During February 2009 I attended the GSMA’s Mobile World Congress making it an unbroken 15 years of attending the show. You might expect that I have seen a lot of changes in that time as indeed the whole mobile industry has.

My planning for attending the Mobile World Congress generally starts six months before the event. As the premier show for people in the mobile communications industry one can expect that flights and hotels will be full closer to the event itself and those seats and beds that might still be available are likely to be a lot more expensive. When the show moved from Cannes (where it had been for some ten years) to Barcelona we were assured that accommodation would be more plentiful and cheaper. Well the reality has been that when the show week rolls around all the hotels and apartments put up their prices in some case more than doubling their tariffs.

In previous years I had always scheduled in a side trip wither before or after, or both. What that generally meant was that I took a flight to London or Paris and then looked for a way to continue on to Barcelona. Readers may remember that a couple of years ago this involved a rather interesting mini-bus ride from Toulouse to Barcelona. This year however I wanted to get to Barcelona and come straight back. The best option I found for this was Singapore airlines which has a flight that routes Sydney/Singapore/Milan/Barcelona. The connection times were quite good and the price was also right. Now I should say that I know a lot more about the back of the bus than the front but if you have to travel in ‘cattle class’ then you can do far worse than Singapore airlines. The plane itself for the leg from Singapore to Barcelona was a modern Boeing 777 with the latest in-seat entertainment systems. If I had a grip it was that the seats on these aircraft don’t recline more than whisker… certainly a lot less than on 747’s.

Now of course if you’re traveling at the front of the bus I’m sure it’s a whole different story. To my surprise I found that there was at least one passenger at the pointy end that was also going to MWC 09. Standing next to me collecting his bags with a nice first class sticker was none other than Sol Trujillo the CEO of Telstra. Of course Sol had his Blackberry out for the whole time he waited but what I also found interesting was that he had no minders travelling with him. I didn’t get to see if there was a nice black limousine waiting for him as my bags of course took a lot longer to arrive. Waiting for me of course was a long line of taxis.

This year like most others I had booked an apartment rather than a hotel. In my experience it’s not only far cheaper but also more comfortable. Plus you get to live like real people not cosseted away in a hotel with all the other MWC attendees. For the last couple of years I had rented an apartment facing the yacht basin and about a ten minute walk from La Rambla and an underground station.

This year I found that it had been sold and was no longer available for rent forcing me to look for alternatives. The one I found was even closer to La Rambla and although not quite as well fitted out it included my obligatory Internet… at no additional cost!

So just after my plane landed at 8.30 am local time I was on the phone ringing the ‘Greeter’ that would let me in to the apartment. There I received my first shock! He could not meet me before 11.00 am meaning that I had to while away some time at the airport. The second shock I got was when I turned on the hot water… it didn’t work. Now I can tell you after a long plane journey the last thing you want is a cold shower! I was straight back to my contact who promised immediate action… which turned up a day later… I blame this unfortunate event for me coming down with a flu bug… which laid me out for the next 48 hours… not the start you want before a busy week.

My first must appointment was to collect my badge on Sunday afternoon. Although I still wasn’t ok I didn’t want to find myself in a major queue on the opening day of the exhibition. When I got to La Fira the first thing I noticed was the lack of external signage. Yes the conference itself was well marked but the advertisers that usually draped the surrounding building with their signs were noticeable by their absence. Another difference to past years was that there was no weekly ticket for the underground in my pack. Clearly it had also failed to get a sponsor. Instead there were ticket selling machine located directly inside the entrance to the Fira.

That evening I dragged myself along to Showstoppers one of the pre-Congress events designed to showcase innovative new products. The event was held away from the Fira in the Hotel Majestic. The set up was similar to last year with hospitality tables set up in the middle of the room and the companies located in booth around the perimeter. Of course the food and drinks was the first port of call for hungry and cold reporters and personally I found it to be somewhat less than last year.

One normally expects that this to be a press-only event however I was pleasantly surprised to bump into an old friend, Mike Short Vice President Research and Development at Telefonica O2 Europe. He’d been recommended to Showstoppers and wanted to get a head start on finding interesting new companies and products.

Looking around the room for something of interest to me I met Leila Modarres Director of Marketing of DeviceAnywhere. Testing the end-to-end experience of mobile services has become an increasing important task for all mobile operators and a variety of solutions have emerged. These basically fall into two categories: active testing where calls are placed across networks using scripts to simulate the actions of customers and passive testing which is based on the analysis of actual traffic passed across the network.

The DeviceAnywhere product falls into the active testing category and is based on real handsets but rather than the ad-hoc testing environment common to many organizations DeviceAnywhere has deployed handset banks containing several thousand real devices in locations around the world. Using the Internet organizations can log into these banks and control any one or more of the devices to test applications and content.

DeviceAnywhere claims more than two thousand customers are using their solution on more than 30 different carrier networks worldwide. One of these deals with Zed, the world’s largest mobile content company, was announced at the Congress. Zed has operations in 54 countries and agreements with over 130 mobile networks and with its use of DeviceAnywhere expects to help improve its testing process as well as reduce its testing budget.

Frankly I didn’t see a lot else of interest and as I still wasn’t feeling well I headed off back to my apartment foregoing the opportunity to go to the Mobile Monday party… on a Sunday! I was dreading getting up the next day feeling like I did… as usual my week was crammed with meetings.

Thankfully when I woke up on the Monday morning… my flu like symptoms had disappeared.