The annual 3GSM conference took place last week in Barcelona. The change of venue was welcome by most of the 50,000 attendees. All the good French food in Cannes couldn't compete with the hotels, public transportation, cellular coverage, and the Fira of Barcelona. This year's participation surpassed all previous years (2005: 34,000, 2004: 29,000, 2003: 26,000, 2002:24,000).Convergence between fixed telecom, internet and entertainment was the main theme of 3GSM. Software makers, device and network equipment manufacturers were all touting their support for convergent technologies (SIP, IMS and UMA among others):
- Nokia introduced new phones including the 6136 supporting UMA connectivity.
- Motorola received the award for the best 3G phone and presented the new A910 used by BT Fusion.
- Vodafone selected Ericsson's IMS.
- NTT DoCoMO showed their new HDSPA phones from Motorola, NEC and Fujitsu.
Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC) represents a clear opportunity for convergent service providers to offset the loss of revenue due to Fixed Mobile Substitution (FMS) and new competition from VoIP service providers. At 3GSM, I presented a service roadmap for carriers to provide a fixed mobile convergence experience to their subscribers while transforming their network to fully support the above technologies. The key take aways were:
- Java is the de facto standard for FMC service development and deployment
- Identity is the common, most critical component across converged services, service delivery platform and IMS.
- Participation is key to address the device, services, network, data center, DRM and OSS/BSS challenges created by FMC.
Content was king at 3GSM again this year. A complete hall was dedicated to all forms of content for the mobile industry. I really wonder when Google, AOL, Yahoo and other traditional internet outlets will be actively participating to the annual wireless fest. In their absence, the world’s largest operators, China Mobile, Orange, Telefonica, TeliaSonera, TIM, T-Mobile, Turkcell, Vodafone and a few others announced their intention to launch Instant Messaging interoperability using the "calling party pays" principle.
This is certainly going to increase traffic (and revenue) between the participating carriers but what about the interoperability with Yahoo, AOL, and Microsoft IM services who were clearly not invited to participate?
