U.S. mobile show reboots with international scope and brains. Mostly

13 September 2017 by Steve Blum
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Rebranding and a return to San Francisco has reversed CTIA’s slide into trade show oblivion. Now known as the Mobile World Congress Americas and run by GSMA, the outfit that puts on the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February, the show is drawing a more international crowd and a better class of speakers. Or at least speakers that are living up to MWC’s standards.

The first keynote yesterday featured Carlos Slim Domit, the chairman of America Movil, which is the largest mobile telecoms company in Latin America, and the fourth largest in the world. He talked a little bit about his company and a lot about the road ahead in Latin America, where mobile telecoms are taking on a central and growing role in everyday life, and where carriers are struggling with ever increasing demand for bandwidth on the one hand, and a deep digital gulf that mirrors social divisions on the other.

Slim was followed by Ajit Pai, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. His speech didn’t break any news, but it was a lucid overview of the issues the FCC is taking on this year, with a focus on mobile topics in general and spectrum availability in particular.

It was a welcome contrast to recent CTIA keynotes, which over the past few years featured elaborate marketing videos accompanied by increasingly junior executives grinning their way through vapid scripts that might have been written by Mister Rogers. As if to remind us how good we have it now, CTIA president Meredith Attwell Baker briefly took us back to the bad old days with a third grade-level, walk-about-the-stage presentation complete with pictures of puppies.

The new MWC Americas show owes a lot to its roots. In Europe, speakers are expected to offer whatever wisdom they can about the topic at hand, rather than deliver tacky sales pitches or smarmy presentations. The show still has one major problem, though: head to head competition with Apple’s annual fall launch event. It’ll never win that fight, particularly since next year’s show is the same week (although they’re moving it to Los Angeles). Even in the press room, where one might expect live streams from the conference program, the video display was stuck on an endless replay of Tim Cook and friends.