LIVE FROM GSMA MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012: Mobile operators have been criticised by some for their slow response to the cloud but, for the CEO of Deutsche Telekom, the cloud represents a new opportunity for MNOs to make the most of their assets and change their place in the value chain.
 
In his Tuesday keynote at Mobile World Congress, Rene Obermann strongly refuted any suggestion that operators would continue to provide the “dumb pipe” in a cloud world, saying that the more complex demands from different cloud services ranging from M2M to the “Internet of Things” will lead to a new way of evaluating connectivity.
 
“You cannot do that with a dumb pipe,” said Obermann. “Connectivity matters,” and is the critical element in the whole cloud equation.
 
Obermann said mobile can therefore no longer be just “best effort”; adding “bigger pipes” is also not the solution to the rising tide of data. He said the new connectivity requirements mean that networks need to be intelligent in order to provide a quality of experience that is suited to the service. However, he was careful to add that this did not mean that networks should be discriminatory.
 
“The pipe cannot be just dumb in times of capacity constraints,” he said. “The smart pipe is the future…with different levels of service connectivity,” and the ability to manage traffic.
 
Obermann was clearly treading delicately around the issue of “discriminatory” networks, but fellow keynoter Ben Verwaayen, CEO of Alcatel-Lucent, was a little more blunt: “I am stunned by the fact that we have to say non-discriminatory in this industry; it’s ridiculous,” he said. “This market will have to develop a form of choice for the consumer on quality. Without it, this market can simply not do all the things we need it to.”