LTE Advanced inspires different approaches

If you were in attendance at last week’s Mobile World Congress by now you’ve hopefully recovered from the experience. Hopefully. Even for the initiated, MWC is a daunting prospect: a sprawling mass of buzzing, active halls, along with many sections of somewhat less travelled areas. It’s a small moon of a show. No wonder the brands such as Fitbit were all over it – the miles you are a likely to walk each day are prime way of demonstrating their fitness tracking technologies. If there’s was one motto your likely to take away from the show it’s that ‘there is no such thing as lunch’.

Press release: Elitecore announces successful LTE rollout at MWC

Elitecore Technologies, a leading provider of Integrated Policy, Charging and Revenue Management solutions today announced that its LTE Revenue and Customer Management platform has been deployed by Lanka Bell – Sri Lanka to roll out next-generation services like prepaid-postpaid broadband, broadband data burst (LTE + Wi-Fi), VOIP, Wi-Fi Hotspot, ILL, SIP & VPN.

Vaibhav Mehta, SVP Business Development, Elitecore Technologies said, “Elitecore platform enables operators to offer Greenfield LTE services without disturbing the current plans while ensuring cost-effective optimization of their network and greatly improving time-to-market via smooth and faster alignment with the existing third party vendor components in the LIVE ecosystem.

Is Samsung leading the way for LTE handset technology?

The ‘gadgetosphere’*, the fetishist tech blogs and sites obsessed with the minutiae of the latest hardware, have been fairly harsh on the Samsung Galaxy S5. While Apple has previously the one to take flack for failing to reinvent the smartphone wheel, as it used to seem to do so effortlessly, it’s now Samsung that is getting grief.

Its latest flagship phone, the S5, is bigger, fatter, heavier and just too sameier* compared to the Galaxy S4, which itself wasn’t that much of a leap compared to the S3. Oh noes.

MWC Day Two – Innovations on Show

Cloudy with a Chance of Cost Savings

The second day of MWC proved to be another full-on day of hall walking and meetings, and innovation was on show aplenty.

That’s certainly true of Israeli VAS company CallUp. This small operation has just 25 employees but sells its products to operators all around the world, from LATAM to India. Its CEO Aron Roth explained to me how its CanVAS product can bring the value back for operators into services such as SMS and voicemail, which for those that are focussing on LTE are products that no longer really revenue generators,  but still have to be offered. The answer is the cloud. CanVAS offers these things via a cloud-based system, thus stripping out the high OPEX costs that carriers would otherwise face for these low revenue generating services. Interestingly Callup itself hosts these offerings on AWS – Amazon’s cloud services. So it’s a cloud service, built on top of a cloud service, which is kinda cool.

Saint Zuckerberg out to connect the world

Mark Zuckerberg, the ever baby-faced creator of Facebook, the world’s biggest communication product, took to the stage of this this year’s MWC keynote stage, to explain his vision of “connecting the world”.

After Facebook reached the milestone of one billion users, he said, the company “took a step back”. As you would. And asked itself, “What is it we want to do? What problem can we solve next?”. This led to Zuckerberg’s plan to create Internet.org – a partnership between Facebook and a number of eco-system partners, to create what he referred to as a “911 service for the Internet”, offering basic services such as weather, food prices, Wikipedia, messaging and, naturally, basic social networking. Facebook, if you hadn’t guessed.

Joyning the LTE dots with Imagination

One of the interesting things about the LTE eco-system is the number of parties involved in making it all happen. Surely one of the most interesting is Imagination Technologies, which has a piece of almost every pie in mobile. I recall Imagination Technologies as offering leading edge technology for the PC market in graphics and sound as far back as late late 90s, but as its ‎Senior Director of Marketing, David Harold told us, it has been concentrating on mobile since around that time – a decision it has never regretted, despite the concerns of those who thought it was misguided to turn its back on the PC market.

With mobile rising and the PC market going the other way, it’s certainly had the last laugh. Perhaps its best known mobile win is the PowerVR graphics technology which helps to make the iPhone such a gaming powerhouse. However, just as its PowerVR offers efficiency in the graphics pipeline, it is also keen to promote is MIPS-based processor technology as a more efficient tech for LTE baseband tech in handsets and tablets.”A high performance, clean architecture” as it described it. The key is the fact that it is multi-threaded, makes for a big performance increase, and it claimed that using its architecture baseband manufacturer Altair saw a 30 per cent increase in performance in the same power envelope. It also has the likes of Sequans using its architecture.

Imagination is also a key enabler of next-gen VoLTE, and its HelloSoft tech support SRVCC, and DRVCC for handoff between 2G, 3G and 4G networks. On the stand we also got a nice little demo of its RCS suite client, (see video below), which it said was currently in the process of receiving Joyn certification. While the jury is still out on whether Joyn will ever take off in any significant way, it was good to see it in action at least.

Mobile World Congress 2014 looms large

The Mobile World Congress (MWC) is already one of the biggest shows on the tech calendar, and thanks to keynotes from the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, in some people’s eyes it’s becoming even more important from the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show. As Eric Schmidt (who keynoted at MWC two years ago), put it, “Mobile has already won.”

For the consumer tech press, MWC is all about the latest and shiniest handsets. The big launch is expected to be Samsung’s Galaxy S5, though the likes of Nokia and HTC and LG are also going to want to make their presence felt. That said, we’ve also heard from new players such as Kazaam. Founded by former ex-HTC execs, these smaller players could make the handset market a bit more interesting.

From the LTE World Series perspective, we’ll be concentrating on the tech that makes it all happen – the latest network infrastructure technology– the stuff that gets discussed and dissected in our on-going LTE World Series of events round the world, from TD-LTE in Singapore, to the LTE World Summit in Europe and LTE Africa in, you guessed it, Africa.

We’ll be at the show next week to try and get a sense of what the industry is getting up to with regards to the likes of LTE Advanced, and making networks smarter using technologies such as Het-Nets, small cells, and technologies such as SON and NFV. We also want to find out a bit more about how it’s all going to be supported with more efficient backhaul technologies. After all, we’re moving into a world of ubiquitous smartphones, smart watches and connected cars your new-fangled internet-connected toaster, or smart watch, won’t be that clever if the network behind it isn’t up to scratch.

Be sure to check back next week for our updates and if you’re attending the show, brace yourself – and especially your feet, it’s going to be mega.