MWC 2012 Photos: NSN Booth Tour

BARCELONA -- Mobile World Congress 2012 -- With photo booth tours already completed at the Ericsson AB (Nasdaq: ERIC) and Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU) halls in Barcelona, what would Nokia Networks show off when we descended on its Hall 8 village? (See MWC 2012 Photos: AlcaLu Booth Tour and MWC 2012 Photos: Ericsson Booth Tour.)

NSN was the third of six mobile network equipment vendors we visited with a photographer at this year's MWC and we gave them all the exact same challenge: Show us your three market leading/cutting edge/most important products and tell us about them in just 10 minutes.

The idea of the exercise is to determine what an average visitor might be shown if they were trying to get a sense for what the major mobile vendors are focused on right now. All the companies were given the exact same advance brief, treatment and opportunity, to which some responded more readily than others.

So here's what we saw on the NSN tour, with the overall grade, based on perceived performance, relevance and other factors (some rather subjective), provided with the final picture caption.

Click on the picture below to start the tour.



All photos taken by Siqui Sánchez/Getty Images, but he can't be held responsible for any of the words.

You can see how NSN and its peers performed in 2011 by checking out the 2011 booth tours below:

— Ray Le Maistre, International Managing Editor, Light Reading

A Bright StartArriving at the NSN "village" in Hall 8 on the MWC show grounds was an assault on the senses.Additional SecurityThe entrance to NSN's village had an extra guard in the form of an entertaining robot. That's the robot on the right, just to avoid any confusion... Show & TellOur chief guide, as in previous years, was Jane Rygaard, head of marketing and communications for OSS, who, with the clock ticking, wasted no time in introducing us to Ben Ansell of NSN's 4G product marketing team.In the ZoneAnsell introduced the company's small-cell architecture called Flexi Zone, whereby a number (up to 100) mini radio access points are treated and 'viewed' as if they are a single mobile site by a controller, which is managed using the vendor's Self Organizing Networks (SON) software. "There is no such thing as a hot spot -- it's all about hot zones," stated Ansell, who also said that the access points support LTE and Wi-Fi, with HSPA being added as an option. Small Is Big These DaysThis small-cell architecture, currently being trialled and due to be ready for commercial deployment by the beginning of 2013, can use meshed Wi-Fi for backhaul from the micro radio access points, though a physical connection can also be used. It also enables local data offload at the single controller point, which can reduce the volume of data traffic being sent back to the mobile operator's packet core.Active ActionNext up was Kai Sahala, head of mobile broadband marketing, to talk about NSN's active antenna system, which is already commercially available. Beam Me UpSahala explained that the product, which is being trialled by Telecom Italia, makes for a much more efficient deployment than a traditional mobile cell set-up as the RF (radio frequency) unit is integrated with the antenna, which has "beamforming" (targeted coverage) capabilities. NSN is claiming this unit can deliver up to 65 percent greater capacity and more than 30 percent more efficient coverage than regular mobile cell deployments. A Different ExperienceBusiness development manager Ludovic Magne was our final product specialist. He was waving the (invisible) flag for NSN's Customer Experience Management (CEM) On Demand system, which provides pre-defined reports on multiple metrics -- service quality for different applications, revenue insight, competitor benchmarking, and so on -- tailored for different executives and/or groups within a service provider. "We see this as a big competitive advantage," said Magne. Data in ContextMagne explained that the portal can show contextual customer-centric data in a visual format and that the system can be hosted and managed by NSN, hosted by the vendor and managed by the service provider, or totally under the control of the operator. The system is available now and is already being deployed by Telkomsel in Indonesia. And with that, NSN's 10 minutes was up!The VerdictNSN is undergoing a major reorganization with a new strategy focused on three areas -- mobile broadband, professional services and CEM. So it made sense that all three were included in the vendor's tour, which also hit the hot topics of small-cell coverage, distributed radio access assets, data offload and customer experience. All in all it was a well drilled and impressive presentation,
for which NSN gets an A+.