Broadband it is

Mobile broadband again dominated conversations at the second day of the Mobile World Congress (MWC), currently under way in Barcelona, Spain.

According to Ericsson group CTO Hakan Eriksson, LTE, a 4G mobile broadband standard, is the way the mobile operator world is moving, including Africa's.

“There are four tracks in the mobile operator world. An operator is either an HSPA player, a CDMA player, (in China) a TDS CDMA player, or trying to get established as WiMax player. All of them will move to LTE eventually. In SA, you need to look at what phase the operators are at. They're beginning to establish an HSPA market so LTE will perhaps come later; there's no point stopping halfway on a technology road.”

The next important step for LTE will be release 10, he adds, saying it's the next evolution in higher bandwidth and bit rate. Ericsson has managed to obtain rates of 1Gbps in the lab, which it is demonstrating at the Congress, but, as Eriksson notes, it's still in the lab and products haven't been developed for it yet.

Ericsson has a vision of 50 billion connected devices, running on an LTE invincible capacity layer of hundreds of Mbps. “I think that everything that can will be connected,” Eriksson says. “I think we're at the starting point of a new era where everything will be wirelessly connected to the Internet. We need to ensure standards are available to enable those connections.”

This is important, he says, because of the innovation and development this constant connectivity will enable. “Different industries will spring up,” he says, “look at Google and the like, none of it would have happened without the Internet.”

The applications wave wouldn't have happened either, without the mobile Internet. Applications ala BlackBerry and iPhone are what really make mobile devices useful, particularly to businesses. BlackBerry is positioning itself as the Apple of the enterprise space as far as apps go. Its announcement at MWC of a free server software solution that wirelessly and securely synchronises BlackBerry phones with Microsoft Exchange or Small Business Server - Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) Express - is part of this strategy.

O'Neill is expecting three uptakes of the new BES Express package, which is offered in English only for the moment, and due to be available in March.

“The first is small and growing businesses, which can download and use it without having to invest in purchasing the solution. The second group will be corporates, which will be able to roll out to more users, and the third is corporates that want to be able to support what we call individually liable or personally liable devices - ie, those that consumers buy and want to work with the corporate system.”

What this has to do with apps is that the product gives companies access to the BlackBerry apps platform.

“For small businesses, people and resources are precious; what BlackBerry is doing is helping them to get information as it changes, whether that be cash position, inventory position, sales position. If you can match people with information in real-time, you can be a more agile business.”

Last year was huge for apps on mobile, he says, but most are disposable, “you download them because they are free and delete them because they are not very good”. BlackBerry wants to deliver “truly transformative app experiences”, by which O'Neill means delivering apps that make a difference to the way a business or governmental entity is run, such as BMW, which uses an app that lets its inventory managers see what inventory is available where, in real-time.

“Apps have to be manageable to IT teams, secure, immediate when changes happen and proven global and scalable,” he says, and that's what BlackBerry is aiming to deliver.

Tele Atlas is on a similar mission, having announced a World Cup soccer map for SA, containing “all the information” fans want, plus free APIs so developers can just get on the bandwagon too.

“The special map release allows our navigation and local search partners to deliver solutions for an enjoyable, hassle-free World Cup experience. With Tele Atlas content as the foundation, mobile and in-car navigation products will help people avoid temporary road closures, find the best walking route to stadiums and see just where they are using Tele Atlas 3D landmarks or detailed Tele Atlas 2D city maps.

“Our addition of Tele Atlas Voice Maps enables speech recognition technologies on navigation devices and provides better voice output,” says Danny Grobben, GM of Tele Atlas SA, in a statement released by the company.

* Ericsson is hosting Samantha Perry Barcelona.