After a decade of visiting Cannes to attend 3GSM, Barcelona was bound to be a learning experience, but after all, change is what the mobile world has been all about in its short life. The last time the conference visited Spain it was the mid 90’s and the industry had barely began to get traction. The few hundred delegates that went to Madrid could not have begun to imagine just how large the event would become. The statistics speak for themselves.

According to the organisers almost 1,000 exhibitors have signed up in 2006, a massive 40% increase over the previous year while 50,000 congress visitors are expected to swell the population of Spain’s second largest city. The reason has a lot to do with Convergence the theme of this year’s event with Telecoms, Media and Entertainment, and the Content Distribution Business drawing in many new companies to join the core infrastructure players.

I am writing this report in the form of a Blog so that you can get a more personal feel of what it is like to attend the world’s largest mobile conference and exhibition.

Please feel free to email comments, suggestions or requests and I will do my best to answer. I reserve editorial right to those posts.

Day -3

I arrived in Barcelona on the Friday before the conference was to start. I thought it was a good idea to get to know a new city but I had more than a few setbacks to begin with. Firstly my trusty Vodafone powered mobile refused to roam. No Access was all I got from its screen! I tried manual selection and confirmed that yes there was a Vodafone network in Barcelona but my mobile refused to log on.

This was a problem as I had previously rented an apartment and I needed to call my ‘Greeter’ to let them know I had arrived. Finding some spare Euro coinage I used a public phone in the terminal where I made a perfectly natural mistake (for an out of towner) I put a ‘0’ in front of the number and instead of talking to my Greeter I found myself speaking to the Ambulance service! It seems that 062 is in fact the short dial code for the Ambulance in Barcelona. A quick visit to the helpful man at the Information counter at the terminal sorted out what I had done wrong.

My Greeter recommended that I take a bus into the city and then suggested it was only a short walk to my apartment. Well it seems that the Spanish idea of a ‘short walk’ was more like a kilometre of trundling your suitcase along a crowded city street. Yes I know I should have taken a taxi. When we finally met up I found that the apartment left a little to be desired. It was dark, cold and as I found out at 2.00 am in the morning, located directly above a popular night club. Luckily I only needed to stay here two nights when a much more modern apartment would become available.

Day -2

Was spent fruitlessly looking for a hot spot that worked. I did drink a few cups of coffee though. The ever-reliable Starbucks had Eurospot but had no connectivity to the Internet. Right next door was another hotspot operated by Telefonica but the same connectivity problem. Of course the management of these coffee lounges could care less whether the hot spot worked or not which really does call into question whether the business model works or not.

Day -1

Was the day I moved to a vastly superior apartment right on La Rambla right in the middle of the restaurant and pub district. Much enthused I decided to do some exploring jumping on the open top tourist bus that circulates through Barcelona. An excellent way to get to know a new city and although I had no time to get off and explore the sights individually I did collect enough photos to bore the folks at home.

It was also the day that I went to register for the conference. My first impression in Barcelona was that the conference had seemingly little impact. Unlike Cannes where every street was plastered with signage Barcelona clearly was a more difficult task with the 3GSM flags sharing space with other commercial messages. However the big names, like Motorola were prepared to spend to get their message across.

The conference venue was impressive and for those who had received an emailed bar code, the registration process was painless and very efficient.

Day +1

Included in the registration pack for all the paying delegates was a five-day pass to all transport systems including Barcelona’s excellent metro underground. For me this meant a cheap as well as speedy trip from La Rambla, just three stations to La Spanya positioned directly outside the conference venue.

With 50,000 people expected to attend the conference and exhibition you would think that finding fellow Australians attending the event would be a little like finding a needle in a haystack but who did I find going into the very first hall but Kevin Phillips and Peter Lodge, recently ex-Telstra, and now working for CiS Wireless. You could call CiS Wireless the Telstra 'Old Boys' considering that they also have John Hibbard, ex-Managing Director of Telstra Wholesale and Brian Wherry, ex NDC International. In fact it would seem that CiS Wireless has ambitions to fill the gap caused by the departure of NDC International from Asian markets.

My first interview of the trip was with IP Wireless, the TD-CDMA technology pioneer and vendor to Whoosh Wireless in New Zealand and IQ Networks in North Queensland. I met with Roger Quayle one of the co-founders and Jon Hambidge VP Marketing. The message was very simple, after some years of pioneering with Greenfield operators the majors were now recognising the benefits of using their TDD spectrum for data services and IP Wireless had the solutions.

The latest of these, TDtv, addressed the hot multimedia broadcast and multicast service (MBMS) market and positioned IP Wireless in direct competition with the MediaFlo offering of Qualcomm. Implemented over UMTS TD-CDMA, TDtv is claimed to allow UMTS operators to fully utilize their existing spectrum and base stations to offer subscribers attractive mobile TV and multimedia packages without impacting other voice and data 3G services. Based on 3GPP Release 6 Hambidge claimed that it enabled UMTS operators to deliver up to 50 channels of TV for standard cell phone screens, or 15 higher quality QVGA channels, all in their existing 5MHz of unpaired 3G spectrum.

2005 had been a banner year for IP Wireless launching services for T-Mobile in the Czech Republic, announcing trials with Sprint in the U.S. and Orange in France and Slovakia plus being allocated a national licence in Japan with plans for 8,500 site deployment. This news had been capped off last month with the announcement by Sprint that they would be investing another US$10 million in the company raising speculation that Sprint was about to undertake an IP Wireless led deployment.

Later that day I made an unscheduled stop on the inCode stand when my attention was drawn by an amazing 3D graphic. What I found was inCode's latest wireless tool which marries together Google Earth information with mobile phone data to display the performance of mobile networks. While the display of network Quality of Service information is hardly new what is different about this tool is that it is aimed at consumers and requires no input from the operator. Output from the tool allows competitive benchmarking, comparing the performance of two or more networks across many categories, such as specific geographies, handsets and time of day periods.

InCode claim that the software will enable operators to identify problem areas on their networks and save of up to 50% of the time they spend on expensive drive testing. What I found to be more impressive though was inCode's plans to offer the information free to consumers that register on a web site. This type of information has never before been available in the public domain and is sure to please consumer advocacy groups but perhaps not the operator's themselves.

The GSMA press conference later that same day brought the world's largest operators together in a bid to resolve a major impediment to them making a lot more money; cross network compatibility for Instant Messaging. Present at the top table was a stellar group of CEO's, Wang Jianzhou, President of China Mobile, Sanjiv Ahuja, Orange, Antonio Vian-Baptista, Telefonica Moviles, Rene Obermann, T-Mobile, Ricardo Ruggiero, Telecom Italia, and Arun Sarin Vodafone. With SMS revenues now representing a major share of overall income GSM operators showed that they were keen to get consumers to use their mobile phone rather than their PC to send IM.

A study by the GSMA, supported by global consulting firm Bain & Company, concluded that instant messaging has huge potential among mobile users because it builds on the success of text-messaging by adding presence information, the ability to track a whole conversation and instant delivery.

Wang Jianzhou illustrated what this could mean to China Mobile when he remarked that its customers send more than 2.7 billion text messages to welcome the Chinese New Year. With more than three times as many mobile users than PC users in China getting cross network compatibility for IM could mean a new pot of gold for the mobile industry.

That evening was the 3GSM welcome party an event always not to be missed complete with free food, alcohol and entertainers. Early starters were greeted by a light, music and water show from a fountain sponsored by Motorola courtesy of some fancy laser graphics. No such thing as a free lunch they say but of course sponsorship plays a major role in making the delegates feel welcome.

Day +2

One of the major themes at the show was the delivery of video to mobile phones although it is still difficult to predict what will be the preferred access mechanism. To help clarify our thinking on the subject we met with Peter MacAvock, Executive Director of the DVB Project Office. Peter agreed that it was still the very early days in the development of a mobile TV standard with no common frequency band agreed on and trials being conducted from low band VHF to L-band. The selection of an operating frequency has major implications for handset design and for the prediction of propagation performance.

The Digital Video Broadcasting Project (DVB) is an industry-led consortium of over 250 broadcasters, manufacturers, network operators, software developers, regulatory bodies and others in over 35 countries committed to designing global standards for the delivery of digital television and data services.

At 3GSM there were more than forty DVB-H services being delivered over three multiplexes and thirty companies exhibiting products. Just about all of the major handset vendors were showing advanced prototype DVB-H receivers, with some expected to be deployed in commercial launches as soon as September in Italy. There were silicon solutions on show from a wide range of vendors with many demonstrating the reception of DVB-H on devices other than cellphones, such as PDAs and laptop PCs.

However MacAvock didn't attempt to gloss over the difficulties that lay ahead for the industry not the least of which was to educate the regulators how they should treat potential operators.

Later that same day I met with Davide Tipaldi International Business Development Manager of Zandan. The company promotes itself as a provider of active end-to-end customer simulation solutions that can be used along the entire mobile service life cycle from interactive testing, service/device acceptance, live monitoring, alerting and troubleshooting, to QoS & SLA management and customer intelligence.

Zandan believes that with the flood of new multimedia services over 2.5G and 3G networks operators need to ensure that their customers get a good quality service. The company claims that 20% of mobile transactions are never completed due to poor service delivery.

They argue that their product suite can accelerate the transition from voice to data revenues by enhancing customer perception, satisfaction and loyalty along with accelerating the time to market of new services & devices.

The company is involved in an initiative with the Mobile Entertainment Forum to investigate how poor Quality of Service can damage customer loyalty and impact financially the growth and continued usage of mobile multimedia services.

This initiative, led by Zandan and supported by Freever, mBlox, motricity, Musiwave & Vodafone, seeks to define best practices and to benchmark Quality of Service, with the ultimate goal of improving the customer experience.

Day +3

The next day saw me continue my study of quality of service solutions meeting with Vallent Corporation. Vallent announced at the Congress, the availability of their next-generation Virtuo™ platform – with the claim that it was the industry’s only integrated Performance Management/Service Quality Management (PM/SQM) solution. As part of the Virtuo platform launch, the company also introduced the latest versions of its PM and SQM products, and a new business-focused service assurance application – all integrated on the Virtuo platform.

Virtuo is claimed as the first platform to help service providers connect network performance, service quality and the customer experience with their business objectives. The results are improved operational performance, faster and smoother transition from a network-centric to a customer-focused enterprise, and quicker response to new business and technology changes in rapidly evolving GSM, GPRS, EDGE, UMTS, CDMA and converged fixed/wireless networks.

The company was formed in February 2005 from the merger of WatchMark® Comnitel™ and Metrica® Software Systems, and operates globally with headquarters in Bellevue, Washington, USA and major offices and support centers in Richmond and Bath in the UK, Cork and Galway in Ireland, and Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia.

However perhaps the most interesting story of the whole Congress for me was revealed at a well attended press conference run by Canada's BlueSlice Networks. Blueslice is a provider of next generation infrastructure solutions for Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs). Stephan Ouaknine, President & CEO of Blueslice gave a passionate presentation about how next generation technologies were about to change the landscape for MVNOs enabling them to deliver highly differentiated services from their network hosts.

While there is no single definition of an MVNO broadly speaking it is an operator that is able to access white-labelled network capacity from a mobile operator and to market mobile services under its own brand. The MVNO will generally have full control of the SIM card, branding, marketing billing and customer care operations.

Blueslice was supported at the press conference by representatives from Alcatel and one of the world's most successful MVNO operator hosts, KPN Mobile from The Netherlands.

Perhaps the most exciting development for MVNOs is the availability of 3G with its higher data speed enabling feature and content rich applications. This is causing the industry to adopt a new business model that is less dependent on the carrier’s network by incorporating network infrastructure platforms including the gateway MSC and the mission-critical HLR responsible for subscriber provisioning and mobility management.

The Blueslice HLR enables features such as GSM-WiFi-VoIP convergence along with low cost roaming solutions that enable a subscriber to have multiple 'virtual' local numbers in different networks thereby benefiting from local rates instead of roaming charges.