Wow, what a week for mobility! With Mobile World Congress over for another year, we’ve been left with a riveting round of new mobility developments.
Football fans will be excited to hear that EE is trialling 400Mbps 4G at Wembley. It’s also been announced that BlackBerry is Leap-ing into the 5-inch touchscreen market. Vodafone, meanwhile, will become a ‘quad’ player to satisfy all four of your basic human needs with a new foray into TV.
I’ve wrapped up my highlights from the show, alongside my pick of the week’s mobility news:
- The Vodafone Foundation was busy demonstrating the amazing power of mobility at MWC, unveiling its instant classroom which could deliver tablet-based educational-in-a-box to thousands of refugee children across Africa.
- Mobile payments were, of course, a hot topic at the show. It looks like Google is set to announce a mobile payments system at its I/O developer conference in May. Wal-Mart believes that mobile payments are ‘where the future is going to be going’ for their customers. But what might this do for B2B markets?
- The turbulent relationship between WiFi and cellular was one of the big topics at congress this year, with a number of proposals to turn competition into collaboration; Offloading to WiFi in busy public areas, or just when the cellular signal is weak. Using Cellular for upstream and WiFi for down. Or simply housing both networks in a shared box to cut costs. All worth exploring?
What were your highlights for this week? Are mobile payments on your roadmap? Which do you think will win out in the WiFi and cellular matchmaking? Share your thoughts by leaving a comment below, or tweeting @Graham Franklin or @CiscoUKI.
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