China Mobile Talks Up its ‘App Store,’ LTE at Mobile World Congress

People started strolling the floor at Mobile World Congress Monday morning

I'm at Fira Gran Via in Barcelona, Spain, where approximately 70,000 people have crammed an exhibition space on the edge of town for this year's Mobile World Congress, the most prominent mobile technology show of the year. The kick-off keynote was given by Franco Bernab�, the head of the GSM Association, who threw up a slide making reference to the latest mobile usage forecasts offered three weeks ago by Cisco Systems (CSCO).

Bernab� roamed across numerous topics, including the fragmentation of the network standard called long-term evolution, or LTE, where usage is hindered by a lack of compatibility, or “harmonization” of wireless spectrum bands.

“The arrival of the iPhone 5 demonstrated this, with its support for only three bands in Europe, limiting its usefulness,” said Bernab�, referring to Apple's (AAPL) handset.

Bernab� made a plea for government not to impose specific taxes and spectrum charges on telecom operators.

Also appearing at the opening keynote session, which ran for an hour and 45 minutes, were AT&T (T) CEO Randall Stephenson and Xi Guohua, the vice chairman and “party secretary” of China Mobile (CHL), th world's largest operator, with 710 million subscribers.

Stephenson noted that mobile data rose by 75,000% in the U.S. between 2000 and 2006. He noted the arrival of the iPhone in 2007, and said there had been an additional 30,000% increase in mobile data in the U.S. following that debut, as “the entire ecosystem caught fire.”

Stephenson opined that the proliferation of LTE would cause more radical change, the replacement of the smartphone age by an age of the cloud, “the mobile cloud era,” where networking is at the center of everything a person does, and “connectivity is assumed.” He cited home automation for security and monitoring. The cost of home automation has come down dramatically and rapidly.” He also mentioned changes to healthcare. Stephenson threw up a chart showing projected growth of this next era, which did see to dwarf the preceding twelve years, without offering actual numbers. The things required will be spectrum, a “whole lot of capital,” and for carriers to bring greater innovation, and to “grasp and take hold of open platforms such as HTML 5.”

Android mascots had to take the escalator like everyone else at Mobile World Congress

Guohua used his ten-minute talk to address “disruptive changes” that are having “profound impacts” on mobile operators. “Mobile devices soon become the main way we access the Internet.” Last year, on a China Mobile's network, data traffic rose in volume by 187%. He said by the end of this year, China Mobile's “TD-LTE” network capability will cover 100 cities in China and 1 million TD-LTE devices that are expected to be sold this year.

He said he company will sell 120 million handsets this year, including the TD-LTE handsets, come Q3, as well as its own branded models running on the existing TD-SCDMA standard. He called for operators to collaborate on the convergence of TD-LTE and “LTE FDD.”

He also talked of the “battle of ecosystems,” noting that China Mobile's “app store” has 1.57 million applications available and has had 1.92 billion downloads. That makes it “the world's biggest Chinese-language app store,” said Guohua.