LONDON — The eyes and ears of the mobile communications world will be focused on Barcelona next week as the glamorous Spanish city hosts the World Mobile Congress. However, this year’s event is likely to be a more subdued affair than previous editions of WMC.

While wireless would seem to be more resilient than some other industry sectors, say automotive or mainstream semiconductor manufacturing, mobile communications has not escaped the downturn. It’s safe to say the recent bad news on jobs and financial losses amongst the leading players will be telling and be a major talking point both on the stands and in the conference halls.

For all that, the event will, as always, be a place setter for the emerging technologies that will shape the future of wireless – and not just the cellular world that used to be the only focus of MWC, which used to be called GSM or 3GSM World.

It is also certain that one of the major themes will be the progress – albeit slower than predicted a few years ago – of the Long Term Evolution (LTE) version of high data rate mobile broadband. We are also likely to see demonstration of another emerging technology – femtocell home access points – whose future is, to an extent, tied to that of LTE. The words Android, applications and smartphones are also likely to feature. There will also be focus on handset displays, mobile widgets, advances in GPS and location technologies, and on HSPA Evolved, more often referred to as HSPA+, the precursor of LTE.

Here the focus will be on LTE and specifically what the chip designers are readying to make this evolution of the 3G Partnership Project (3GPP) a reality for handsets. (For progress on the network infrastructure side of the equation, see LTE basestation suppliers address software balance).

Almost all the major suppliers of chips for handsets – big, established players such as Qualcomm Inc, ST-NXP Wireless, Infineon Technologies, Texas Instruments, Samsung, Broadcom – and particularly the younger thrusting ones – are pinning high hopes on early adoption of LTE.

Meanwhile, operators are finally beginning to announce dates for trials – if not commercial deployments – of the network that has the potential for significant data rate improvements and, crucially for the operators, much better and more efficient use of spectrum.

Some of the network providers that have put down markers for wanting to be early adopters include T-Mobile, Scandinavian group TeliaSonera AB, China Mobile, Verizon Wireless in the U.S. and Japan’s NTT DoCoMo.

We should not be surprised at some of these names – Japan has always been at the forefront of new developments in mobiles, and in Europe, the Scandinavian countries have long led the initial thrust into the latest mobile standards before they drift further south into the larger markets such as Germany, France and the U.K.

And because LTE changes the air interface to orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) – also specified for the other major technology targeting mobile broadband, WiMAX – we will likely hear much at the MWC about how these two approaches could coexist. There is, however, no getting away from the fact that there exist significant uncertainties about the push towards LTE, not least because it requires new hardware in the radio access network (RAN), and thus enormous capital expenditure commitments from operators. Some are even questioning whether there is any urgent need for this fourth generation (4G) technology.

The other side of that equation is that LTE also offers enormous opportunities for infrastructure suppliers, perhaps even bigger than we saw for the shift from 2G to 3G networks.

One uncertainty that should give an impetus to the development of chips for both handsets and basestations has been lifted in late December, when the 3GPP standards setting group firmed up the specification of the air interface for mobile broadband, in time for these to be included in the important Release 8 of the standards. The one outstanding aspect is the final word on the system architecture evolution (SAE), or the evolved packet core architecture to be used in LTE. This is expected to be finalized next month.

However, the really difficult – and if history repeats itself long and complex – process of defining and processing interoperability between basestations and handsets still lies ahead.