On the 24th of August 2007 an earthquake that measured 8.0 on the Richter scale hit the coast of Peru.  The epicenter was just off the coast and located about 150 kilometers SSE of the capital city Lima. Over 150 people died. There was some damage in the capital but most was confined to the towns on the coast.

The mobile networks collapsed due to damaged network infrastructure from the quake, the loss of electrical power and the sheer volume of calls to the affected areas from concerned friends and relatives.

Even while the operators were trying to put their networks back together the Peruvian government started a public firestorm over the outages. “This should not have happened!” was the general tone. The President, Alan Garcia ordered the regulatory bodies to investigate and multi-million dollar fines were bandied about. Operator management was distracted by the public savaging and the need to respond to government officials at a time when they should have been concentrating on restoring services.

Seven months later, the regulator fined Telefonica, America Movil and Nextel a collective 2.8M Peruvian soles or just over USD300K each, an amount that maybe looked good in the newspapers but was nothing more than a face-saving slap on the wrist.

Last Saturday morning (Feb 27 2010) an earthquake measuring 8.8 hit the coast of Chile. Since the Richter scale is logarithmic, the Chilean quake was 6 times as strong, heavily damaging parts of the capital city of Santiago some 317 kilometers to the north of the epicenter. As of this morning (Mar 1, 2010), over 700 people have lost their lives.

Again the mobile networks have collapsed. Again for the same combination of reasons largely beyond the operators’ control. The most affected parts lost internet service but this was restored fairly quickly to Santiago and social networks have pumped out amateur video of the damage.

Since Sunday morning, the country’s chief regulator – Subtel’s Pablo Bello – has been answering customer complaints via Twitter, patiently explaining the reasons for the problems and passing on useful messages from other citizens. The chief problem as he reports it is the lack of electrical power to sites so he has been working to getting vital resources directed to the operators. He has not yet breathed a suggestion that the operators could have done anything in the face of a natural disaster of this magnitude.

His followers on Twitter have received constant updates on his activities to support the restoration of the network and he appealed on the Internet for more satellite telephones. Telefónica has responded. Today we got a region-by-region breakdown of the damage including estimated percentages of the number of base stations affected. Nothing keeps the public from panicking like a constant stream of information from its leadership.

On March 11^th there will be a change of government in Chile and Pablo will most likely be out of a job. The new president is center-right and Pablo is closely associated with the outgoing center-left coalition.

I don’t agree with much of what Subtel decides. It is far too quick to intervene in competitive markets for my taste.

But this kind of leadership in a crisis and clear-headed understanding of the issues demonstrates a level of executive skill that is often lacking in many businesses.

Pablo Bello deserves to get a good job somewhere when all this is over. It will be a loss to the Latin American industry if it isn’t in telecom.

Because of my current research interests, most of my meetings at MWC 2010 in Barcelona were about mobile broadband and in particular, the crunch that network operators experience as usage soars.

At his press conference, Ericsson’s CEO seemed to breeze by the issue in a “Brave New World” speech (why do these always remind me of films from the 1939 New York World’s Fair?). But it came up in meetings with the rest of his company and with every other vendor I met with from Tier 1 network vendors (Alcatel-Lucent, NSN, Huawei), to OSS vendors (Amdocs, Comverse, Convergys, Telcordia), to mobile backhaul vendors (RAD, Cambridge) and of course with Femtocell vendors (Airvana) and specialists like Allot. It was the “elephant in the living room” in a Telecom TV panel discussion I did on WiFi and it even came up in a discussion with over-the-air TV chip maker Telegent who proposes their solution as a way to off-load streaming TV traffic from the mobile network.

In every meeting the following question either arose naturally out of the discussion or I forced the issue and asked it directly:

Are dongles (mobile broadband modems) or smartphones to blame for the problem?

Hardly surprising that the answers were almost equally balanced between the one and the other i.e. both are to blame. But depending on the country, the principal blame will lie ether with smartphones or with dongles.

In developed markets like North America and Western Europe, the blame lies with smartphones. Sometimes it is bad protocols or bad settings and so sometimes just a software refresh by the device manufacturer gets things under control. But most of the damage is done by apps that constantly poll the network for new information. As the king of the app ecosystem, the Apple gets singled out but the issue isn’t the iPhone per se but the types of applications advanced smartphones like the iPhone encourage users to install.

In emerging markets like Latin America or Eastern Europe or developing Asia Pacific, the issue is dongles. Lack of adequate fixed broadband and heavy marketing by mobile operators mean that 3G wireless connections are increasingly the primary means of accessing the internet in these countries. As I have written elsewhere, that means the devices are stationary instead of in motion, connected for long periods of time instead of just for brief dips into an app or for a quick search and they are often used for heavy video or even peer-to-peer traffic. To state the obvious, this is not the kind of use-case the 3GPP standards bodies had in mind.

The solutions are many but they basically boil down to variations of the following

1. Optimization of device protocols
2. Traffic shaping and prioritization
3. Pricing schemes beyond flat-rate that encourage economic use of mobile broadband
4. Off-loading fixed-use case traffic to fixed networks
5. Waiting for LTE

Of these only “Waiting for LTE” is anything more than a stop-gap, a way to slow down traffic growth and hope that LTE arrives before the seemingly inevitable crash of 3G networks.

Just over 10 days ago, America Movil (AMX) announced a reverse takeover of parent company Grupo Carso Telecom and the consequent purchase of sister-company, the fixed line and cable TV operator Telmex.

The press was rife with speculation what this might mean. Grupo Carso majority owner Carlos Slim was quoted about convergence so the telecom press mostly went off in search of the Holy Grail of converged triple and quad everything. (Grupo Carso is the holding company for all of Slim’s investments from retailers like Sanborn’s and Sears Mexico to bank Inbursa to Grupo Carso Telecom.) The popular press – especially in Mexico – tended to focus on the consolidation of major players and wondered out loud if this was a good thing for customers or not.

Predictably – given the very high market share of both Telmex and Telcel (America Movil’s flagship) – the Mexican competitors cried for government intervention to prevent further monopolization and the Mexican government said they would study the matter.

Frankly, I thought from the beginning that this was more about financial engineering than re-engineering. Complicated transactions like this one (reverse takeover, partial or complete buyout of minority investors) are usually trying to solve some technical financial problem like weak ratios in some part of the group, inconsistent bond ratings or elimination of a holding company discount. In particular, Grupo Carso Telecom, as a holding company with no direct operating activities, could trade at a discount of up to 10% to the expected “sum of parts” valuation. It really has no “raison d’être” and so some sort of reverse takeover was inevitable. The surprise perhaps was that it took so long to happen.

More importantly Slim’s overall management style leverages very focused units with clear mandates and clear performance measurement. As I have written on other occasions, America Movil and Telmex seem blissfully unaware or unconcerned about competitors’ efforts to bundle and package fixed, mobile, broadband and TV. Telmex sells triple play offers aggressively outside of Mexico (and would in Mexico if permitted to offer TV) but so far mobile has never entered the equation even where permitted by regulation. The two companies have shown little interest in network synergies although likewise they never strike deals with strangers. Finally, merging Telmex and America Movil’s quite different corporate cultures – despite their common roots – would have been a strategic flip and probably a management distraction with little positive to show for it.

But this is just my theory and I wanted some empirical evidence. What was the “smart money” saying?

The bond rating agencies were generally delighted putting America Movil on “credit watch with positive indications” a backhanded way of saying “we think this is probably a good thing”. Bond holders are worried about cash flow. Bring together companies with significant cash flow on their own to create a single huge cash generator and they are generally happy. Bigger cash flow means less volatility and more sources to cover loan payments and bond coupons.

Equity investors were decidedly negative. It’s a rule of thumb on Wall Steet that one should “buy on rumor and sell on news”. As the chart below shows, that certainly happened: America Movil stock rose from about New Years until the announcement and then dropped like a stone: from US$50 the day before the announcement to just under US$44 today. (The red line is America Movil’s stock price indexed to its value on January 4th, 2010. The black vertical line marks the peak on January 13, 2010.)

Usually investors punish the buyer and reward the seller. In this case all three participants in the deal, America Movil (AMX), Telmex (TMX) and Grupo Carso Telecom (TELECOMA1.MX), are all affected. This shows that investors have little faith either in cost synergies or upside from convergence. All they know is that buyers – especially those attempting to restructure, especially those trying to take out minority shareholders – usually wind up overpaying.

Admittedly this has been a rough month for Telecom stocks: AT&T, Verizon and Vodafone are all down and Telefonica has received a series of bad news of the kind that makes investors decidedly nervous (steep devaluation in Venezuela, rumors of squabbles among the Telecom Italia ownership group of which Telefonica is the leading shareholder, orders for Telecom Italia to divest Telecom Argentina).

The final nail in the coffin of convergence at America Movil / Telmex came recently when Slim told reporters that they would NOT be bundling fixed and mobile in Mexico anytime soon. Clearly he was thinking about the difficult regulatory and political situation for his companies in that country, although he seemed to dismiss the bundling idea generally even in countries where he legally can offer all four services either alone or in bundles.

For all the excitement created in the press – aided and abetted by the analyst community – this was a strategy devised by lawyers and finance types. Convergence was just a bit of spin-doctoring that eventually backfired.

This morning there is an article doing the rounds about a South African Call Center that was so frustrated with data speeds from its carrier (Telkom SA) that it mounted a test. The company recorded a large database on a card, strapped the card to the leg of a carrier pigeon and had it fly from near Johannesburg to Durbin 80 km away. The pigeon took 68 minutes to fly to the coast and the whole data transfer took 2 hours 6 minutes and 59 seconds. In that time, only 4% of the file had been transferred using a direct data transfer.

Amusing as this is, looking below the numbers shows that this was one VERY BIG database. The transfer rate for USB 2 is 320Mbps. The pigeon was done after 68 minutes and let’s allow 5 minutes for fumble-fingered IT staff to unhook the data card, stick it in the PC and start the flow. That means the data transfer itself took 127-68-5=54 minutes at 320Mbps. That means 54 min*60 sec/min*320Mbps or 1.037Tb (by my calculation) was transferred.

So Telkom transferred 4% of that or 41.5Gb in 127 minutes. That’s an effective rate of just under 5.5Mbps. The article doesn’t say if this was over a dedicated line or over the Internet. Over the Internet, probably with a VPN and other security protocols, 5.5Mbps effective transfer rate is pretty good where I live.

And let’s not talk about the security issues associated with carrier pigeons. What if some passing hawk had decided the pigeon looked like lunch? Where is the AK protocol that says “Please send another pigeon” if that packet didn’t get through.

Let’s face it. Large data transfers will almost always be better done physically if that is possible. We frequently use USB-sticks to transfer files to a colleague’s laptop rather than sending an email. Whether data network transmission is faster depends on the speed of the data network, the size of the file, the physical distance to transit and the speed of the courier service.

In fact, having sat for long periods of time in congested highways around Johannesburg, what amazes me is not the data transfer speed but that the pigeon was able to average just under 80km per hour getting to Durbin. To me the story says more about carrier pigeons as a competition to courier services, than carrier pigeons as a competition to carrier data networks.

It’s no secret that media and telecoms group Grupo Clarin and the ruling “First Family” of Argentina (the Fernandez-Kirchners) don’t like each other. From best buddies a couple of years ago, the relationship has soured considerably. Clarin uses its media power in print and television to criticize the government and the government uses its control of regulatory organs to “punish” Clarin whenever it can.

Clarin bought struggling cable operator Multicanal years ago and wanted to officially merge it with their own cable operations. They received agreement from the government in December 2007 (during the “best buddy” phase) but late last week the broadcasting regulator denied the merger citing duplication of licenses.

Forgive me for pointing out my prescience but in a July 2006 report entitled “Populism and Public Services” I said that the leftward shift in Latin American governments would mean more populism and intervention in regulatory decisions. The focus of that report was mobile and I can quote a long list of items in that regard especially in interconnection pricing. Television has always been heavily regulated and the cable television industry sometimes suffered — and sometimes benefited — from a lack of separation between regulation of content and regulation of carriage.

There was a time when regulators fiercely demonstrated their independence from politics. The goal was to emulate well-regarded “technical” regulators like the FCC in the US or Offcom in the UK. Osiptel in Peru and SubTel in Chile come closest to that standard. Anatel in Brazil has struggled with Ministers of Communications in the Lula government throughout its tenure. But the rest of the region’s regulators are either under the direct control of the presidential palace (Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela) or discredited and bypassed by other more politically oriented bodies (Mexico).

Grupo Clarin deserves no sympathy. When times were good, it used its relationship with the Kirchners to further its telecom agenda. Now the worm has turned.

But I don’t like the precedent and I like the tendency even less. As I said in 2006, operators must pay more attention to their public positioning — to be seen as good corporate citizens — and must beef up their lobbying capability. Technical arguments — however well developed — are necessary but not sufficient.

In a previous blog I described how I found myself on vacation in Canada with a smartphone with a dead screen even though the rest of the phone functions worked. The big challenge was entering the PIN for the SIM when restarting.

Anticipating that I might need the directory at least, I went out to look for a cheap, replacement phone. In my Third World naiveté I had assumed that buying a replacement phone would be easy. It would have been in Bogota Colombia where I live. I guessed that the operators wouldn’t sell me one but surely all those big box retailers, independent “phone stores” and kiosks in the center of the big malls would sell an unblocked phone?

Well, no.

After asking at probably 10 stores in a very large mall in Kingston, a kind-hearted guy in an electronics store finally told me that there are no unblocked phones in Canada. The operators control 100% of distribution, even through the retail channel: new phone, new line. You can buy a prepaid phone and via the usual “friend of a friend of my brother-in-law” route you can find someone to unblock it. But the cheapest prepaid was $90 Canadian (US$80) or about the price of a mid-range prepaid phone in Bogota.

I decided I could live without the screen although eventually I did mess up the blind PIN entry and was without my phone for FOUR WHOLE DAYS until I got back home to my stash of unblocked phones.

No, I don’t think the Canadian operators should change distribution strategy to deal with the probably infinitesimal quantity of foreign visitors whose phones get damaged and need replacement. But I spend considerable time writing and speaking to emerging markets operators about opening up the retail channel for replacement phones for their own customers. It was a surprise to see an advanced economy market like Canada mired in a distribution strategy that I believe is being (slowly) abandoned by operators in the developing world. Many South Asian markets like India or Bangladesh are 100% non-operator distribution. Oi in Brazil has said they will only sell SIM cards.

And it is not just that “other markets are doing it”. I see no point in subsidizing replacement phones. I see no need to control 100% of the distribution channel. More importantly, I see no need to swell subscriber ranks with inactive phones.

I assume that most people who are forced to buy a prepaid phone when all they want is a replacement just chuck the SIM in a desk drawer and forget it. At best they use any included credit and then chuck it in the desk drawer or the garbage.

We have calculated that, depending on the operator’s disconnect policy, something like 30% of subscriber ranks can be inactive mainly because of unused SIMS from prepaid phones bought for replacement. This sends the wrong signal to the market, to the regulator, and to investors: penetration is overstated, ARPU and MOU are understated.

Subsidization — that drives the need to block phones — also sends the wrong message to consumers who have a distorted view of what a phone is really worth. An iPhone isn’t worth US$99. It is worth something like US$300-400.

Operators in all markets — emerging and developed and even Canada — should encourage the development of a non-subsidized retail channel for replacement. It won’t be easy but we have to get there.

On the way from Toronto airport to my mother’s house near Kingston Ontario, the screen on my smartphone went completely black.
The phone itself was fine — I could make and receive calls — but the screen was useless. This meant I couldn’t use the directory or send SMS’s. This wasn’t a terrible limitation since I was on vacation away from the country where I live. Most of my directory entries are local and my operator offers limited SMS roaming services (which should be the subject of another blog). I use a separate device for email so I could stay connected to the office — and therefore not really on vacation I suppose.
The really big issue was that the battery indicator was an on-screen display and I couldn’t see that I was running out of power. Worse, when I found out the hard way that the battery was dead– the phone simply didn’t work — and I got the phone recharged, I couldn’t see how to put in the PIN code for my SIM. Punching the code was fine but what was the button to say “ENTER”? Was it the big button in the center? Was it one of the soft keys? If so, which one? The first time this happened I got lucky and hit the right key. Of course I had no way of knowing if the code had been accepted, except to make a call. And of course, I forgot which key I had hit to make it work.
One week later I am sitting in a church waiting for a wedding to begin. An usher comes by and politely asks everyone to turn off their phone. Unable to see the menu, I couldn’t just set the phone on SILENT or even shut it off. So I took out the battery.
And immediately regretted it: what key had I hit to accept the PIN?
I was pretty sure it was either the middle button or the left soft key and so I tried them both. Sure enough I didn’t get it right on the first two attempts. Or even the third. By this time, I was sure the SIM was now blocked and so further attempts would be fruitless. I took out the battery and put the phone in my suitcase. Now the problem was “In which drawer was the card from my operator with the code (PUK) that unblocks a blocked SIM?”
I´m not exactly sure what the lesson from this is. Don’t put a PIN on your SIM? Memorize all possible button configurations? Don’t carry a smartphone when travelling? Always carry a spare unblocked phone? Carry the PUK card in your wallet at all times? Stop worrying about this nonsense and enjoy a few days without a cell phone?
This is the first time in I-can’t-remember-how-many-years that a phone screen has gone blank and that was the only problem with the phone. Usually if the screen is blank, there is a more serious problem. This is NOT a high probability event that needs strategizing by users, operators or vendors. But the experience did point out once again how central these devices have become in our lives and how dependent we are on the displays to make them work.
Besides the wedding, one of the reasons for my trip to Canada was to help my mother who has gone partially blind. It is supposed to be temporary but she has to plan for the worse. The family spent several days putting textured contact strips on the stove controls, coloring the buttons on her landline phone so she could see the SEND button, and creating a very large print paper directory so that she could find the entries.
My problems with using a phone with a broken display were an illustration — albeit very trivial — of what my mother and all sight-challenged people have to overcome every day.

I think one of the first reports I ever wrote for Yankee Group six years ago commented on Latin American executives who still get their secretaries to type their emails. Maybe we have moved on a bit but some habits are hard to break. Executives may actually use their Blackberrys but now the issue is “who else gets to use one?”

RIM invited a number of analysts to their annual Wireless Enterprise Symposium event in Orlando. This event brings together enterprise clients — lots of CIOs — operators and developers to hear the latest announcements and pick up on the latest mobile enterprise (and Blackberry) trends.

The expected crowd was around 5,000 and it certainly looked like the organizers achieved their objective. I didn’t get an official count of Latin American attendance but the US Immigration official at Miami airport told me on Monday that he had seen several come by that morning for the same event. Since the Miami immigration hall is huge, that must mean lots of Latin American attendees. Certainly I frequently heard Spanish and Portuguese being spoken in the corridors.

RIM set up an informal roundtable for some LA-oriented analysts (including your correspondent) to talk to Latin American developers who were attending the show. There were the usual complaints about operators (can’t live with them; can’t live without them) and a couple of complaints about RIM but surprisingly few. These were passionately devoted Blackberry developers (at least those that RIM assembled for the roundtable).

The surprise was that they still reported some client prejudices about handhelds and enterprise mobility that I thought were going away at least among large enterprise clients:

·         “Blackberrys are only for executives.”

·         “I can’t give something that expensive to a worker.”

·         “These things are only for email and workers don’t need email.”

·         And my personal favorite… “I can’t give my subordinate a device that’s the same as mine or costs the same.”

(The later opens up a lively debate about whether RIM should introduce a “bargain basement” Blackberry to pander to this prejudice or stick to their strategy until these dinosaur-managers come around — or get wiped out!)

The cases weren’t isolated and they certainly weren’t exclusively small companies. Some developers reported that SMB’s were MORE open to enterprise mobility but this tended to be in smaller markets where large companies are more likely to be either branches of multinationals with no local power or entrenched family businesses.

Certainly it was clear despite evangelizing by vendors and thousands of PowerPoint slides by the analyst community, broad-scale enterprise mobility isn’t yet a business decision rather than some sort of emotional status-related decision. But this shouldn’t have us give up hope (nor stem the PowerPoint flow — analysts have to eat too).

Prejudice can only be cured by education.

Frankly, this is a role — and an opportunity — for the operators.

In a recent Yankee Group report on Nokia’s Service Strategy, I mentioned said that some handset manufacturers could pursue a similar strategy and some could not. I said Research In Motion (RIM) aka Blackberry was one of those who could be selling applications but wasn’t doing so extensively. Last week the analyst community was given a chance to peak under the hood of RIM’s applications strategy, and the hot topic was the announcement of Blackberry App World.

Whereas I could only find just under 90 applications for sale on the RIM / Blackberry website, the company says there are “thousands” available through third-party developers and the new App World is designed to facilitate their distribution and sale. The revenue split with developers is very attractive but the company will not discuss — for obvious reasons — the splits they are negotiating with operators. Giving about 10 points more than usual to developers, RIM says they are not trying to make a huge profit on the site but rather to encourage applications and the relevance of the Blackberry to end users.

In the logic of my recent paper, RIM is subsidizing the developer side of the two-sided Blackberry application market to encourage the supply of applications and by so doing, encourage the development of the Blackberry operating system itself.

The launch will come “soon” but for now only in the US, UK and RIM’s home market of Canada. Asia Pacific is the next priority (no date yet) and other regions will follow.

Certification of applications will have two steps: certification of the developer and certification of the particular application. RIM says this should take less than 10 days but this still means a careful certification process and so not a rapid buildup of titles. But given Blackberry’s core franchise of users perhaps an Apple App Store kind of title list is unnecessary.

The company expects most applications to be enterprise oriented but App World will be designed for individual purchases not for CIO’s licensing their entire Blackberry base. This reflects the trend we at Yankee Group call the “Consumerization of the Enterprise”. Enterprise-oriented smartphones like the Blackberry have to serve two masters: the CIO AND the individual user.

Now the stands are all empty / Let the roadies take the hall / Pack it up and tear it down / They’re the first to come and last to leave / Working for that minimum wage / They’ll set it up for another fair. (With apologies to Jackson Browne, The Load Out)

There is always something sad about Thursday afternoon at the Mobile World Congress. Many of the Europeans have already left so they can sleep in their own beds and a lot of non-Europeans flew home in the morning. The big parties are on Wednesday night and so there is much water and aspirin consumption on Thursday morning. The crowds thin out. Meetings are more subject to last minute cancelations. Everyone complains of sore feet and even the CBOSS dancing girls seem dispirited, overtired or both.

Like Jackson Browne’s song the mood is wistful and becomes reflective: What did we learn? Where is the industry going? Where did I leave my best scarf?

Phil Marshall has already given his take so I’ll pick up some different themes.

Although the stands were still big and shiny, Nokia still had its party and top restaurants couldn’t be had without a reservation, the recession is biting and could bite very deep. We asked vendors what they were hearing about CAPEX budgets and the range was wide but universally scary. Nokia Siemens says revenues will be down 10% in 2009 but since about 40% of their revenues come from relatively stable services, equipment will drop a lot more. There were a cluster of forecasts around 15% lower CAPEX than 2008 (consistent with NSN) but another cluster around 30 to 50% lower budgets. Yankee Group lowered our subscriber growth forecasts by an average of 50% and so growth-oriented CAPEX might also drop in that range.

But not all CAPEX categories will be affected equally. Short-term payoff investments like capacity or coverage might still make it past the sharp-pencil brigade. But despite the optimism of application platform vendors, I think boards will be very skeptical of the promise of future revenues and be focused on the reality of current cost cutting and hoarding cash.

More scary news comes from dramatic reports of data traffic growth from mobile broadband. Normally, increasing data traffic is thought to be a good thing, but traffic is growing very much faster than revenues. Flat-rate plans and – for some operators – the misguided pursuit of fixed broadband subscribers are pressuring profits and cash. The industry doesn’t need new mobile broadband customers to get turned off by lousy service quality, shareholders can’t fund capacity expansion indefinitely and peer-to-peer users would probably fill in the new capacity anyway. Regulators stand by to close off solutions like choking back on throughput or capping downloads. This paragraph does not end with “Fortunately the solution is …” because frankly, the industry is only just starting to recognize and define the problem.

Still there was some positive news especially for emerging markets. Vendors are putting the unique characteristics of these high-growth but low-ARPU markets front and center with targeted solutions like low-power base stations which – oh, by the way – also happen to be appealing to cost-cutting developed-market operators.

I heard the usual “There’s nothing new!” complaints about devices but haven’t we done all the variations of slide/flip/rounded-corners-on-candy-bars that we can? I saw innovative software and chipsets that will bring the mobile internet experience a lot closer to the fixed internet experience. And I saw attempts to solve the “Poor Man’s PC” problem that show great promise.

Although there were visibly (and at times thankfully) fewer attendees (officially 47,000), vendors reported much more productive meetings meaning that the decision-makers came and the mere gawkers stayed home.

More good news: A nasty rumor that the MWC was moving back to Cannes (NO!!!) from beautiful and accessible Barcelona proved to be false, at least for 2010.

AND I found my good scarf at the bottom of my brief case under a bunch of glossy handouts from the mobile multimedia companies in Hall 7.