Morning of Day 1 at the Mobile World Congress

Tuesday, February 15th, 2011 Karen Ambrose Hickey, Editor

Up bright and early, NOT because I want to get to the Congress early. It’s just that I can never sleep after a long haul flight.

OK all ready: pen, paper, laptop, power supply, adaptor, guide, contact list, badge, photo ID, phone, charger for phone, money, credit card, camera – check, check and check. Oh wait, forgot the hotel key. Now off to the subway.

The train is packed; oh well, Monday morning commute; no room have to squeeze in. After the 10 minute ride, we arrive at the Plaça d’ Espanya and 99% of the folks detrain, leaving a handful of people on the train. They must be pleased to have such a crushed commute this week.

We all trail to the entrance like sheep. Pleased, I collected my badge Sunday (thanks John!!) Photo ID + Badge = entrance.

Yes! I’m in and rushing off to the opening keynotes on customer service, which looked interesting on paper and a good friend is presenting. Find a seat. Wow, the room is freezing! I learn more about Analytics and real time data mining to support customer care than is good for anyone.

I thought only engineers shrouded their art in a mystic set of acronyms, but no, I realise, customer care does too!!

The CEO of Mobilicity makes some interesting comments:

• All his senior staff have to spend one day a month on the customer care help desk.
• His customer care must be able to sign up a customer in less than 5 minutes.
• All call plans must be understandable by his 7 year old son without the use of a calculator
• No one is to sell a Smartphone to anyone who does not really need one, and that includes his 76 year old mother (who apparently returned it)
• He randomly calls in to check on his customer care.
• Any new ideas must be easily understood by his dumbest employee.

KPN Spain then presented their customer care plan which includes new software that looks at the customers call data records, billing information, etc. etc. and tries to redirect the customer to the right person without asking. So if you are having connection problems then you will go to tech support; no need to go through the IVR system and enter “Voice Jail”.

Rush off for a breakfast meeting with a partner; no one there – did I miss it?

OK – off to the highlight of the day: a four-hour seminar on data services – actually it is more interesting than it would appear. Just as I get out the door, the rain starts and I am soaked before I reach Hall 7. I thought Barcelona was supposed to be sunny. The place is packed – standing room only. The presentations are fast and in some ways superficial, but they are full of excellent data – pun intended. All the information is real world. Four hours later, it is all over….

One good quote from Magnus Ewerbring of Ericsson:

“…400 million 3G smartphones will be sold in 2011, if you look at the impact on the network this is equivalent to 4 billion GSM [2G] phones being sold in 2011. Or put another way more than the current GSM subscriber base.”

Other points:

Laptops account for almost all the the data traffic and smartphones account for the majority of signaling traffic. The ‘always’ on smartphone is overwhelming the signaling capacity of the networks.

There are currently 150 million LTE subscribers worldwide.

Interestingly most people record these presentations using the video mode on their phones. Looks like some techno concert with everyone holding up phones!!!

Next stop…the exhibit hall!

But to remind you how glamorous this conference life is, I wanted to share a picture from my hotel room:

Previous posts:
Getting to Mobile World Congress

Tags: mobile device, mobile employee