There Was Nothing Bombastic About MWC 2014 Says Ovum

Overall, there was nothing bombastic about Mobile World Congress  2014, according to Ovum’s analysts.

Ovum provides clients with independent and objective analysis that enables them to make better business and technology decisions.

Its research draws upon over 400,000 interviews a year with business and technology, telecoms and sourcing decision-makers, giving Ovum and the clients unparalleled insight not only into business requirements but also the technology that organisation must support. Ovum is an Informa business.

Based on its analyses of the MWC 2014 and on Industry, Communications, Broadband & Consumer services, Ovum admitted that there was a lot of talk about the content and services that runs on the broadband infrastructure.

However, it said that the Facebook/WhatsApp deal was a reminder of the gradual displacement of telcos from the content market, but there was still a lot of emphasis on service development aimed at propping up telcos’ top lines.

The strength of OTT players in messaging and now voice, challenges not only operators’ revenues, but also their role in the messaging and VoIP ecosystems.

Operators must either partner with OTT players to create more valuable, monetizable products for their customers, or they must be quick to launch their own services that leverage operator strengths such as billing, customer information, and the customer relationship to offer product bundles that help to increase loyalty and reduce churn.

According to Ovum, “the industry praised itself for connecting the world, noting that it contributed $336bn to public funds and supported 10.5 million jobs in 2013. The main call to action was for the industry to invest $1.7tn by 2020 to extend broadband connectivity globally. In the face of pricing and regulatory pressures facing telcos, this is going to be a tall order.

“As the delegates departed there was a sense of quiet satisfaction that the future of the industry is more assured than it seemed in 2013. Concerns still remain and many things could still go wrong, but as the CEO of Tele2 said to the CEO of WhatsApp when the latter announced plans to add voice to WhatsApp: “bring it on.”

Summary of the key themes from events and how Ovum sees this impacting the telecoms industry, also follows that unsurprisingly, Big Data was a key theme, but telcos were sanguine about balancing its use for new revenue opportunities or to improve customer experience with concerns about privacy.

“Orange said it is focusing only on how to use Big Data to improve services for its customers, while Deutsche Telekom called for greater clarity – especially in Europe – on the modalities for using or sharing customer data. Service providers now know (or perhaps they have always known) that to monetize their customers’ data they will need to earn those customers’ ‘Big Trust,’ a trust based on more explicit foundations than have so far existed”.

On network infrastructure, a key topic at MWC 2014 event was centralized RAN (C-RAN). This, Ovum said that, vendors demonstrated advancements in this technology despite the fact that its current market opportunities are limited to fiber-rich markets such as China and South Korea.

“Longer term – five years or more from now – the need for more capacity on the mobile network will push operators to make the fiber investments needed to expand the opportunity for C-RAN.

“5G, as expected, was also a popular topic, but what it will ultimately be remains very much an open question. Vendors are in some agreement that 5G won’t be available until 2020. Right now they are all just showing concepts around the technology, including combining multiple radio streams and higher orders of MIMO to increase throughput. But any notions about 5G are fairly immature at this point.

Ovum also analyses several other topics discussed at the events during MWC 2014, expressing disappointments in key areas.
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