London and Tokyo, January 18, 2011 – NEC Corporation (NEC) announced today that it will attend the Mobile World Congress 2011 at the Fira de Barcelona, Barcelona February 14 – 17, 2011. This year, NEC will showcase a range of innovative and revenue-generating solutions for mobile operators at Stand No 8A125, Hall 8 including quick-to-market cloud services and next-generation mobile broadband solutions: LTE, backhaul, femtocell and Operational Support Systems (OSS).

While acknowledging the need to relieve capacity bottlenecks by offloading data traffic from their networks, mobile operators are looking for ways to better manage the process in order to maintain customer contact and build value.

Larry Socher, global lead network practice at consultancy Accenture, talks about the proliferation of smartphones, backhaul, and the explosion in user generated content.

At the AfricaCom conference in Cape Town last month, it was apparent that major operators across the continent are looking more to data and other value-added services to stimulate future expansion. But the prospects for data services in Africa rest in part on the promise that the new submarine cables that are arriving on the shores of the continent will both improve the availability of international bandwidth and reduce its cost.

I’ve been in Munich for the last couple of days, listening to Nokia Siemens Networks executives tell us industry analysts all about the new company strategy. Bearing in mind who the parents of this joint venture are, old skool bastions of Northern European communications engineering, renowned for delivering solid products with solid performance, the company at first seemed to have gone all soft and fluffy.

Harris Stratex, a backhaul specialist and WiMAX RAN supplier, believes it will be a main beneficiary of President Obama’s $7.2bn broadband stimulus package. Aimed at extending high-speed connectivity to rural communities in the US, the $7.2bn fund has a ‘Buy America’ provision attached to it, as has President Obama’s entire fiscal stimulus package across different industry sectors, which is worth around $800bn in total.