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The Future of Mobile: Going Open, Going Green?

The Call for Papers for 2009's Mobile World Congress – the wireless industry's largest annual gathering, taking place in February in Barcelona – opened recently, with the organisers, the GSM Association, announcing two key themes for the show – openness and sustainability.

The themes are highly topical for industry at large, with two recent reports suggesting that, in the UK at least, a growing number of businesses are considering the adoption of both open source and green technologies in order to cut costs in these frosty economic climes. But how will these trends play out in the buoyant and often inward-looking wireless sector?

Openness is an easy one. Speak to the majority of mobile developers and they'll tell you that the one thing holding back the adoption of next generation mobile applications, content and Internet services is fragmentation. Multiple operating systems, diverse handset characteristics and competing carriers have made it all but impossible to affordably launch services on a mass scale – or at least on a scale to match the desktop PC world.

However, industry wide initiatives such as Google's Android platform and the recent creation of the Symbian Foundation point to a groundswell of support behind open standards for mobile. So perhaps the key question in Barcelona will be not when open standards begin to proliferate, but which one will win out.

The issue of sustainability is not quite so clear cut for the industry. While countless analyst reports emerge each week lionising new mobile music, TV or Web services, it's difficult to find any data points on the environmental impact of mobile or guidelines on how the sector could become more sustainable.

To date, much of the green focus has been on the handset itself. For instance, Green Mobile – a UK-based virtual network operator – is attempting to highlight the forced obsolescence that's endemic in the industry. It only offers subscribers refurbished handsets, with the hope of increasing the 15% recycle rate that currently exists amongst the 100 million handsets discarded in Europe each year.

Meanwhile, handset OEMs are increasingly looking at ways to reduce the environmental impact of their shiny new devices – improving energy efficiency by refining battery and charger performance, making their bill of materials recyclable with more bio-plastics and fewer heavy metals, and taking steps to streamline and localise their supply chain.

However, the real environmental concerns lie at the heart of the mobile network itself – China Mobile, the world's largest carrier, states that its base stations account for more than 70% of its total energy use, while estimates suggest that 30 million litres of diesel are used each year to power network infrastructure in Africa alone.

Some solace can be found in the fact that network technologies are becoming increasingly efficient – the GSMA itself indicates that current 3G technologies produce about a quarter of the CO2 per subscriber per year than their first generation predecessors – yet it's still clear that alternative energy sources will need to come to the fore, with emerging markets that lack national grid infrastructure likely to lead the way.

So what does this mean for the agenda at Barcelona? Well, it's great to see the GSMA starting a dialogue on sustainability. Whether or not the industry will take note immediately at this, its most triumphant meet of the year, is a different matter. Our bet is that sexier topics such as long term evolution, widgets and ad-funded content stay atop most delegates' agendas for the 2009 event at least.