What to expect at MWC 2016

Jim Machi : Industry Insight
Jim Machi

What to expect at MWC 2016

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The biggest, baddest (and I mean that in the best way possible!) communications show on the planet, Mobile World Congress, is only 3 weeks away.  What are we to expect to see there, at least from a perspective of messaging and marketing?  Typically this is the show where overboard on marketing is the norm, as companies think that a cool unique message may actually draw a lead into their booth.

First of all, we’ll see the old guard complaining about the OTT guys.  This has been an annual occurrence for a while now but hopefully this will stop soon.  I mean, the wireless service providers give a monthly data service allowance and people use the monthly fee to actually, like, do stuff! If they want to take market from the OTT apps, they need to create their own apps, or other value-added services that will attract people. WebRTC, and even VoLTE can be great ways for them to offer their own services.

Speaking of VoLTE, with LTE deployments in full swing, we’re seeing more VoLTE deployments.  So I do believe we’ll see more VoLTE positioning than we have in the past.That means we probably will see more VoWiFi positioning as well.  Bringing voice offerings to this event makes sense.  I don’t think this will be over the top messaging, but if you look for it, you’ll see it!

You’ll definitely see all things NFV.  There will be companies positioning NFV that don’t know how to spell NFV.  They might spell it VNF but since that means something in the NFV world, it could get super confusing.  Expect to see a lot of this.

5G, 5G, 5G.  It’s here!  I don’t know where the specs are, but it’s coming soon to a theater near you!

And finally, expect to see even more about IoT.  IoT is superhot now. We might even see companies combining IoT with NFV to try and be super-duper hot.  But actually, this hype is somewhat justified. There is a lot of potential out there in the IoT space.

I’ll try and take some time out of the meetings to see what everyone is focusing on. When you’re there, you really have to go in with a plan because it’s so easy to get lost in all the noise. Be sure to schedule a meeting with us at Mobile World Congress.



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