At the 'Mobile 2024' session at the recent GSMA Mobile World Congress held in Barcelona last month, five companies pitched for the title of 'most innovative company'. In previous years, pitches have come from companies with a mix of backgrounds, from noise cancellation technology to carrier billing.
This year all five companies were showing off their apps. And the other companies that were invited to demonstrate, Blippar and DTS, which delivered augmented reality on smart glasses and enhanced sound respectively, had no direct connection with network operators.
The lack of an operator presence in a session looking at mobile in the next ten years inevitably and predictably triggered the predictable refrain that operators are little more than "dumb" pipes.
I would concur that network operators' core competence is fundamentally about delivery of connectivity via the pipes we call the mobile network: but I would not describe the network as "dumb".
Today's networks are more complex than ever (but simpler than they will be). They are an amalgam of multiple, individually complex networks operating at different frequencies within radio spectrum. These networks are used to deliver calls, photos, messages and far more out of thin air. They work with a wider variety of devices, from basic feature phones to television cameras. They know exactly where you are, so wherever you are you can receive the one call that's destined for your phone out of the five billion devices in use.
This is no mean task, and engineering a national network across a range of terrains, and keeping this working, is challenging, and always will be.
This is why collectively mobile networks are able to generate over a trillion dollars in revenues: they deliver significant value. And they are likely to continue doing so for the foreseeable future. It is hard to deliver a mobile network. Our collective dependence on mobile networks is not likely to disappear any time soon.
So going back to the session: why is it that no network technology featured among the contenders? One reason is because explaining a small but significant advance to a crowd of 1,200 attendees is hard, particularly within the three minutes allocated. Does it matter that there were no network technologies on show? Consider this: the factor common to all the apps being demonstrated – from the winner Wibbitz to health app uMotif, is that all depend on connectivity; without this, apps would be not just dumb but utterly pointless.
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