What to expect from Mobile World Congress 2011

Adam Leach, Practice Leader, Ovum

AUSTRALIA: Next week, the great and the good of the mobile industry will be gathering in Barcelona for Mobile World Congress 2011. So what can we expect?

Device vendors will focus on two main areas: first, low-cost smartphones, with device vendors driving smartphone platforms further down their device portfolios; second, at the higher end of the portfolio we expect to see further developments in the tablet space, following the flood of Android-based tablet announcements at CES at the start of the year.

We will also see a continued focus on developers, with smartphone platform vendors battling with each other to win the hearts and minds of the growing mobile developer community.

As if to reinforce the above demand for data-centric devices, Cisco reported this week that mobile network traffic grew 159% year-on-year in 2010 – more than four times faster than fixed traffic – and will increase 26-fold between 2010 and 2015.

So, with the continued growth in demand, operators and vendors in Barcelona will continue their focus on coping with the ensuing traffic growth in an era of intense profitability pressures. For vendors, there will no doubt be announcements relating to LTE technical developments or orders. However, we also expect traffic management, policy control, and content optimization solutions to be in the spotlight.

As usual, the revelation of operators' LTE plans will be of interest, but we also expect the debate to increase its emphasis on more commercial strategies for optimizing data's potential, such as through innovative tariff plans and business models.