catwalk09

This week I travelled to the beautiful town of Karlskrona in Sweden to attend and speak (have a look at the slides) at the Telecomcity CatWalk09. There were many topics covered at this industry event, here is a highlight of the ones that I found most relevant:

MOCOM 2020

MOCOM 2020 is a think tank looking into what mobile media will look like in 2020. I was very impressed by the video they screened at Catwalk09, and I found it to be quite inspiring. Here it is:

4G – Broadband for the whole of Sweden

Magnus Zetterberg – CTO, Telenor Sverige- presented his vision of Broadband in all homes through 4G Mobile broadband.

Sweden has a geographical challenge that makes it difficult to reach all homes with fiber/cable-based broadband.

Telenor is planning to address this problem by providing a 4G network with enough bandwidth phase out fix/DSL lines across the country. They aim to achieve it by sharing their allocated frequency set with another mayor Swedish operator, this will provide them with enough network spectrum to ensure high download speeds for all their subscribers.

App Shops

It became quite obvious during the 2 days, that platform fragmentation is creating a new breed of obstacle for developers – The App Shop. With every manufacturer, operator and large development company racing to compete/replicate the Apple App Store, cross platfrom developers are facing a distribution channel nightmare for their products.

Although no generic solution was offered at Catwalk, I was pretty pleased that this validates the Symbian Horizon efforts. Definitely we are on the right track!

Good times ahead

I came back from Catwalk09  excited about what the future of mobile communications will bring to Europe within the next few years. Also, pleasantly surprised by the “early adopter” attitude of operators in the scandic region. All and all, well worth the trip!