Mobile World Congress approaches

As February hoves into view our minds turn to Mobile World Congress and sunny Barcelona. But things will be different this year. Since Barcelona won the bid to keep on hosting the congress, the show is moving a few miles down the road to the other Fira, which promises, you’ll be glad to hear, better catering and greater ease of locomotion from stand to stand. It is also really hard to get to for all those that aren’t staying out there, in the wilds near the airport.

But this is only a small cosmetic change in what the new Mobile World City has to offer. BCN – for that is what the locals abbreviate it to, not Barca: that's the footy team – is to be the centre of excellent for mobile all year round. The plan is that congress and a mobile music festival in September will offer huge one off events for the business and the consumer, respectively, while the city will play host all year to a series of mobile development programmes and a mobile exhibition.

All this goes to make BCN the Mobile World Capital, in the words of the GSMA, and is a much needed boon to the Spanish economy. It also might shift the centre of gravity of the mobile world firmly to the Iberian peninsular.

But what all this really hopes to achieve is to create a much more co-operative ecosystem for mobile development, something that everyone in the telemedia industry should welcome.

For MNOs, the industry stands at a crossroads. The risk of becoming dumb pipes hangs ever present. Meanwhile m-commerce is becoming the real raison d’etre for mobile use among consumers – with payments set to be the real battle ground. But what is painfully lacking is any real co-operation between the operators to make it happen.

For a proper user experience, networks have to work together to offer seamless cross network services. For retailers looking to embrace mobile commerce, costs and prices and payments have to be the same across all networks. Yet agreement is so very slow.

And the result is that other third party services are coming along that are going to steal a lot of this business from the operators. Hell, even the banks are working more closely together and more rapidly to make mobile payments works. One has to wonder what the role of the operators is actually going to be? Just maybe dumb pipes?

But the initiative in BCN aims to help put a stop to that, by changing the mindset of how the whole mobile industry works. It is, of course, a massive undertaking, but get it right and mobile could be transformed.

So, while you strap hang on a bus out of town to the new Fira with a banging hangover, just remember that it is all for a very good reason: the future of mobile.