An awesome first day at #MWC16. The team just made it back to base camp, busy brain dumping everything we saw and heard today. Here is a quick wrap up… The usual flurry of pre-show and post show announcements, some exciting news from handset vendors to operator initiatives and plenty in between.
We got to meet up with several vendors and operators during the course of the long day. The two main themes that came out of our discussions were as follows:
- Virtualized is a given! Every vendor and operator we met with is offering/ expecting a virtualized solution – Policy & Charging, Analytics, Customer Experience – the expectation is that any solution will run on COTS and play nicely with others. A quick poll of the team and it was unanimous – “VNF” was the buzz word of the day.
- Personalization is critical! With the Digital lifestyle continuing to gain momentum, personalization is key for operators both in terms of loyalty and revenue opportunities. Most operators know they need to become more relevant to their customers. All need to.
The keynote of the day was Mr Zuckerberg’s fireside chat. He talked about everything from his company’s Free Basics ‘set-back” in India to Virtual Reality – the new frontier. With some audio problems that are reminiscent of my daughter elementary school concerts, he plowed his way through the topics. He described the Indian Internet.org outcome as follows: “That’s disappointing for the mission and a major setback,” Zuckerberg said of the India decision, “but every country is different.” Mr. Zuckerberg talks like a man on a mission, but not everyone’s buying what his selling, even if it’s free!
When confronted about their underlying motivations for Internet.org and similar projects he responded “we don’t need to have people care about it, we care about it,” he said, referring to Facebook’s own sense of mission in the project. “We believe that everyone should have access to the Internet, and it’s kind of crazy that we’re sitting here and 4 billion people in the world don’t,”
Facebook innovations are powering on, and Mr Zuckerberg was very excited about his drones in particular. “It will have the wingspan of a 747 but weighs as much as a car, very light,” he said. “And the other piece is a laser comms system twelve times faster to beam down access. With a laser you can get higher bandwidth.”
He also touched on the issue of encryption, since the issue re-emerged with the FBI/Apple story last week. He did say that FB sympathizes with Apple over the standoff, but did go on to reiterate that there is some responsibility for companies like FB to work with Governments to prevent terrorism and that FB has strong rules in place.
That’s our short and sweet wrap up of day one at MWC. Stay tuned for MWC Day #2
This article first appeared on Pricing Data Plans.
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