And yet another Mobile World Congress has come and gone. The 2016 event saw record-breaking attendance, and while a public transportation strike threatened to throw a wrench into the works, MWC was a great success – for the ecosystem itself, and for the Wireless Broadband Alliance.
Monday morning kicked off with our CEO, Shrikant Shenwai, together with Mike Zeto, GM – Smart Cities, AT&T Mobility and Vijay Sammeta, CIO, City of San Jose, CA, being featured on Mobile World Live TV to discuss Smart Cities and highlighting the role of the WBA and the Connected City Advisory Board in formulating City Blueprints on developing a Connected City. On the same topic, an interview with Shenwai was featured in the MWC Show Daily, highlighting the need for public private partnership (PPP) models and interoperability.
WBA CEO Shrikant Shenwai chats with CNBC’s Arjun Kharpal at this year’s Mobile World Congress.
Monday afternoon featured a large panel discussion as part of the MWC Conference Programme, now featuring the topic of Smart Cities Sustainability. Again, emphasis was drawn on the need to develop PPP models and blueprints to support interoperability and convergence between different network technologies.
But not everything was about Connected Cities, as 5G also took center stage at MWC.
Despite the fact that 5G standards are still under development, several companies have started to develop pre-standard products to showcase the potential of 5G. In an interview with CNBC, Shenwai gave his comments and thoughts on how 5G would continue to develop and which benefits consumers can expect to see from 5G developments.
Amongst the “noise” around 5G were some very interesting comments made by Nokia and Intel on the position of Wi-Fi in 5G. “Wi-Fi has become a de-facto service and needs to be integrated into 5G” and “The (Wi-Fi) standard provides a very important eco-system…and carries more than 50% of today’s wireless traffic…and will also include support for IoT applications for the future.” It is becoming more and more apparent that the WBA and the rest of the unlicensed wireless ecosystem need to seriously engage with the 5G discussions on standards that are taking place.
This year’s MWC also saw the first public appearance of the MuLteFire Alliance, which is developing an LTE based technology for small cells operating in the unlicensed spectrum. The technology aims to boost performance and improve indoor coverage, while ensuring that there is no disruption to the existing Wi-Fi ecosystem.
Last but not least, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg again underwrote the objectives of our World Wi-Fi Day, by emphasizing that the industry should “not overlook the task of connecting some four billion people that still don’t have access to the web” and highlighting the role of Internet.org in achieving this.
Upcoming MWC Video Interviews
We had the pleasure of conducting several executive video interviews at Mobile World Congress with some truly influential people in the wireless industry, such as Ralph de la Vega, CEO of AT&T, Jahangir Mohammed of the recently acquired Jasper Wireless, Andile Ngcaba, president of Wi-Fi Forum South Africa, Alex Sinclair, CTO of GSMA and many more. We’ll be releasing these over the coming days, so stay tuned!
