Last week it was MWC Barcelona. As seems to be the fashion, like with CES, MWC just stands for itself, and is no longer Mobile World Congress. I predicted in my preview post MWC Barcelona: 5G in Catalonia that this year it would be all about 5G. And so it proved to be, with practically every booth in the 8 exhibit halls showing a 5G sign. One issue hovering over the whole conference was the situation with Huawei. As it happened, Huawei's rotating chairman Guo Ping was giving one of the keynotes, and he was forceful in his defense. I'll write about that later in the week. 

Barcelona

Last year I didn't go to MWC, instead, I went to embedded world in Nuremberg since we were going to make a big announcement (which it turned out we didn't, oh well). That means that it is two years since I'd been in Barcelona.

In a nice bit of generosity, MWC gives every attendee a free ticket for the metro (subway) for the week. In a bit of spite, the metro employees partially go on strike so that the metro is only running at about 50% of its normal frequency. I suppose it is Barcelona's biggest event of the year and so striking then gives them the most leverage. They did the same two years ago, last time I was in Barcelona. I notice that they worked normally last year, when MWC seemed to be seriously considering moving from Barcelona to Dubai (I suspect that they were just negotiating and would not move).

The most famous building in Barcelona has to be the Basílica i Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família, or just La Sagrada Família as it is usually called. This is the cathedral (technically not a cathedral since it then has to be the seat of a bishop) designed by Gaudí. The building was started in 1882, and they are trying to get it mostly finished by 2026, the centenary of Gaudí's death. He was knocked down by a tram in 1926, and since he was dressed so shabbily, he was not recognized for a couple of days and received only cursory medical treatment.

I walked over as I always do in Barcelona to see the progress. In some ways, it looks very different each time I see it, and in others it seems to progress slowly. The picture on the left is the first time I went to Barcelona in 2001. I was working for Cadence, as it happens, but it was in the summer (as you can tell from the trees) and not for MWC. MWC was still called GSM World (or maybe it was already called 3GSM World) and was still in Cannes not Barcelona. On the right is a picture I took last week.

Mats Granryd

The day opened with various keynotes. First up was Mats Granryd, the head of GSMA (the operator association, and the organizer of MWC). He pointed out in his opening remarks that:

If mobile was a country it would be the 4th biggest in the world, bigger than Germany.

There was far too much talk, to my mind, of the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Not that there is anything wrong with them, but, as I related in an anecdote in my post Why Millennial Engineers Should Work for Cadence, I think that mobile is a technology that has made more of an impact on poor countries than pretty much anything else, certainly than the kinds of NGOs who I mainly associated with the MDGs. I think mobile undersells itself when it makes itself sound as if it is subordinate to the UN. Instead, what is really happening is that mobile is making money by delivering transformational technology, and letting the UN rush out in front to pontificate and pretend they are leading.

He carried on pitching the importance of good governance to this technology continuing to be transformational. By good governance, he meant by governments, not the industry itself. Mobile is so big that it is seen by governments as a cash-cow, a source of money from selling spectrum and other "taxes". But mobile is actually so big that it operates at a scale larger than individual countries. We are a decade or two past the point where vendors can build equipment for a single country or region.

He says the industry needs a regulatory framework consisting of four things:

1. Timely release of harmonized spectrum, but not in a way where the operators are saddled with too much debt.
2. Approval of consolidation while maintaining competition.
3. The same rules for equivalent digital services between internet and mobile—an even playing field.
4. Harmonized international privacy and data protection rules.

The reality, as was touched on in other keynotes by the head of Singtel, and KT (Korea Telecom), is that mobile operator have a very capital intensive business on which it is hard to make a reasonable profit. Instead, operators have to find ways to deliver higher value services. To them, 5G is potentially a way to do that. The ideas tried so far, going for scale through consolidation, adding media (Verizon buying Yahoo! and AOL comes to mind) have not really delivered. As Stéphane Richard, the CEO of Orange said in his keynote:

Mobile money is a great achievement and shows that this industry can provide more than just connectivity.

Nick Read

Mats interviewed Nick Read, the CEO of Vodaphone. He is fairly new in the job, having become CEO in October last year, so not yet 6 months. Note that stuff in [brackets] is my commentary, not something that either Mats or Nick said.

Mats started by asking him his view of the industry.

I’ve been with Vodaphone for 17 years. Also a similar amount of time in retail, logistics, media too. We are the scepter of scepters that will transform society. We have a pivotal role. This is well understood in US, Asia, and Africa. There we have the right balance. But we haven’t got there in Europe. A lot of operators turn to regulators and say it is all regulation. Our sector is only slightly above tobacco in terms of industry perception. Why is that happening? I think that there are 3 inhibitors: we have been protectionist in mindset, we don't collaborate with each other, and we are not fast enough to deliver against customer needs.

For example, with text messaging we were protectionist about our revenue, and we didn't collaborate on rich messaging. As a result, the OTT [over-the-top such as WhatsApp, WeChat, iMessage] people took over. With roaming, we didn't address it and as a result we've had extensive regulation in Europe. Europe has fragmented spectrum, giving poorer coverage, so we are not in the optimal situation going forward.

Mats asked how Nick though 5G would play out.

5G is on our doorstep so it's an opportunity to reflect. We need to be more transparent, and have simpler product and price plans, instead of being opaque and complicated. We can learn from other industries going forward.

With 5G and the need to invest, we need to do a lot more sharing, such as Vodaphone's announcement with O2 [a deal to share mobile infrastructure such as masts]. We can improve coverage and performance, and improve returns. Frankly, the telecom sector has the worst shareholder returns for 3 year running, things need to change.

That was an opportunity for Mats to aks Nick what he is going to change at Vodaphone.

I went out in November with refreshed strategy. I’m passionate about being a purpose-led organization and improve a billions lives and halve the environmental impact. We need to focus on customers and drive a deeper customer engagement. We need to do more strategic partnering, and build a global IoT platform, reflected in the announcement we made with Arm this morning [the agreement combines iSIM, IoT software and network services to dramatically reduce complexity and enable fully open, remote provisioning of IoT devices]. We need a faster introduction to market at lower cost.

We need to unify products and services for automotive that works across US, Africa, Europe. Finally, building gigabit networks, and we want to partner with like-minded operators. We are building big "data lake" for us to start putting our platforms on top.

Mats had been on CNBC and the host was talking about the "dismay" of the industry. "You're not an engineer like me," he said. "You're a normal person. So I need to ask about security. How do you see it?"

I think it is an industry issue. A lot of concentration in the supply chain. Three very significant players [Nokia, Ericsson, and Huawei]. In terms of operators, paramount is security. We've been working for a long time with government security agencies in terms of certification of equipment. What has been disappointing is that in some ways 5G is perceived as this new network, but that is far from the truth. It is a layer on top of the 4G network, adding 5G is adding another layer on top of a multilayer security, not something  brand new. Also, internet traffic is increasingly end to end encrypted anyway. We have to be fact-based.

Tomorrow

Check Breakfast Bytes tomorrow for part 2. And then the Huawei situation and keynote on Wednesday.

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