Backhaul, billing, stolen femtocells and a NFC-enabled key ring were among the whispers in the aisles on day one of the Mobile World Congress.
Over two thirds of customers trialing femtocells in Norway refused to return their kit following a year-long test, Network Norway revealed. The firm used the statistic to talk up the launch of commercial services in Norway.
The Norwegian experience bodes well for Russian carrier MegaFon, which aims to launch a femtocell network on NEC kit “later this year.”
Huawei unveiled Any Connection, a mobile broadband backhaul product it claims eases the migration from 3G and HSPA to LTE, and demoed its heterogeneous network product.
Orga Systems pulled no punches when announcing its convergent billing product has passed muster with IBM, describing as “outstanding” the ability to add capacity for 140 million pre-paid accounts by fitting new blades alone, and latency of 3.9 milliseconds.
ZTE shipped its whole range of LTE base stations to the event, including prototype LTE Advanced kit it states is the first in the world to comply with coordinated multipoint transmission (CoMP) standards. Peak download rates of 1Gbps were hit during demos.
Mobile financial services outfit Fundamo outlined plans to market NFC-based retail payments and related services in emerging markets, through a partnership with contactless network provider accells.
Another potential boost for NFC came from Morphos, which unveiled a key fob that uses Wi-Fi to connect mobile phones to the payment technology developed with Simlink.
Aircom International scored a high-level win with a contract to provide performance management tools to AT&T.
Social networking was handled by Gemalto, which is embedding Facebook on SIM cards to enable mobile access without a data connection or subscription.
And LG Electronics fought the corner of 3D with a deal offering instant YouTube uploads for videos watched or shot on its new range of glasses-free 3D smartphones.