Mobile World Congress review - Playing it safe

The black suits were back, and the show was very business focused, serious even. And Mobile Europe had its team looking out for the most important news across the industry - from network equipment to application development

The main vendors and LTE:
At MWC, tier one vendors faced a difficult balancing act of pleasing MNOs with widely diverging network development plans, kick-starting the network upgrade cycle to recover considerable investments into OFDM/MIMO technologies, and showing investors their optimised product portfolios that could be supported at lower cost.

As a result, the Big Four vendors - Ericsson, Huawei, Alcatel-Lucent and Nokia Siemens Networks - moved in a tight pack announcing their strategies to deliver end to end 4G portfolios, showing technical readiness to launch LTE and demonstrating converged RAN products, some of which were announced in the weeks leading up to WMC.

Ericsson exhibited the Evolved Packet Core portfolio for LTE and next-generation broadband, including SGSN/MME and Mobile Packet Gateway - software upgrades for the existing SGSN and GGSN - as well as Converged Packet Gateway. At the same time, it announced HSPA network upgrades to 28Mbps for TIM Italy and trials of 42Mbps HSPA speeds with Telstra. NokiaSiemens Networks demonstrated LTE interoperability between its recently launched multi-radio Flexi Base Station and Qualcomm's terminal technology, while Huawei showed off its unified LTE FDD/TDD solution.
Alcatel-Lucent stepped back in the game after Verizon's announcement that it chose ALU and Ericsson as its two vendors for the initial LTE rollout in the US. In Barcelona, ALU launched a new LTE software module of the node B, already trialled by a Tier 1 MNO and on general availability from mid-2009. It also completed a series of calls over LTE TDD on LG's devices.