It’s that time of the year again when the great and the good of the world’s mobile technology industry gather in Barcelona for the Mobile World Congress . So far this year, there have been plenty of images of Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer and Nokia’s CEO Stephen Elop getting cosy (rather fitting that the first day of this year’s event falls on Valentine’s Day perhaps) as well as the usual parade of the latest and greatest smartphone technologies.

As in previous years however, there are other less glamorous announcements but ones that could make significant differences. In a couple of previous posts going back to 2009, I made comments about the impact of molecular level electronics and how the really useful innovations in energy reduction were happening within the very power-hungry networks themselves.

With the heritage of Bell Labs at its disposal, Lucent was at the heart of developing 3G networks and services when this guide was published by the team I worked in during 2001 and it's great to see those efforts continue today

This year, the subject of those previous posts, Alcatel-Lucent, has combined both of these innovations in its announcement about new approaches to 3G transmissions that are currently on trial with some major operators. As picked up by some the UK mainstream media, the spin on these developments is the potential end of unsightly phone masts. Reading the company’s own press release on this, that wasn’t quite my interpretation and I can’t see such a fundamental change in established networks taking place that quickly after all the money the operators have sunk into them over the last decade. This development certainly has great potential for in-building deployments and providing even more of a mix of 3G and wifi services for even more ubiquitous high bandwidth mobile network coverage. All good news for the ‘Internet of things’ particularly 🙂

In an announcement from the conference today, Alcatel-Lucent, China Mobile and Audi demonstrated how LTE (Long Term Evolution) mobile network standards offer some very exciting prospects for automotive innovation in the coming years, as our vehicles become smarter and more connected.