What I'm Seeing at MWC 2016 Right Now

Jim Machi : Industry Insight
Jim Machi

What I'm Seeing at MWC 2016 Right Now

IoT waves.png

Mobile World Congress is like the Super Bowl of the mobile industry.  The crowd comes hoping to see a great game, the players take the field and perform, over the top outings are the half-time show, and the crazy marketing are the commercials.  Some are great, and some are not.  On the marketing side, what I expected to see, I saw.

NFV is a huge buzzword here, as I expected.  I still don’t know if most of the vendors know the difference between a VNF and NFV, but at least they have the three letters right.  And I saw “demonstrations” of 5G. 

I knew there was going to be a lot of IoT but I definitely saw more IoT messaging than even I expected.What I was sort of ready for, but not really, in what is possibly a new trend, was the marriage of IoT and Real Time Comms.  Some people question this marriage because IoT is about things connecting, and real-time comms are about communications in real-time. They’re in two very different fields. But I always saw the potential power of marrying these together. 

For example, cars that can talk to you, and health monitoring devices with communications interfaces. They talk to other devices, other networks, and they talk to you (which would require real-time communications). In the picture above, you’ll see exactly that in the 3rd wave of Internet of Things. 

And at this Mobile World Congress, because of this marriage and because of IoT, I am seeing more and more non-traditional vendors showing up than ever before, because “connected things” use mobile to connect. 

That is my overall view of the first day of Mobile World Congress. Stay tuned for more updates on Mobile World Congress on the Dialogic blog



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