INSIGHT: IT and enterprise themes will dominate at MWC

For the first 30 years of its life, mobile communications felt like a standalone industry with its own technology, services, vendors, and service providers.

Enterprises are adopting a combination of public and private clouds and Ovum believes that operators are well-placed to start providing orchestration tools that manage hybrid cloud approaches.

We expect to see a number of tools being launched for the hybrid cloud – and with telecoms operators in mind.

Enterprise mobility

In the past, the Mobile World Congress had a much stronger focus on the consumer market than the enterprise sector. However, this is now changing.

2014 saw a massive influx of enterprise software and applications companies into the exhibition halls. This year we expect to see the same vendors with even bigger stands and the entry of a large number of enterprise mobility specialists.

Even Android, which has always had a reasonably strong presence at the event, is likely to place a much greater emphasis on enterprise applications through the Android for Work program.

Analytics

In 2014, it felt like every technology that was struggling to grow its core business was launching an analytics product. 2015 will see no letting up in the number of new product and service announcements.

The big difference this year is that operators will have a much clearer strategy around analytics – on the one hand to improve and extend their core offerings, and, on the other, to help build a value proposition around IoT.

5G

Many different visions of 5G will be presented at MWC2015. While there is much consensus around the technology that will sit in the radio access network, differences of opinion exist around the extent to which SDN and NFV will be part of 5G.

Furthermore, while the business models of telecoms operators were never really in doubt when the 3G and 4G standardisation processes were undertaken, the same cannot be said of 5G.

While there is an expectation that IoT will drive many of the future requirements of mobile networks, the role of the operator and the value of licensed (as opposed to unlicensed) spectrum are both extremely unclear.

LTE-A / 4.5G

It is easy to forget that 3G only delivered on the promise of mobile broadband after the arrival of HSPA – a software upgrade to initial 3G deployments. While LTE-A – an upgrade on LTE – is most unlikely to deliver the same dramatic improvement as HSPA, it will deliver faster connections, more connections, and improved latency.

Ovum expects most of the large wireless infrastructure vendors in Barcelona to carry out live demonstrations of LTE-A – in some cases with their operator partners.

VoWiFi/VoLTE

The launch of the iPhone 6 and its voice-over-Wi-Fi (VoWiFi) calling capability has spurred mobile operators to develop their own VoWiFi services.

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