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.

At MWC the company launched a 40GHbE ATCA processor blade and updated its 10G and 40G platforms for equipment manufacturers.

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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.

The company calls this adaptive customer assurance. “We need to associate the customer experience with understanding how things are going in the network, if there are issues there, or at the service level. We need to associate and correlate the data coming from the network and then understand how that impacts the customer experience and that understand what is the service quality overall.”

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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.”

Duverne adds that although LTE standards are established, implementation is not so simple and there is a need for solutions that enable manufacturers to design beyond the standard and stress their solutions “to the limit”, so they will be ready for high level performance in the network.

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It runs the biggest mobile event in the world and isn’t afraid of telling you about it. As you will be aware, last week over 60,000 people attended MWC in Barcelona, a new record for the event. There are hundreds of exhibitors, all keen to access that audience. Add in a slick and very impressive analyst and media operation and that’s a lot of stand, ticket and sponsorship sales.

The event serves many useful purposes. It’s a high level talking shop allowing operators, service providers and major vendors the opportunity to distribute their messages globally. It’s a marketplace bringing together operators and their suppliers at a high level. It’s a fantastic opportunity for the media to access operators and vendors and, let’s be honest, to turn an advertising dollar or two at the same time. It generates a mobile bubble, virtually mandating a yearly product cycle.

All these are good things. Without the GSMA’s scope and reach, no-one else could replicate it.

So what follows isn’t “GSMA bashing”. The GSMA is a membership organisation that quite rightly acts in the interests of its members. I appreciate the work the GSMA does, its technology initiatives, its advocacy of the economic, social and cultural benefits of mobile. Many of its staff are helpful and personable and see their work, quite rightly, as facilitating the development of the mobile industry as a whole, for the benefit of all concerned.

What I want to know is  – why not be more open about the figures? What is the total turnover of the MWC? What funds does the event generate to go forward into the overall activities of the GSMA? Where, in short, does all the money go?

I asked the first two questions on Monday and was told by the GSMA that as a membership organisation it doesn’t share those numbers, and that all funds are reinvested in the industry and GSMA initiatives. I understand this, what I am asking for is a greater understanding of what that funding entails.

So yesterday I asked the following questions, to explain why I think communicating this could be of value. Here’s what I asked.

“Would it not be beneficial for the GSMA to publicise how these funds are invested – to demonstrate not just the scope of the GSMA’s activities, but to highlight and justify what is in essence the industry’s investment in itself?

Perhaps you are already sharing this information amongst your members. How are GSMA accounts distributed currently? Are members given an annual report breaking down income and expenditure?”

That was only yesterday, so this today is not intended as a piece bemoaning any lack of a response and neither is this piece intended as any kind of pre-judgement of a response from the GSMA.

But I want to ask – do you agree with me? Has the time now come, given the scale and scope of the GSMA’s activities, for the organisation to open up on the income it generates, and how that is disbursed? Or perhaps you think it’s a complete non-issue, that exhibitors and sponsors will respond to any value they see in the events or services the GSMA runs, and where the money goes after that is up to the GSMA. That, too, strikes me as a valid opinion.

For my part, I think the GSMA has long since gone beyond acting as a private members’ club, due in part to the sheer volume of funds that are generated from the industry. It may be that it now has a responsibility to its customers and the industry at large to open up. I cannot see the downside.

If you too would like to ask the GSMA to open up, or tell me I’m talking rubbish, or express any view in between, please leave a comment below, or email me at keithd@mobileeurope.co.uk.

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.

Hiley adds that spectrum is available for such P2MP applications in Europe, and that operators are responding well to the P2MP concept.

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“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.

So what are the issues that mobile users themselves  think are most denting their service quality, and what does that mean for the operators?

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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.

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