for designing high-quality LTE-advanced networks and support for small cells. The company told Pipeline that UK operators are in a heated race to be the first to market with 4G, shadowing the ongoing race in the US. Meanwhile, Celcite was talking about self-organizing networks (SON) and the management of small cells, cautioning that even though the cells solve a key piece of the puzzle, they can add significantly to network complexity and must be properly managed.

Alcatel-Lucent showed off new solutions that bridge IMS (IP multimedia subsystem) and WebRTC (web real-time communication) to allow for exciting, new collaborative and interactive communication use cases as well as monetization opportunities for service providers. And the innovative Liquid Applications platform from Nokia Siemens Networks inserts computing, the cloud and caching directly into base stations to reduce the strain on backhaul networks and boost the speed of commonly used or carrier-defined applications. Altobridge coined it DATE, or “data at the edge,” and told Pipeline that “without adding any capacity, operators can improve the capacity of the 3G network by 40 percent overnight.”

LTE and the cloud were also hot topics at MWC 2013. In his keynote address AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson called them “the most powerful technological combination we have ever seen,” adding, “Technology innovation is moving at warp speed.”

Qtel has renamed itself Ooredoo, which essentially means “I want” in Arabic. The announcement was made at MWC 2013 by Lionel Messi, a famous soccer star who plays for FC Barcelona. “The new brand signals our readiness to take the company to the next level,” said Qtel Group CEO Dr. Nasser Marafih.

Several trends that predominated in the solution-provider space were:

• Vendors are evolving their products, many of which are chiefly cost-saving or process-optimizing tools, to empower service providers to increase top-line revenue. TEOCO, for example, is leveraging the data it collects for service assurance to provide a revenue stream for mobile operators based on predictive, location-based mobile advertising. Plus, Allot Communications shared its latest “Mobile Trends” report, which identifies five different user segments within the mobile digital lifestyle and supplies operators with “the human side of data,” giving them a chance to market to the unique characteristics of each segment, thereby reducing churn and expanding that all-important top-line revenue.

• The cloud is table stakes. The majority of software vendors now offer BSS and OSS software as an XaaS (anything as a service) solution; for instance, Cerillion’s enterprise-class billing system can be delivered from the cloud. And Openet reminded us that policy can be an effective marketing tool rather than just a set of restrictions: cloud-based policy management enables value-based selling, which will help keep service providers relevant.

• Many solutions are focused on making it possible for providers to rapidly roll out new services; Volubill claims a customer of one mobile operator was able to launch 18 new services in under four hours — that’s an average of 13 minutes for each one. Tribold continues to furnish innovative collaboration and product-modeling tools that help providers shorten time to market (TTM) and facilitate self-service applications for retail centers, and SDN (software-defined networking) pioneer Tail-f Systems reported strong interest in real-time OSS deployments as tier 1 operators scramble to meet demand for what they call “service velocity.” Subex, on the other hand, is focusing on the network side, helping service providers potentially gain billions of dollars in efficiencies through “capital avoidance” via asset and capacity management.