CTIA: Four areas to watch beyond the radio

Quite correctly, the majority of attention and focus at next week’s CTIA show will fall to operator plans to roll out 4G networks and services and the efforts of radio and core IP vendors to enable that mobile broadband infrastructure.

But as the mobile industry continues to swallow up everything in its path – and with the CTIA show itself following a similar trajectory – other areas merit attention too. Here are four we think that bear watching closely:

1. OSS/Test – As LTE and other technologies roll out of the labs and into field tests and ultimately into commercial deployment this year, test vendors are all over this opportunity. In recent weeks (courtesy of Mobile World Congress) and leading up to next week’s show, a number of vendors have rolled out new testing gear to simulate and examine 4G radio network, new mobile core IP core networks and the ability of service-layer traffic to traverse end-to-end.

2. Mobile Billing – Billing/charging regulars and upstarts alike will be showing wares at the show that enable operators to put in place more flexible billing and service tiering approaches. One major trend in the U.S., reflected in the vendor market, is the upswing in prepaid or hybrid payment models. On the hybrid side, the idea that users (or families of users) might go postpaid for some services while paying more ad hoc for other things -- like individual services, apps or mobile data tiers -- is helping operators drive ARPU and balance out heavy demand.

3. Activation and E-Tail/E-commerce – Another key vendor area to watch are platforms enabling both device makers, mobile operators and their various sales and distribution channels better deal with today’s more complex mobile value chain. Consumers (and mobile workers) today are getting their phones, services and applications from a variety of different places – and it’s not always the mobile operator driving the transaction or post-sales support processes.

4. IP core, Gigabit Ethernet, etc – At times you may feel like instead of walking into a wireless event you’ve wandered into an IP/networking show.  We’ve written about the evolution of the mobile core in great detail in recent weeks and months. Also notable is the widening use of IP and Ethernet in the mobile backhaul, which brings with it its own set of issues. But as tomorrow’s mobile networks (indeed all networks) flatten and IP goes end-to-end, operators are going to be fixated on getting users off their radio networks and onto the open Internet or some IP network they own as rapidly as possible.