Kontron's Sven Freudenfeld says that high growth in mobile data is driving an increased need for powerful processing applications such as security, DPI, classification and QoS - at 40Gbps wire-speed.

To meet that need, Kontron supplies multi-core, standards-compliant hardware for network equipment manufacturers providing LTE EPC applications.

Zinwave's Colin Abrey says that his company is seeing a drive for in-building solutions coming from operators because of increasing mobile data usage. "That's causing them to look at data offload and in-building coverage to maintain the efficientcy of their networks," he says.

So where does Zinwave's wideband active DAS solution help, and how does it compare to other approaches such as pico and femtocells?

Accanto CEO Michele Campriani on the importance of marrying network monitoring data to customer information, so that operators can gain a more involved and up to date view of the customer's actual experience, and target investment and operational efforts more efficiently.

Agilent's Renaud Duverne announces tools to support the design and verification of LTE-A devices, as well as LTE test products. On LTE-A, he says, "Even if it's a bit ahead of the standard, you need to get ready. There's some things you need to take care of like carrier aggregation, the wider bandwidth, and how you are going to handle MIMO."

Cambridge Broadband Networks' Lance Hiley tells Keith Dyer that point-to-multipoint backhaul is ideally suited to LTE architectures and traffic demands, and can solve backhaul challenges assoicated with the dense deployment of cells in urban environments.

"Something's got to give, we can't continue on the road we are," says Acision's Steven van Zanen, of the way carriers have addressed customer experience problems so far. Yet it's not all bad news, research shows that consumers are willing to accept fairness principles in the distribution of bandwidth, and also optimisation of content.

Ian Brown, CEO of Axell Wireless, introduces Axell's dual band DIGImini digital repeater. With around 80 per cent of mobile phone traffic now originating from within buildings and the rapid growth of data applications, Brown talks about the value of providing flexible indoor mobile coverage.

Comarch's Piotr Piatosa on how operators can take a flexible approach to supporting the introduction of new services.

MWC debutant RGB Networks talks about how the company can take a video stream and create many different versions of that stream for different devices, at optimal bit rates and resolutions. With a large number of high resolution displays coming onto the market, through tablets and smartphones, operators will see more demand for video at extremely high quality. How does RGB's real time video conversion help them, and how does it differ from other video optimisation solutions?

SIM manufacturer and developer Gemalto demonstrates an application it has built for Facebook on the SIM - allowing non-smartphone users to access Facebook.

NEC offers IT and network expertise, plus revenue-share business model

Jaime Serrano, President and CEO of NEC Iberica, tells Keith Dyer that carriers are on the search for new revenues and business models and that the cloud is the right way ahead.

NEC is making the deployment of cloud services its main strategy for the international market, he adds, and is well-placed with its IT and network assets to provide the capabilities operators need. "There aren't too many companies that can combine IT expertise and high market share in IT together with network technology knowledge," he says. "NEC has both things."

Additionally, NEC is investing in the operator cloud infrastructure itself, offering revenue-share business models to help service providers to deploy cloud infrastructures.

ZTE had an LTE-A demo showing at MWC. We thought we might be able to show you some of it but we didn't get very far. However, we were told that the demo was on ZTE's SDR platform, was showing up to 1Gbps downlink, and also that ZTE is the leading company in this area...

Tektronix announces a partnership with geolocation optimisation specialist Groundhog to add a geolocation monitoring application as part of its OptiMon suite.

(This is a sponsored video)

Will the introduction of tiered data pricing be a successful step towards closing the gap between data revenues and usage? How can operators best communicate with their customers to allow simplicity, but also personalisation; flexibility, but also clarity?

At Mobile World Congress 2011, Mobile Europe and Redknee hosted a discussion to debate the opportunities, challenges and future direction of tiered pricing. The debate brought together operators, a leading analyst and a leading provider of operator-focussed solutions.

Discover how Telefonica views the transition to tiered data pricing and the opportunities it gives them for customer interaction; hear how and why US MVNO I-Wireless made the change from flat rate to tiered pricing; and hear what future capabilities operators will be able to exploit to enable more profitable and customer-focussed mobile data services.

Host: Keith Dyer, Editor, Mobile Europe
Panelists: Tanya Field, Director, Mobile Data Group, Telefonica; Patrick McDonough, GM, I-Wireless; Mark Newman, Chief Research Officer, Mobile Operator Strategies, InformaTM; Lucas Skoczkowski, CEO, Redknee

(This is a sponsored video)