Appledore Research Group attended the inaugural Mobile World Congress Americas (MWC-A), held this year at San Francisco’s Moscone Center. The main event, MWC Barcelona, is well established as the industry’s premier venue for product announcements, but more importantly for critical networking and meetings amongst engineers and executives from across the globe. By contrast, CTIA has become a regional show with a focus on phones, gadgets, trucks and tools. Not much of interest for an analyst like me who covers the software and infrastructure necessary to transform our industry to highly automated virtualized networks. MWC-A is looking up. The GSM association reported 21,000 attendees. That feels high, but the show does have a better and deeper feel. Exhibitors mostly filled both the north and south halls, but more importantly the mix of skills topics and technologies was much better. This year there were executives and experts willing and able to talk about 5G, small cell deployments, NFV, SDN, operations, management software in the end and agility of tomorrow’s networks. Nearly everyone I spoke to indicated that the quality of attendees in terms of knowledge and seniority was good. So CTIA/ MWCA is back in business. But I also said it’s getting […]