Nokia and Huawei in Mobile World Congress

Mobile World Congress, being held in Barcelona from 24th Feb till today [check this page for the latest report from BBC], is decidedly one of the most prestigious and sought after annual congregation for both technologists and Industrialists across the world. Every leading vendor brings its latest inventions here be it a technology proof or a product, to make its presence known to the world. While there were different themes, I was particularly interested in how the leading vendors are positioning their products in respect to LTE (4G) and more curiously how they factor emerging markets like India and China in their strategy. 

As for LTE adoption is concerned, MWC, 2013 has very little to showcase. LTE still is a high-speed data service for the most handset vendors. I instead tried to find what Nokia people are talking about.

Nokia, as always, an interesting component in cellular wireless Industry.  Not the least because of the way it brought itself down from its unique leadership position in the worldwide handset market with windows strategy. In the changed market scenario, when most of its competitors from GSM days [before 3G], like Motorola, Sony-Ericsson have given up the race for the leading handset makers, Nokia still is trying its best to remain relevant. As per the recent survey, the top two positions in the handset vendors table are well-secured by Apple and Samsung. The top two OS in the race for smartphone OS are clearly Android and iOS. The dominance of Android and iOS is so overwhelming [check Apple and Google duopoly] that Blackberry positions itself aspiring for No.3 positions [CEO Thorsten Heins famously told reporters at the company's BlackBerry Jam developer event that BlackBerry 10 has a "clear shot at being the Number three platform in the market."- source: Neowin.]. Nokia's Windows-phone strategy is at best a limping response to the challenge, albeit slowly pulling some revenues for Nokia.

 So I was curious what Mr. Elop would say in the MWC. Mr. Elop predictably sounded both ambitious and optimistic in numbers of interviews with virtually all media representatives in MWC. You can watch him below in the Bloomberg interview [courtesy Bloomberg] 

Mr. Elop thinks Lumia strategy has started to pay dividends and his winning strategy is to make Lumia platform accessible to low-cost mobile market such as India. He appears to have claimed that Nokia  would be the first in the market to make advanced features, that are only available in high-end smartphones, also available for cost-conscious customers. He mentioned about Nokia's Asha series of phone in India in one such interview.      

 Anyone who has been following the industry may beg to disagree with him. Fact is it was Samsung who first adopted the strategy of creating one platform for all its phones and tablets and then executed it to finesse. Once Samsung Galaxy proven itself as a good competition for high-end smartphone and tablet segment, Samsung aggressively pursued cost-conscious market by launching numbers of low-end galaxy-based phones, delivering popular features like wireless LAN, Facebook app, dual-SIM, touch phone to multitudes of India at affordable price [Trust me Samsung did not pay me to write this!]. Nokia's Asha was at best a delayed response to Samsung. The question is whether same strategy with Lumia will deliver bigger success for Nokia. There is no doubt that notwithstanding the loss of reputation of Nokia as the most sturdy phone maker in last two years, Nokia still is a force in the Indian handset market.

Huawei Ascend P2: courtesy PC Advisor

  I, however, was particularly intrigued the way Huawei has been slowly becoming a serious brand in the handset market and cranking up newer products. In fact Huawei claimed to have brought out world's fastest smartphone with the launch of Ascend P2 which is its latest LTE-based Android smartphone making it position against both Samsung Galaxy and Nokia Lumia. [ you can read complete review from PC advisor here]. Silently Huawei has got its new LTE chipsets as well as brought out a new platform over Android following Samsung. Huawei in fact has been pushing its low-cost CDMA phones to India for quite some time and if one has to go by the buzz, people like them; they are cheap, light, sturdy and provide nice UI. I would expect Huawei to be lot more aggressive in Indian market when LTE takes the dominant position in India.

Indian Mobile market is one of the most attractive segment for the handset vendors; almost all of them agree that ignoring 250+ million strong customer base in India would be a strategic suicide. Fortunately beside being cost-competitive, vendors hardly need any large customization to their phones unlike Chinese or Japanese market. All that the Indian consumers want are proven technology and a sturdy and nice-looking phone. As far as LTE is concerned, as I mentioned in my last post, the technology  needs another year to mature to replace the 2G for voice. So Apple, Blackberry and Nokia can afford to be slow with LTE -based product release but there is no doubt that in about two years when 4G replaces both 2G and 3G, chinese Huawei and ZTE will figure prominently in world-wide handset vendors table.
My previous posts on Nokia handset strategy:

• 2012 post on Nokia's business performance
• 2011 February post on Nokia's new mobile OS strategy
• Nokia at the inflection point

India one step closer to pan-India 4G adoption

Reuter reports that Indian Government has taken a decision this Monday to allow all the wireless broadband airwave holders to support voice over 4G by paying a one time fee of $306 million. This will remove the last regulatory hurdle to deploy LTE as the technology for both data and voice. Three large players, Reliance, Vodaphone and Airtel are expected to go full-steam in this year with LTE. For voice however, technology is still in the catch-up mode. Ideally, with LTE, the bearer protocol for the voice was expected to be voice over LTE. But voice over LTE still has some distance to cross before the technology can mature to substitute existing circuit-switched voice service provided by GSM. This is a case where market is moving faster than the technology.  For countries like India, who do not have large technology R&D investment in LTE or 3G wireless, market driving technology is in fact a boon. India does not need to follow a particular country (e.g. USA) or a technology, it has the freedom and latitude to follow the best of the breed. Fact is although GSMA adopted voice over LTE as the bearer protocol service for LTE technology in 2010, world's first ever commercial deployment of voice over LTE happened only in last quarter of 2012 when SK Telecom of South Korea launched the service with Ericsson and LG as the technology partner in September, 2012 [news announcement].
Operators in US and Europe have been trying with alternatives to voice over LTE as an interim solution but none of them match the spectral efficiency that VoLTE can provide. Heavyreading article provides a good summary on the alternatives that operators are trying for providing voice service over LTE. I have pasted their summary table here for those who are hard-pressed for time.
 As one can imagine, lack of clear choice impacts not only the network readiness but the handsets too. Huawei spokesperson stated last year that the aim is to bring voLTE enabled handset by 2013. Operators definitely want a single IP-based voice delivery solution, for LTE, which can simultaneously deliver voice, video and data so that it becomes credible deterrent against existing VoIP service like Skype. So there is no doubt that all the handset manufacturers would focus their resources to bring out fully voLTE capable handsets but challenge of interworking with multiple evolving technologies can be a serious hurdle. The hurdle can be somewhat reduced if the handset manufacturers work together. For a service to function smoothly, handsets from different manufacturers must agree on a single common procedure for voice call transfer, or voice/video call switch or roaming service. Some of them are part of the standard, but many are design artefacts which handset manufacturers must settle between themselves. For the first generation voLTE smartphones [from LG or ZTE] call switch quality appear to be satisfatory but power consumption appear to be on higher side [source]. Fallout of all these is, we may have to wait till the end of 2013, to see fully functional voLTE handsets from leading handset manufacturers like Samsung, Nokia or Sony-Ericsson. Indian operators have another hurdle. Indian operators have adopted LTE-TDD, as opposed to LTE-FDD that European operators adopted, following China and other Asian countries [check my previous posts]. This may mean that Indian operators may have to depend on Huawei or ZTE to bring the first set of handsets for Indian LTE voice/video consumers.Incidentally Airtel last year launched LTE multimode based Huawei smartphone, in India, that actually use 3G CS fallback alternative for voice calls [first alternative in the table]. In other words they do not support VoLTE yet.
So what does all these mean to you? If you are a technology enthusiast looking forward to buy a 4G smartphone, it means that you perhaps would like to wait till the end of the year when voLTE enabled handsets will be launched. Otherwise you are quite likely to replace your handset with another 4G handset in 2014.