October 6th 2009
“Is it Geneva or Asia?"
I have been to the ITU Telecom Geneva 2009 Conference this week and wanted to share with you some of my observations.
If you would like to see some pictures and videos from the conference see:
So here there are:
1. First, a few stats that were presented:
- The world has now 4.6B mobile subscribers or 63% of the world population – isn’t that amazing? Basically the developing countries are where Sweden was 10 years ago.
- 25% of the world population is connected to the Internet
- China overtook the US in not only mobile subscribers but also in broadband internet subscribers!
2. Now for the Telecom exhibition itself: Reminiscence of 2001
The previous time I have been to Telecom Geneva was in 2001 (the show is only every 4 years), and I can’t overcome the temptation to compare. No doubt the economic turn took its toll. I remember that back in 2001 the exhibition was larger and much more crowded with visitors and exhibitors (my guess maybe 3 times more).
There are several explanations to this: First and most, the Telecom market has been in decline for a while (we all know what happened with the M&As and the downturn of Nortel and others). Secondly, we are at the bottom of one of the worse economic crises in years; 3rd reason: there seem to be less of a need for people to go to shows and exhibitions with the abundance of information on the Internet, video conferences and such. Since it is also expensive and time consuming, many prefer to stay at the office.
With my fond nostalgic memories as a Telecom veteran I found this a bit sad.
On the other hand there were also great advantages as it was less stressful and you could actually have a decent chat with the exhibitors and old colleagues.
3. The Shift to the EAST:
Another striking observation is the shift from Western-world dominance to the new Asian stars. The biggest booths and the biggest show were those of Asian companies and countries: Huawei had the largest and most impressive booth; so did NTT Docomo and ZTE, China Unicom & China Mobile, the Russian booth with its magnificent musical performances, India, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Of course you still saw the major “old”players like Samsung, Fujitsu, Cisco, Microsoft, and countries that were there with many start-ups included: Spain and Belgium. But, it was rather surprising to see huge and impressive booths of countries like: Egypt , Saudi Arabia, Malasia and Nigeria. And I am talking Big booths.
Interesting enough was to see who did not show up (at least I did not see them): Ericsson, HP, Nokia, Siemens, Alcatel-Lucent, AT&T, Verizon, Telefonica. In the past, each one of these would have the biggest booth, but this year in Geneva, they decided to pass.
At times it felt like I was in Telecom Asia rather Telecom Geneva.
But it’s not only at the floor level. Everyone is talking about emerging markets as the main growth areas for manufacturers and service providers, especially with many Western countries seeing around zero GDP growth.
4. Technology:
Overall, I must say I did not see any new earth shattering technologies, but if you step back to get a bigger perspective, you realize the last 8 years have really changed the Telecom ICT market. A lot of the “buzzwords” of 2001 have now become real and available and have crossed the chasm! In these I include: Fiber to the home (FTTx) technologies, IPTV, Wireless Broadband, Centrix and hosted services, ICT services for business enterprises, Digital home networks and more.
The battle between WiMAX and LTE seems to be settling into 2 complementing positions for each: In GSM dominant territories (such as Europe) WiMAX is not able to overcome the preference to LTE as the preferred solution for the broadband mobile 4G (even though it is not quite ready yet); On the other hand, WiMAX can be quite suitable for specific vertical applications of Fixed Wireless broadband (as oppose to mobility) such as video surveillance, campus or municipality broadband networks or ad-hoc broadband projects. In emerging countries WiMAX has more success and is considered a cheaper and quicker solution for getting a nation-wide wireless network up and running.
5. The Hot Demo:
One application that really impressed me was the NTT Docomo demo of their new social networks and location based services. They had an iPhone like phone with a quality camera integrated to your social networks, a navigation GPS map and location based services database. What they demoed was seemingly trivial and intuitive, but not so easy from a technology point of view. You point the camera at any direction, while walking down the street and you see on the flat screen, on top of the live view of the street, small icons that represent whatever can be of interest to you. Some are the names of your friends or colleagues so you can send them a message with one click; others are the name of the restaurant on your left with the menu and prices so you can decide to drop in or a cloth store that has a 50% off sale, even the municipality building down the street with its opening hours. And of one of your colleagues is still working in the office on the 20th floor, you can also let him know that it’s time to go home. Some of these features are not new but the integration of all this in such a seamless way on top of the real view of the street in front of you, was only available to fighter pilots on their helmets until now. It’s no surprise as this Japanese mobile operator, with its 50M subscribers is always a trailblazer in the mobile space.
6. The Israeli viewpoint:
Finally, as an Israeli, I of course was interested to see the Israeli companies that are showing. They included: Amdocs and Comverse (who had a large booth for meetings only), Alvarion and CopperGate who had a small booth of their own. The rest of the companies were in the Israeli Pavilion: Telco systems, TTI, MTI Wireless, Runcom, IXI Mobile, IPGallery, Fibrolan and and OptiWay. The Alvarion and CopperGate invested more in their booths (then the ones in the Pavilion) and seemed to be getting more traction with visitors. Overall, I have seen better days for the Israeli Hitech industry, where the Israeli pavilion was getting the most attention.
CopperGate has got great technology and is introducing its Power lines chipset to provide home broadband triple play network over electrical lines. Alvarion just announced another win at Safaricom Kenya, for a 12M$ nation-wide WiMAX network.
So maybe things are looking up after all.
The writer is an ex veteran hitech executive, turned an entrepreneur and serves as the managing director of HitechStrategies.
For more information, you may contact:
Boaz Gruener
www.HitechStrategies.com
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