Day one of MWC was dominated by the usual array of sexy devices with ever increasing feature lists and ever diminishing true differentiation. Today, we saw more of the same with some more color on tablets plus Microsoft and Nokia driving down the Windows Phone specs and price points to potentially enable the next 1B smartphone users.

More significant for me today were the reactions and statements of leading operators. Operator alliances to promote TD-LTE as well as branding RCS under the Joyn moniker as well as significant discussions of privacy issues were all front and center in Barcelona today.

Joyn apps for Android are being shown off at MWC, and in the coming months they will be joined by iOS apps and devices with the capabilities built in.

There is clear consumer demand for enriched messaging and voice services, and Rich Communications provides mobile

network operators with solutions to address these consumer needs.

? Anne Bouverot, GSMA

We also see the industry moving forward on privacy guidelines issues today by the GSMA being a much needed initiative given the tsunami of apps and the inevitable rising tide of opportunities for abuse.

Further evidence of operators and service providers looking to partner to grow the entire mobility pie can be found in the m-payments arena where Vodafone was top of mind with planned global offering partnering with Visa for NFC.

The operator keynote panel which included China Mobile CEO Li Yue, Vodafone CEO Vittorio Colao, and Ralph de la Vega, CEO of AT&T's mobile business as well as Franco Bernabe, CEO of Telecom Italia painted a picture of an industry with significant challenges in declining arpu, escalating investment costs, growing competition from OTT players and of course those pesky regulators.

This year’s Mobile World Congress looks likely to be a useful platform for mobile operators to provide updates on their LTE network deployment plans. There have been a couple of announcements from the show floor so far, though some operators put details out last week to avoid the noise. We are expecting LTE launch plans to emerge throughout the week, but here is a recap of what has come over the last 10 days:

• Deutsche Telekom confirmed an LTE launch by T-Mobile USA in 2013, following the failed AT&T-TMO merger attempt at the end of last year. It is modernizing 37,000 cell sites in 2012/13 as part of this process and through a combination of spectrum refarming and the spectrum dividend it received from AT&T, it will be able to launch with 20 MHz of LTE spectrum (AWS band) in markets covering half of its current HSPA POPs.
• eAccess will launch an integrated UMTS/LTE 1.7 GHz network in Japan next month, supplied by Ericsson and Huawei.
• Everything Everywhere hopes to launch LTE services in the UK by the end of 2012, providing it can get regulatory approval to use its 1800 MHz spectrum. The UK is late to auction 800 MHz and 2.6 GHz spectrum, with UK Broadband also looking to step into the void as it trials TD-LTE at 3.5 GHz.
• Telefonica unveiled its “live test” LTE network (pdf) covering 5 square km of central Barcelona as part of its domestic LTE build. Using Alcatel-Lucent’s lightRadio technology, the companies are positioning this as the world’s 'smartest' 4G network. The network consists of conventional base stations and smaller metro cells, all operating in the same 2.6 GHz frequency band with no interference. It supports speeds up to 100 Mbps downlink and 40-60 Mbps uplink with the partners suggesting each cell can support 30 simultaneous users at 30 Mbps.
• Movicel will launch an LTE network in Angola by the end of May 2012. The network, supplied by Huawei, is the first 1800 MHz FDD LTE network in Africa.

Watch this space for an update later in the week on further launch announcements.