I've written a report on the main speech of the morning at LTE World Summit. But there have been other conference soundbites that I thought were worth a quick review. Here they are:
1 Can I have your job, Chika?
"The CFO is asking for flexibility, and we are being asked not to commit, and to review capex every three months so they can play with capex. I think we, as the technical team, have a responsibility to be the conscience of the future of the business… watch out if we don't invest now because at the end we will lose our position." – Eduardo Dato, CTO, Orange Spain
"It's a global issue. COO's are more interested in the dividend than investment, then if that is the focus then we will not be able to grow. It's time for top management to stand up to shareholders and say we need to invest. If we don't invest there won't be growth." – Marwan Zawaydeh, CTIO, Etisalat, UAE
"I do have a review every three months, but as data demand is doubling every year, every time I am being pushed to deploy as much as possibie by my CFO because LTE is more efficient cost per bit, better margin." – Yoshioki Chika, CTO, Wireless City Planning, SoftBank, Japan
2. WiFi's Mutally Assured Destruction:
"WiFi is almost useless outdoor because of interference. We did 200k hotspots and everybody followed, and we got interference. You do need controllable spectrum."(Yoshioki Chika, Softbank)
"So are you continuing with WiFi rollouts?" (Mark Newman, InformaTM)
"Yes, because our competitors are." (YC)
"So would you change anything about your deployment – what would you do differently?" (MN)
*Shrug* "It is not my department." (YC)
3. Contra Candy
"The price per bit is irrelevant. Once you've made the investment the electrons are free. It's a fixed cost business that requires economies of scale."
"More data doesn't necessarily mean more cost. There's been massive reduction in the cost of computing and routing equipment, so we can upgrade our platform and end up with 10x the session throughput for half the cost."
"Capacity upgrades are not that expensive. A new line card in your NodeB is only £3 thousand or so. Not a lot of money compared to your initial investment." (All Ed Candy, Ex-CTO, Three)
4. Vendors in dire straits:
"We need to find ways to gain some margin. It won't come from OTTs. And we can't pass it on to industry vendors because they are already in dire straits. It must come form our own business." (Eduardo Duarto, again)
5. OTT? We are OTT
"We will also work with OTT providers, to live together and find a way to earn money. We will support the open internet and take care to be discrimination free, and anyway we will be an OTT player as well." (Bruno Jacobfeuerborn, CTO Deutsche Telekom)
6. Apple does it differently
"The arrival of these guys was a shock. When we first started with Apple to talk about getting the iPhone, our first conference call was at 1am. We had to adapt ourselves to the way they work." (ED, Orange Spain)