Mobile World Congress 2013

Judging by the response of manufacturers, the mobile operating system of choice at MWC 2013 was all Android all the time despite Google’s no-show status, and, to a small degree, Windows, although Microsoft’s mobile platform took a hit when LG announced it had no plans to manufacture Windows Phone 8 devices. As usual, Apple was conspicuously absent from the largest mobile-industry event in the world, which, ironically, owes a good measure of its success to the smartphone revolution the company ignited.

The topic of border controllers seemed to be buzzing about at this year’s event, with the recent acquisition of Acme Packet by Oracle causing quite a stir. Metaswitch was making waves with its next-generation border controllers and revealed a remarkably large footprint in bringing about VoIP (voice over IP) and UC (unified communications) services for hundreds of competitive carriers on both sides of the pond. On the wireless side Stoke was promoting its mobile border agent for Wi-Fi and “RAN-to-Core” optimization, while Avvasi coined the term “video border controller” for its piece of the video assurance space.

The CEM bandwagon also continued full speed ahead, with virtually everyone claiming to have a stake in the customer-experience management game. TeleTech was making strides by moving from its role as a call-center provider to a true CEM solution provider, capitalizing on years of intellectual property and expertise. Similarly, Saguna is focusing on service optimization via deep packet inspection (DPI) for content-rich services delivered over mobile networks, and Tektronix showcased a CEM solution that lets service providers mine Big Data for the sake of personalized mobile marketing and campaigning.

But perhaps most interesting was Trendium, which is putting the power of the customer experience into the customer’s hands by giving a feedback app and comprehensive CEM tools to service providers in order to proactively yet reactively improve negatively impacted areas with an incredible amount of granularity. Meanwhile, JDSU is getting selective about data, capturing control-plane info that’s content-aware, correlating it for relevance and then filtering it to bring out only the data that operators really need. Finally, Comptel highlighted its Big Data analytics approach under the banner of “Making Data Beautiful,” illustrating how the company’s “event-analysis-action” framework identifies real-time opportunities for service providers.

Pipeline had the pleasure of meeting with nearly 100 technology and service providers over the four-day Mobile World Congress 2013 event. Unfortunately, not all of them could be mentioned here, but we took copious notes and will continue to cover the leading innovators in the communications technology space in upcoming issues.