LIVE FROM GSMA MOBILE ASIA CONGRESS 2011: Representatives from three of the world’s largest network vendors urged operators to press ahead with next-generation network deployments, and called for governments to encourage investments in infrastructure to drive GDP growth.

Speaking at a special Mobile World Live keynote session at Congress this afternoon, NSN’s Tommi Uitto, Alcatel-Lucent’s Jyoti Mahurkar-Thombre and Ericsson’s Ulf Ewaldsson pointed to areas such as smart cities, m-healthcare and public safety networks that will require operators to become more than just consumer-facing businesses. 

"If you build it, they will come," declared Mahurkar-Thombre. "We are not building things that people don’t know what to do with. It’s now about ’needs’ not ‘wants’."

"We are moving to a dense radio network that is fundamentally different to 2G and 3G which creates a variety of new opportunities for operators to go after,” said Uitto. “We have a responsibility to put technology into verticals. The current system in healthcare [for example] is awfully inefficient. Some people are protecting the old ways, but we have to use the new technologies to make healthcare more efficient.”

Ericsson’s Ewaldsson highlighted the opportunity created by what he called the “urbanisation phenomenon,” which will see 30 percent of the world’s population living in cities by 2016, but occupying just 1 percent of the world’s landmass. “This will lead to massive deployments of networks in cities to make them smarter. It has untapped potential, but we need to find the business models.”

Taking up the theme, Mahurkar-Thombre added that there will be ten “mega-cities” in Asia by 2025, classified as cities with over 25 million people. “[These cities] will have huge public safety and environmental issues [that networks can solve],” she said. “There is already a business case for governments; it’s not just altruistic, they can make huge savings.”

The vendors were all in agreement that network quality and performance was a key differentiator for operators, and that operators should work closer with their vendors moving forward.

“Operators have the most valuable asset: spectrum. And we [the vendors] are about monetising this,” said Ewaldsson. “The best way is to provide the most value to the consumer. So it comes back to who has the best network.”