For more discussion on mobility, visit the Service Provider Mobility Community: https://communities.cisco.com/community/solutions/sp/mobility/

1. Postcards from MWC 2012: A Journey Through Mobile Devices, Infrastructure and Applications
By: Giovanni Fruscio, Posted by kelliwon Mar 6, 2012
Finally a journey through the booths! It’s extremely important to understand the focus for the upcoming
years and, for the first time, what are the real challenges for LTE now that deployments have started
and Operators are looking at how to operate and monetize the investment.
In terms of infrastructure, Small Cells (and roaming to SP WiFi, 3G/4G handover to Wifi and vice-versa),
Mobile Cloud and Machine to Machine platforms represent a key focus, while mobile security is a
common challenge being faced. Mobile Cloud Solutions allow for Virtualizing the user’s “persona” being
it private or professional (and you can switch between them with a finger in just microseconds), running
it either locally on the phone/tablet or remotely in the Data Center. In the latter case, you won’t need to
backup data as it’s always stored in a central secure location. And, again, if you loose the phone you
won’t loose any data and no data can be stolen.
From a device perspective, the Samsung’s valzer opens on the note ... You’d expect something more
here, but, instead, they fully dedicated about 12 square kilometers to the Galaxy Note 10.1, based on
Android 4.0 ... Even if they are pushing for the new BADA OS. A clear indication that in the battle among
OSs are there just Android and iOS left? Let’s have a look later to the App Zone ...
Walking through the Android Area I realize it’s really huge and supported by dozens of partners. On the
left corner, the scrolling belt presents literally hundreds of new terminals, and I’m just wondering what
will be the differentiating characteristic that will make successful a model or another one. Maybe either
the form factor (e.g. I saw a slim android phone being ejected by a slim container with the display and
keyboard of a laptop and three batteries in common) or just the different combinations of available
features or characteristics that could fit an application or another (e.g. Screen size, bearer, cpu, etc.).
Now let’s move to the App Planet (what a scenographic entrance !!!) and in the corridor the first big
screen appearing, shows: “Windows - Virtual Memory Minimum Too Low”. An horrible premonition ...
At the GSMA Mobile Cloud Forum Service Providers representatives brought important messages to the
mobile community, reported here below:
1. with the widening of the access interface with LTE, security becomes more and more important,
especially for corporations using mobile services. Despite security should be proportional to the
threat and not to the size of the corporation, service providers have in most cases more
resources and a better infrastructure to mitigate security threats than most of the enterprises
have or can build on their own. That is, using the Service Providers’ access and applications
could be a clear advantage in terms of security;

2. 2. the customers of Mobile Cloud Services should always experience the different classes of
services he subscribed to, regardless of the network they are roaming to, thus creating the need
for interconnection among Clouds;
3. it’s extremely important the “alloy” between Network and Cloud because a mission critical
application (premium service, not necessarily bandwidth intensive like video), should always
have priority over a non-mission critical application (like social networks, OTT video, etc.) that
should be possibly offloaded over a cheaper infrastructure like SP WiFi;
4. the network and cloud infrastructure should provide the developers with open APIs (including
non sensitive subscriber data and interfaces to billing systems). No mention to the opportunity
to standardize them.
Enriched by the discussion, next step is to take a look at real applications being developed, how to
monetize them and the different issues and innovation brought by the developers. It was interesting to
find Nokia booth here, where the “world’s best camera phone” is presented. This is clearly their way of
differentiating in this competitive market, even if it’s unclear the OS strategy with regard to Android. In
terms of monetization, the Ovi Store’s revenues growing and they represent an interesting OTT player in
this sense, as they have an important market share.
As expected, most developments are in the direction of Web and Mobile Messaging, as opposed to
voice and SMS, having been the majority part of the Service Providers’ revenues in the past but currently
slowing down and declining, to some extent. Mobile Collaborative video shopping would allow for
discussing remotely with friends about goods actually available in a physical shop (by using the camera
to zoom on shirts, trousers, etc.) and this can easily lead to veeeery long conversations ...
Mobile Advertisement is clearly another area of development, as web advertising investments have for
the first time surpassed the ones on other media and Mobile Access is clearly the future of accessing the
web.
Interestingly, Intel has built the so called “Appup” program for HTML5+, delivering SDK and resources to
developers and financing interesting projects. Moreover, they will share revenues of applications with
the developers.
Moving to the Blackberry area, I had the opportunity to experience a new way of collaborating, that is
people with tablets in a conference room can put the tablets on the table and compose a single screen
dynamically, with the automatic sharing of information and presentations, but still keeping contents
locally. In order to send a document or a piece of presentation to another tablet, you’d just need to shift
quickly the finger on the screen in the peer’s direction and the document magically appears on the other
tablet. What an application !!!
In the developer’s area, you can really breathe the IT atmosphere, with a whiteboard, people eating

3. pizza, sharing ideas and discussing ... And the most used word on the whiteboard is “API” ... Perfect fit
for the SP’s idea of monetization.
The last visit to Sling’s booth where a live demo on a home set-top-box accessed remotely with a
3G/WiFi tabled showed HD channel experienced on the move.
Is this the main application for LTE networks or will the Mobile Operators, offload these to WiFi
networks while keeping their premium services over LTE spectrum?
We’ll see the answer in the upcoming months ...
For more discussion on mobility, visit the Service Provider Mobility Community:
https://communities.cisco.com/community/solutions/sp/mobility/