Well, MWC is all but over at this point and I have to say that while I’d love to have sunned a bit in Barcelona I’m not sorry I didn’t attend. Judging from the comments I’ve received from operators and financial analysts at the show, it didn’t move the ball very much. If there was a common theme, it was “mobile is really important to consumers, they’re using it a lot more, and you operator guys need to suck it up and buy more boxes”. The theme that the OTTs will overtake you in mobile was strong, and it plays on the truth that the OTTs have taken over wireline at this point. Buy boxes or OTT traffic will swamp you. Buy Crest or your teeth will fall out.
The problem of course isn’t that operators can’t do the math on traffic, it’s that they CAN do the math on profits. You don’t keep pushing infrastructure out at steadily declining ROI. Everyone on the vendor side blew kisses at the notion of the operator “empowering” their network, supporting the “leveraging of their assets” and the “programmability” of their infrastructure. The thing is that nobody moved the ball toward achieving any of this stuff. DT, in fact, indicated that key standards linking the network with higher layers were simply not happening. I’ve been involved in standards in this area; the progress is largely obstructed by a combination of vendor in-fighting and the reluctance of old-school OSS/BSS types to face the future. Thus, it’s not the operators who need to wake up, it’s the vendors.
This morning, I looked at the material that’s emerged from the shows, the vendor websites, the speeches and videos. In the main, it’s just marketing fluff. To make itself relevant in the consumer age, MWC seems to have turned itself into a consumer show. You can show a teen the wonder of mobile social networks and viral videos and expect them to sign up for a plan. You can’t show that same video to an operator and have them see it as a solution to their future revenue challenges, and yet that’s what we’re doing.
The best insights of the show came from players like Alcatel-Lucent and NSN, who announced specific small-cell stuff, and from Cisco who announced WiFi Hotspot 2.0 support and hinted at the concept of a mobile cloud. But all of this stuff comes down to how to run the pipes through the dirt of the new subdivision. It doesn’t build the house. What created the disintermediation problem of wireline was that network operators believed that their only role, the only one they needed, was pushing bits. They didn’t see that “services” were passing them by. The message of the equipment vendors in MWC was at its heart—stay the course and push bits. It doesn’t matter to operators whether video, or the cloud, or retail, or LBS, or whatever is the future of mobile services if that future is ceded to the same players who have seized the initiative in wireline.
MWC was an exercise in crowdwashing and partnerwashing. Everyone’s message was “crowds of people in social relationships will consume more and more video, video each other, videocast to the world, watch videos while they’re producing them and produce videos of themselves watching videos. En masse veritas? And then to fix the problem, we’re “partnering”. What that says is that either we don’t have a clue what to do, we don’t have the money and skill to do it, we don’t have the time to do it, or all of the above. Every network vendor’s story was “you can build a successful service future on our equipment. Big deal; the OTTs built a successful service past on your equipment too and your own partners didn’t. What have you done today to help those partners do something? You’ve pointed out the need, like they didn’t know it existed. Partner strategies are valid if they’re built on something that solidly advances the linkage of network and services. We didn’t move the ball with stuff announced at MWC. I’m glad I missed it.