Rob Conway: machine-to-machine services will
connect 50 billion devices in the next 15 years
Rob Conway strides his new office in the heart of central London. The dome of St Paul’s Cathedral is hidden by another large building, but otherwise he can see landmarks of the city such as the Tate Modern art gallery, the Big Ben clocktower and the London Eye — the big wheel — from his new headquarters just off Fleet Street, where the old media used to be.
Conway has run the GSM Association, the most influential organisation in telecoms today, fixed as well as mobile, for a decade and transformed it from a standards-oriented association into something which is influencing the future structure and infrastructure of the industry.
With good reason, Global Telecoms Business named Conway as the most powerful person in the industry in our Power100, published in September — and Conway happily includes this information in his biography on the GSMA website.
So who is Conway and what are his plans for the organisation which brings together almost 800 of the world’s mobile operators in 200 countries and regions?
Its power lies in its board, created in 2003, says Conway: “We reformed the association with a board of top executives to run it on a corporate model, as a business serving the members.”
That board is probably the most international group of top managers in industry: Conway plus 24 men and one woman from across the world, Africans, Americans, Arabs, Chinese, Europeans, Indians and Japanese. Each of the 13 largest operator groups has one board member and the other 12 are drawn from smaller, independent operators across the world.
That’s a powerful network: in one room, senior executives from China Mobile, AT&T, América Móvil, Vodafone, Zain, VimpelCom, Orange and Telefónica can discuss issues affecting the industry.
“We have business plans and classic corporate goals,” says Conway. “It puts discipline and rigour into the system.”
Under the new system, the GSMA has expanded hugely in the past decade. In 1999 the income, mainly from membership fees, was £7 million. Today members contribute £17 million but the association’s income is close to £80 million.
Barcelona and Hong Kong
Much of the extra comes from Mobile World Congress, the vast conference and exhibition that it runs every February in Barcelona — with a smaller version every November in Hong Kong.
MWC — previously called 3GSM — was originally run under licence by Informa, but the GSMA took back ownership several years ago: “It’s one of our largest revenue generators,” admits Conway.
The 2008 event attracted 55,000 people to Barcelona, though the recession cut attendance to 47,000 in 2009. After the decline of both Supercomm in Chicago and the International Telecommunication Union’s Geneva event, it is almost certainly the biggest telecoms event in the world.
It’s too early to say how big the February 2010 MWC will be. “We’re being a bit more conservative,” says Conway, though he says support is “really solid” and “ahead” of the reduced business plan.
“We have an incredible line-up of speakers,” he adds. “There are world-class names asking to speak.”
There are, of course, the usual suspects from the industry — Ben Verwaayen of Alcatel-Lucent, Chang Xiaobing of China Unicom, Guo Ping of Huawei, Tadashi Onodera of KDDI and César Alierta of Telefónica. But there’s also Eric Schmidt of Google — a significant nod from one of the most powerful people in the online world to the companies providing connections to current and future users.
There’s more to it than that: the leaders meet in private with one another and with government representatives — a classic part of the GSMA’s function as a trade association — and “it’s where people sign contracts”, says Conway. “This is where our key people are.” The key people in the industry, that is — almost all of them will be there. “It’s a real who’s who.”
There is, though, more to the GSMA that a trade association for a large and expanding industry running a profitable exhibition and conference. What is it about the organisation that Conway runs that has turned it into such a powerful influence?
It’s partly that the mobile phone itself has transformed from being a toy of the rich — as it was back in the mid-1990s — to becoming a liberator of the poor.
For decades the ITU and its government-owned fixed-line operators worried about getting one payphone in each village in Africa and India. And achieved almost nothing. Now millions upon millions of deprived people across the world have their own phones which they use just as the rest of us do — to keep in touch with family and to do business.
ITU and World Bank
And the GSMA — backed by its members and by organisations such as today’s changed ITU and the World Bank — has backed initiatives that extend the reach of phones and the services that people can get from them. “We’ve always said we need to be deeply engaged,” says Conway. Member companies “are keen to work with us on forward-looking programmes”.
Some of it is still focused on “the unconnected” but the industry is also working together on services such as mobile money, mobile health and mobile agriculture. “Farmers need critical information about what to do with their crops. A lot of these poor people are sitting on the edge,” says Conway. “These are $2 a day income people.”
And many of them are way beyond reliable mains electricity, so base stations have to be powered by diesel generators: expensive to fuel and maintain, and very ungreen. So the GSMA has promoted work on solar-powered and wind-powered base stations: this is a big challenge for the industry. “What is a green base station?” asks Conway. “It will need to be very energy efficient.” But once they exist there is potential not just in areas beyond mains grids — they will benefit operators everywhere.
It’s all good, and influential, as is the GSMA’s work to stimulate and coordinate mobile money transfer, to persuade vendors to provide a standard handset charger — announced at MWC in 2009 — and to work with the Gates Foundation and the G20 to promote broadband as a global accelerator for economic recovery.
PathFinder for data
There are some other projects, though, that are more industry-focused. Notable among these is the GSMA’s PathFinder project. This, some have joked, including some inside the organisation, is the GSMA’s bid to take over the telecoms world.
In a way, this can be a modern successor to the work of the original GSM Memorandum of Understanding Group, which was formally registered in Switzerland in 1995, three years after the first one-to-one roaming agreements. There were already 117 GSM networks in operation, but they had only 10 million customers between them.
A system like the original GSM — the 2G system — needed an organisation to coordinate interworking, and the GSMA, as it has become, was that body.
Today, though, we’re talking mobile broadband on 3G networks, on HSPA, and in a year or two on LTE. They’ll be designed to carry, with voice as an application, and they’ll be in the IP domain.
PathFinder is primarily a way for mobile broadband operators to exchange IP traffic efficiently. “We can be a facilitator,” says Conway of the project to develop a way of interconnecting services. “The market didn’t have it and there was an important opportunity for us to seed the way.”
As a result, PathFinder is designed to facilitate call routing “much more efficiently”. Importantly for the whole industry, though, it can connect up fixed networks as much as mobile operators. One of the first signs of that was when XConnect, which largely specialises in providing peer-to-peer services for fixed voice over IP operators, was able to interconnect with PathFinder alongside NeuStar, the initial contractor.
That means that the GSMA could be seen to be the future organiser of the way all telecoms operators, fixed as well as mobile, exchange IP traffic across the world.
“We don’t get involved in areas of high controversy or conflict,” says Conway. “We look for areas of possible agreement, to try to be a bridge and facilitator with all those in the ecosystem. We should be the honest broker, the facilitator.”
He’s relaxed about the expansion of the GSMA into the fixed market with initiatives such as PathFinder. “We do need to go where the market and its members are going,” he says. “We need to be conscious of how convergence happens.”
We’re moving into the world of the three screens, he adds: the mobile screen, the PC screen and the TV screen. Broadband can be fixed or mobile. “The distinction is just blurring.”
Internet of 50 billion things
It’s clear, though, that most things are going to be mobile — and Conway has the GSMA’s eyes set on what some people are calling “the internet of things”, or machine-to-machine communications.
If there are almost four billion handsets in operation today, in a world of about 6.8 billion people, that doesn’t mean the telecoms industry’s growth prospects are limited to the other 2.8 billion or so. That would just be a couple of years’ growth for the GSMA.
Machine-to-machine services are the future, he says. “There will be 50 billion devices by 2025. That’s our aspiration and we think it’s achievable.”
The devices will be mobile communications chips in a vast range of devices. “They’ll be affordable chips providing data, provisioned in a cheap way. We see great challenges but great opportunities.”
What opportunities? Health monitoring, for example — even down to the level of having chips with people’s antibiotics to remind them to complete the course. Or keeping an electronic eye on people with Alzheimer’s.
“We’re looking at smart metering.” Not just monitoring the input of electricity into a house, so a family can see the effect of turning things off, but monitoring each electrical device: “smart grids” will need sophisticated information systems to control the flow of power.
And there will be applications in transport and delivery services, tracking cars and trains and trucks and packages.
That means the GSMA will be getting more and more involved in the whole developing ecosystem, because these new services will need standards to be agreed quickly if they are to work together. “It’s not just standards but maybe de facto standardisation,” says Conway. That means the GSMA has to be close to the developments, “understanding who’s doing what and asking how do we be a facilitator”.
For smart grids, the GSMA and the telecoms industry will have to work with the power companies worldwide. For transport and asset tracking, with the logistics companies, airlines and others in that business.
Evolving to LTE
It’s clear that the opportunities in standardisation in communications are greater now than at any time since the creation of the original GSM standard 22 years ago by France, Germany, Italy and the UK under the aegis of the European Union. Three letters: LTE.
The industry, scarred by the huge sums governments extracted — and operators willingly bid —for 3G licenses, have deliberately downplayed the significance of its “long-term evolution” plan. The name seems boring, signifying no more than a gradual tuning up of present systems.
But LTE will have the potential to carry data at huge speeds and with high capacity wirelessly. Better still, the industry is almost universally learning from another lesson of the late 1980s and is showing remarkable coordination in adopting the same standard.
“We are seeing the convergence of nearly all the players,” says Conway. The most powerful operators in the world, such as KDDI, China Telecom, Vodafone, AT&T and Verizon Wireless are all following the LTE route.
Of these, Verizon Wireless is the most significant. This powerful US player, though 45% owned by Vodafone, has until now been outside the GSM family, as a user of Qualcomm’s CDMA system.
But Verizon is a convert to LTE for its 4G programme, and is pushing the technology almost more vigorously than any other large operator. That will mean the company will eventually qualify to join the GSMA, which for historical reasons has been limited to operators using the GSM family of technologies.
“Verizon are now rapporteurs, but they will soon be members,” says Conway.
“And there is a real surge to get going with LTE — there are players with the financial resources, such as China Mobile, Verizon and NTT DoCoMo. In China, all three operators will move to LTE — and that will have economies of scale across the globe. The price packages are going to come down.”
So if you think mobile broadband is a bargain now, just wait. If Conway’s right, in a few years LTE could be the technology used by the world’s networks — used by everyone and everything from farmers in Tanzania to heart monitors in Texas. Standby for the next mobile boom. GTB