That's the question we put to seven major vendors (Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson AB, Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd., Juniper Networks Inc., NEC Corp., Nokia Siemens Networks and ZTE Corp.) at this year's Mobile World Congress, with the aim of identifying some (any?) mobile infrastructure trends and testing the quality of the communications of each company.

It's also intriguing to know which current development is deemed to be the most important by each company. For some, it was directly linked to announcements made at (or ahead of) the event; for others, not.

The rules were the same for all participants: They could only present one technology, the one they believed to be the most important for operator executives attending the show, and they had no more than 10 minutes in which to make their presentation.

This is a slight variation on what Light Reading has done in the past. (See MWC 2012: Booth Tour Report Card.) The difference this time is that we forced the vendors to focus on a single development.

As you can imagine, that was something close to torture for some of the executives we met, who wanted to talk about a number of developments but were forced to decide which one was the most important.

This, then, is the first of seven articles to related to those 10-minute sessions, which we will publish (with a subjective grade based on perceived relevance and performance) in the order in which they were conducted. The first company running against the stopwatch was Ericsson. Continue to page 2 of this article to check out Ericsson's small cell pitch.

Ericsson's presence in Hall 2 at Mobile World Congress 2013 was imposing but welcoming.