Having attended the Mobile World Congress, the largest global telecoms conference (attended by 49,000 visitors from 200 countries) in Barcelona this year, the following 10 key trends and developments came to the fore.

The 10 major developments at MWC were:

1. Groupe Speciale Mobile Association (“GSMA”) and about 15 major operators have signed up to create an application planet where there will be a common platform that will allow application developers in the Symbian world to operate across networks and geographies (i.e. a challenge to Apple’s dominance in the apps space);
2. The affordability of smartphones are becoming a reality, with estimates that by 2015 approximately 50% of mobile phones will be smartphones. This will require larger amounts of backhaul bandwidth for the mobile networks. Once smart phones reach 70% of the market, they will be the single largest access device to the internet;
3. Mobile operators see device-to-device connectivity as the next revenue opportunity in the mobile space. These data flows are viewed as a mechanism to bolster declining voice ARPUs;
4. Green technology, especially in the data centre environment and the growth of cloud computing, is a major trend that will accelerate in the coming years;
5. The growth of smart devices on one side and sophisticated cloud computing on the other will drive growth in “intelligent pipes” in between them. This reinforces the case for increased access to fibre optic networks;
6. Here is a thought, as you go to a restaurant to have coffee or food when you pay with your credit card and you are given a receipt. Use your smartphone with high-resolution camera to take a photo of the receipt and store it or send it to your private data vault. Intelligent systems in the cloud will then collate and reconcile receipts and expense claims automatically.
7. In my view LTE is 3+ years away. No handsets are widely available. While people are talking about LTE trials, large scale deployments are still some way off, however, the hype is here. This is another reason why we need backhaul bandwidth now so that when LTE is implemented there are enough pipes to support this infrastructure;
8. Africa will continue to use mobile devices as the primary means to access the cloud;
9. Africa must develop its own applications that are specific to Africa’s needs. Including its own social network platforms that will address Africa’s unique lifestyles;
10. In conclusion, the communications ecosystem is evolving, but it is not clear which organisations will be absorbed by black holes or collide with each other to create new planets in our ecosystem. The ICT ecosystem at one level and the DNA of organisations and companies at another, will fundamentally change in the next ten years.