In an interview with GigaOM, Vestberg said that 4G business models, not infrastructure or devices, was the far bigger theme at Mobile World Congress this year – it’s what he’s spending time talking about in Barcelona this week with Ericsson’s hundreds of carrier customers

“We’re at this inflection point where we’ve built the networks, but we still haven’t worked out the business models,” Vestberg said. “Some of our customers are taking very different directions.”

European operators are testing the potential of 4G being a premium-priced data service, charging more for a megabyte of LTE than a megabyte of HSPA. In the U.S., AT&T and Verizon are barreling ahead with shared data plans. Vestberg says he’s witnessing many more business models emerging as operators start experimenting with enterprise and machine-to-machine data plans as well as continuing to tinker with their consumer data pricing.

Carriers are still debating whether they should be big pipes selling mobile broadband by the gigabyte, or applications and data services providers that inject something tangible into that bitstream, Vestberg said.

Many operators have begun to think beyond smartphones and focus on the internet of things, Vestberg said, connecting everything from tablets to cars to home appliances. At Mobile World Congress, for example, AT&T and General Motors announced plans to embed LTE into millions of future cars as an upgrade to GM’s OnStar service. Several other carriers were demonstrating connected home and connected city applications at MWC, sticking LTE radios in smart utility meters, public transit and healthcare devices.

“What devices can we connect that will create a more efficient life for people?” Vestberg said. “[Carriers have] already identified a lot of those devices. It’s more a question of who and how and when they’ll monetize them.”

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To accomplish this the GSM Association launched a new initiative called the OneAPI Exchange at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The idea is to create an application programming interface (API) that any mobile app developer can use to authenticate new users against a carrier’s subscriber identity data. So far AT&T, Orange, Deutsche Telekom, Telefónica and Vodafone have all signed on to the program, and together they represent a healthy chunk of the world’s mobile subscribers.

At first glance, the initiative seems like a nifty idea. If there is one thing every mobile subscriber in the world has it’s a phone number, making it ideal as a universal credential. But operators are also hoping to be more than just a username replacement. In a demo at Mobile World Congress, the GSMA showed off a bike rental app, in which carrier data was used not only to identify the user, but verify location and charge the rental to the customer’s mobile bill.

Obviously carriers are looking to make themselves relevant once again in the applications market and take a cut from any mobile transaction. This time they actually stand a chance of succeeding. Unlike previous API initiatives, the GSMA has actually figured out a way to make OneAPI near universal. Instead of tapping into separate APIs and crafting separate business agreements with every operator, developers just have to build to one API and strike one carrier deal, but the identity feature will work across all carriers’ networks.

The development house that built the OneAPI Exchange, Apigee, wasn’t able to eliminate the widespread fragmentation among carriers’ API platforms, but it rather ingeniously found a way around it. Apigee’s head of marketing, Dave Jordan, explained that the exchange acts as universal bridge between the operators’ disparate network interfaces.

A developer just picks a single operator to deal with and then builds to that operator’s API, Jordan said. If the app is downloaded on a different operator’s network the exchange will automatically map that carrier’s API onto the app, he said. For instance, if a developer were to pick AT&T’s API, any Orange or Telefónica customer could log in to the app using his carrier’s credentials, but AT&T would federate all of the transactions across those networks.

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GM said it would use the increased bandwidth to offer new infotainment features such as audio and video streaming direct to the car in addition to the usual complement of OnStar navigation, security and emergency services.

The deal is a bit puzzling because it contradicts the bring-your-connectivity strategy GM has adopted of late. While GM cars are all linked via cellular networks for its low-bandwidth telematics services, GM has relied on it customer’s smartphones to provide the heftier connections necessary to support infotainment services.

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NSN is partnering with IBM to embed the latter’s WebSphere applications hosting servers into its future base station design, with the idea of turning the radio access network into both a baseband processing and computing platform. Putting content closer to the consumer isn’t a new concept in mobile – Ericsson and Akamai teamed up two years ago to do just that – but NSN is talking about a lot more than just caching video or routing traffic more efficiently.

Mobile applications and radio infrastructure have always been walled off from one another – applications just barrel ahead onto their radio on-ramps oblivious to the highway traffic conditions ahead. What NSN proposes to do with Liquid Apps is to make those disparate portions of the network work in unison.

For example, mobile video today can be a precarious proposition. As video viewers rack up in a particular cell, the network will keep trying to cram those video streams into the same limited airwaves, The result is a backed-up network with no one getting a quality video stream – or any stream at all. By processing video at the cell site, though, the base station could make decisions how to deliver those individual video feeds based on the prevailing network conditions.

If the cell is congested, then the base station downgrades the video quality of every stream, ensuring everyone sees a decent-quality picture. And as users gradually vacate the cell, the base station could gradually boost video quality for those that remain.

The architecture could also produce some noticeable increases in performance, say, if a subscriber was playing a network-based game. Instead of reaching across the many nodes of the backhaul, transport and core networks – as well as the Internet itself – a game hosted at the base station would have near zero latency, making the possibility of network-hosted fast-twitch real-time action game feasible.

Ironically, Liquid Apps is going in the opposite direction of NSN’s overall network strategy. In the last few years, NSN has promoted the concept of a cloud-based architecture, called Liquid Radio, where much of the intelligence and raw processing power of the network leaves the cell-site and becomes a virtualized set of shared resources. At NSN’s press conference on Sunday, mobile broadband chief Marc Rouanne said that the two approaches actually complement, rather than contradict, one another.

“We need computing capacity at both ends,” Rouanne said. “That’s what operators love about it.” NSN’s Liquid fabric has never called for excising processing capabilities completely from the cell site. Instead Liquid Radio is redistributing the intelligence of the network throughout the edge and core, allowing – as its name implies – to flow to wherever its most needed. Rouanne said, NSN now is taking the same approach to applications: relocating a portion of them from the core to the network fringes.

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According to Spotify Global Head of Hardware Partnerships Pascal de Mul, the updated iPhone (No word on Android support yet) will soon be able to pair with the dashboard AppLink system, streaming music through the car’s entertainment systems. Users will be able to play their songs, playlists and radio stations and even be able to create new radio stations on the fly with simple voice commands, he said.

Ford has been loading up on music streaming apps in AppLink, making it a key initial focus of its connected car strategy. Its library of supported services includes Pandora, Amazon Cloud Player, MOG Music, Slacker, and Rhapsody as well as multiple radio station’s digital apps.

Ford CTO Paul Mascarenas said digital music streaming figures right into Sync’s sweet spot. Ford doesn’t have to explain the utility of the services to the driving public since music is already the most popular form of entertainment in the car. The integration of a streaming service into Sync is relatively simple. And since the content is audio only and can be manipulated through Sync commands, the apps all easily meet Ford’s requirements that no connected car app distract a driver from the road, he said.

At the show Ford also revealed it is adding AppLink connectivity to its EcoSport crossover SUV (pictured at top) just in time for its European debut. For also brought several apps Europe that were previously available in U.S. cars: Kaliki, Glympse and Aha Radio.

We got a chance to sit down with Mascarenas for a few minutes at MWC to get a quick update on Ford’s new open development platform, originally unveiled at CES. Though the program is barely more than a month old, 2500 developers have already signed up and downloaded the SDK. Many of those devs have already completed apps and have submitted them to Ford, and a few those apps actually received final approval, Mascarenas said. Mascarenas said Ford plans to announced those apps in the coming weeks.

Spotfiy doesn’t count since it began working with Ford before the development program was launched, Mascarenas said, but the program has opened up Sync to a lot of smaller developers who wouldn’t usually get Ford’s direct attention. Ford is now faced with a distribution and discovery issue. “If you go into an app store, there’s no easy way to find the apps that AppLink-enabled, Mascarenas said.

When the number of Sync apps was small, Ford could promote them individually. But there are now 63 AppLink-optimized apps, and that number will grow significantly as the apps start emerging from the developer program. Ford is working on ways to catalog them. Whether that means creating its own app store or portal Android or working with Apple and Google to spotlight connected car software, Mascarenas didn’t say. Ford could also go with the approach, GM appears to be adopting and create a catalog in the dashboard itself.

Correction: An early version of this post stated that Spotify’s Sync integration capabilities would be available on both Android and iOS devices. However the initial launch will support only the iPhone. 

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Ssangyong doesn’t have quite the international pedigree of the WPC’s first car partner Toyota, but in an automotive market that traditionally takes years to plan and develop its products, the fact that Qi is making headway with any carmakers is nothing to scoff at. While the Qi platform has seen interest from many automakers, some are going to faster than others in adopting the technology, said Peter Hoehne, VP of sales and marketing for Leggett & Platt, which designed the automotive charging system.

Some are introducing Qi at the beginning of the design and development process, meaning their Qi-enabled cars won’t be out for several years, Hoehne said. Meanwhile, others are choosing to include the technology into vehicles relatively late in their development processes, he said. That was the approach Toyota adopted for the Avalon, getting the technology into its most recent 2013 model for the North American market.

Instead of relying on a cord, Qi uses induction to transfer an electric charge to your mobile phone. Typically users buy a separate charging pad they can place their phones, but in a few cases the technology is getting embedded directly into furniture and on other surfaces people are likely to place their phones. There are now 36 different Qi-integrated or Qi-ready devices, according to the WPC. Many of them, like the Samsung Galaxy S III, don’t support the technology out of the box, but require customers to buy a separate battery back plate embedded with the Qi receiver coils.

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Last month, Cisco Systems scooped up Israeli self-optimizing network outfit Intucell, one of Bessemer’s key portfolio companies. The networking giant paid $475 million for the company just two years after Intucell raised its $6 million Series A round. But that wasn’t a fluke investment. Bessemer has made mobile infrastructure a significant pillar in its investment strategy.

While Bessemer is perhaps best known for its investments in LinkedIn and Skype, its most spectacular exit in the mobile networking space was Flarion Technologies, a pioneer of the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing access (OFDMA) technology that is now at the heart of all 4G networks. In 2006, Qualcomm bought Flarion for $600 million.

Its current portfolio includes mobile data traffic shaper Vasona Networks, 4G chipmaker Altair Semiconductor and network API developer Twilio, but after the exits of Intucell last month and Traffix Systems last year (bought by F5 Networks), Bessemer is looking to reload. One of the places Bessemer hopes to find to find its next wireless darling is at the world’s largest mobile trade show, Mobile World Congress.

Next week in Barcelona, Bessemer’s lead wireless partner Bob Goodman is wading into a miasma of LTE-Advanced, HetNet, diameter signaling, envelope tracking and self-optimized networking. Before the show, I had a chanced to talk to Goodman about what exactly he’s looking for at MWC and about Bessemer’s wireless strategy in general.

Wireless has been tough on the investor

Investment in telecom infrastructure startups has plummeted in recent years even as investment in services and applications has recovered since the last recession, according to Ovum. In the 12 months ending in June, new money going into networking companies was just $270 million, compared to $796 million two years before.

There’s a reason VCs are reluctant to invest in telecom, Goodman said: It’s such a stratified market. While there are hundreds of carriers around the world they tend to buy their equipment from just a handful of vendors such as Ericsson, Nokia Siemens Networks, Alcatel-Lucent, Huawei and Cisco. Small players have traditionally found it extremely difficult to get on a carrier’s radar unless you had a big vendor at your side.

After Flarion’s sale in 2005, Bessemer stopped investing in wireless players for several years. Not only were the economics difficult for small companies, but the mobile industry seemed to be going nowhere. 3G networks went up, but they were primarily used for voice. The mobile data revolution we had been promised simply didn’t happen.

But a few years ago, Bessemer jumped back into the infrastructure space. According to Goodman, several trends converged to make the market much more attractive. First, there was the iPhone, which reinvigorated the smartphone and drove a deluge of mobile data traffic over carriers’ networks. Operators were looking not only for technologies to add capacity to those networks, but also technologies to manage and optimize that traffic flow.

While data usage was exploding, the big infrastructure incumbents were fighting a massive price war over international borders. “Huawei and ZTE drove costs down, which led the vendors to chop their investment in R&D,” Goodman explained. So just as carriers needed new innovation, their suppliers weren’t in a position to deliver it.

Finally and most recently, the old carrier-vendor ties began to break down. “The carriers have changed their tune,” Goodman said. “They used to want as few vendors as possible, but now that those vendors are all suffering, they have started looking beyond them.”

Intucell is a good example of how startups are taking advantage of that trend. Goodman and fellow Bessemer wireless specialist Adam Fisher introduced Intucell — then an eight-employee company — to AT&T in 2011. After working with the company’s technology for nine months, first in AT&T’s new Innovation Lab in Israel and then in live trials over AT&T’s 3G networks, Ma Bell committed to a system-wide deployment across its 3G and 4G footprints.

Goodman is convinced that much of the new innovation in mobile is going to be done by small startups in places like Tel Aviv and London, not in the big vendor labs in Stockholm or Helsinki. And now that carriers are willing to work directly with startups — AT&T, Verizon Wireless and Sprint have all opened innovation labs for just that purpose — there’s even more incentive for entrepreneurs to attack the mobile networking market.

What Bessemer is looking for in a startup

If anyone understands the dynamic between carriers and small infrastructure players, it’s Goodman; he’s played for both sides. Before joining Bessemer in 1998, Goodman founded Celcore, a distributed cellular networking company that was bought by Alcatel, and Boatphone, a mobile operator out of the Caribbean. That gives Goodman a perspective on what to look for among the thousands of companies and entrepreneurs converging next week in Barcelona.

I asked Goodman what criteria he was using to evaluate the companies he meets. (As you might expect, he wouldn’t reveal who he plans to talk to.) He boiled his approach down to three things:

• Software: While Goodman isn’t ruling out hardware companies, he still favors companies that write code versus companies that build boxes.
• No straw men: Goodman is looking for a company that has identified a very specific problem carriers face and has developed a very specific solution to address it.
• Speed to market: The telecom industry has tirelessly long development cycles with some technologies taking nearly a decade to make their way through the standards process and into commercial networks. Goodman wants technology that carriers could feasibly deploy as soon as it is developed.

“We want to find a carrier problem — an immediate problem — that a really talented group of people can identify and can solve relatively quickly,” he said. “We also want to be able to go directly to the carrier. You don’t want someone else standing between you and the customer.”

There’s evidence that Goodman is willing to bend some of those rules, though. You could argue Goodman’s most successful investment venture broke all of the rules. Flarion built a base station box, which ultimately didn’t sell because it emerged at a time when mobile data use was insipid. Ultimately its OFDMA technology wound up in Qualcomm’s LTE architecture, but only after a long process of standardization.

There are always going to be exceptions if a company is building something exceptional, Goodman said: “I would never rule anything out completely.”

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Rather than fit into the headphone jack of a smartphone, the new reader pairs to the an iPhone or Android device via Bluetooth. And instead of swiping the card’s magnetic strip, the card is inserted into the reader so it can access the smart-chip embedded within typical European debit and credit cards, while the keypad is used for entering the customer’s PIN.

PayPal plans to showcase the new reader and service at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next week, but U.K. merchants will have to wait a bit before they can get their hands on Here. According to PayPal’s blog, the company will roll out the service to select U.K. businesses in the coming months, after which it will launch nationwide. Following the U.K. launch, PayPal will roll out Here in other European countries, though it didn’t identify any by name.

The company faces stiff competition in Europe, with local rivals including iZettle, Payleven, mPowa, Adyen and SumUp.

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Qualcomm’s baseband chips and integrated applications processors have long supported all cellular technologies and bands, but they’ve never been able to produce a truely global phone. That’s because the other hardware components of the phone have never supported the same breadth of frequencies. Consequently, LTE devices have always been region-specific. Even Apple had to can its usual of strategy of producing a single global device and design three different variants of the iPhone 5.

Wireless Intelligence projects 38 distinct LTE bands in 2015

But Qualcomm’s new front-end chip, called the RF360, can supposedly support up to 40 LTE bands, both the time division and frequency division variants of LTE and all legacy 3G and 2G technologies to boot. Qualcomm created a 3D chip that utilizes a separate sophisticated antenna tuner that can latch onto any of 40 LTE frequencies between 600 MHz and 2.7 GHz – pretty much the entire range of current 4G spectrum.

This technology will be a key element in creating the future universal LTE phone, but — before you get too excited — it’s not the only necessary element. Other components in the RF chain such as the antenna will need to catch up before a device could feasibly work on every LTE network in the world. Smart antenna makers like SkyCross and Ethertronics have designed antennas that can support a dozen bands or so, but they’re not quite ready for 40.

But Qualcomm EVP and co-president of mobile and computing technologies Murthy Renduchintala said that the RF360 would allow device makers to make far fewer variants of their phones. In order to cover all of the world’s LTE networks, a vendor is faced with the prospect of designing as many as 10 different devices. The capabilities of RF360 could cut that number down to as few as three, he said.

“There will always be more problems to solve,” Renduchintala said an interview with GigaOM. “What we’ve done here is remove one of the most enormous obstacles.”

One of the problems this technology could overcome is the 4G fragmentation problem that’s already emerging in the U.S. All four of major operators are deploying LTE on different frequencies, while the rural and many regional operators are off on their lonesome in a neglected portion of the 700 MHz band. Clearwire isn’t just launching LTE on it’s own 2.5 GHz band, it’s the only U.S. carrier using TD-LTE. Maybe the RF360 can’t yet produce a global 4G phone, but it could produce a universal phone for the U.S. — and maybe ensure that smaller operators aren’t left out of the 4G revolution.

Also, Apple could conceivably use the technology to combine all of its iPhone 5 variants into a single device, but it still wouldn’t have a universal iPhone. Apple’s three iPhone models still leave out a good deal of the world’s current LTE frequencies, and with current technology it couldn’t cram 30 or 40 bands into a single device.

But wait, there’s more! Qualcomm has also introduced its own envelope tracking technology into the module, which will help sate LTE device’s notorious hunger for power. Envelope tracking helps control the enormous energy spikes inherent in LTE, reducing device power consumption by as much as 30 percent. Other silicon vendors like Broadcom and Altair Semiconductor have announced support for envelope tracking in their new super-chips, but support doesn’t necessarily equate inclusion. Qualcomm developed its technology in-house and is embedding envelope trackers directly into its future RF products.

Renduchintala said the module has already begun sampling and is in the hands of phone manufacturers. The first commercial devices with the new capabilities should start appearing in the latter half of the year.

This post was updated at 12:05 PM, Thursday, with new information on the implications of the technology for the iPhone.

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As I wrote earlier this week, LTE-Advanced is a much-abused term, used increasingly throughout the industry to make LTE products seem much more significant than they actually are. Carriers and vendors have latched onto a single technique in LTE-Advanced standard to justify their use of the moniker.

Altair is no exception, though to be fair its new super-chips are more advanced that others. It’s incorporated into its designs two techniques from the LTE-Advanced standard: carrier aggregation, which bonds together disparate swathes of spectrum into one big super-carrier, and enhanced inter-cell interference coordination (eICIC), which will allow small cells and big macrocells to coexist in the same airwaves.

What’s more, Altair co-founder and marketing VP Eran Eshed said that whatever LTE-Advanced techniques its chips don’t support today will be supported in the future through software upgrades. “In contrast to competitive solutions, Altair’s solution is based on a very advanced and powerful SDR (Software Defined Radio) architecture which means that we have the ability to deploy a chipset and upgrade its features as standards evolve,” Eshed told me via email.

Perhaps the most notable detail in Altair’s new chip specs, though, is its use of envelope tracking. It’s an obscure little technology being developed by companies like Nujira and Quantance, but envelope tracking has the potential to significantly boost 4G-device battery life by tempering LTE’s innate power hunger. Eshed wouldn’t tell me whose envelope tracking technology Altair is using, but this is the first implementation of the technology I’ve seen in a chipset.

Correction: I was wrong about Altair being the first to support envelope tracking. Broadcom’s new LTE chip, announced last week, also supports the new technology.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user alphaspirit

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