It’s always a critical time for the large infrastructure vendors, but this year as Mobile World Congress looms, things seem a little more... well, critical. The network is virtualising and the kit that’s left over is commoditising (and that’s where there’s huge competition from the likes of Huawei). Software, not hardware, is BIG and this is proving highly disruptive for what I’m calling here traditional ‘big iron’ vendors - slightly ironically since there’s not much iron around these days, big or otherwise.

As a result all the big trad vendors are downsizing, restructuring, re-focusing, outplacing or all four.

The job remains the same though: providing end-to-end infrastructure solutions and management tools and systems.

Here is what NSN says it’s aiming itself at and what it wants to show in Barcelona in about a week’s time.

Simplifying operations is key: NSN says its new suite of products and services will help operators cut through the growing complexity of running mobile broadband networks.

Operators’ main enemies, it says, are diversity and complexity as they expand 3G networks, roll out LTE and deploy small cells.

So we’re mostly talking Operations Support Systems (OSS). NSN is pushing a set of tools to automate processes and improve information flows.

- Network 360 provides a map-based overview of the entire multi-technology and multi-vendor network, and network domains to speed up both troubleshooting and trouble resolution.

- Automated LTE Site Creation speeds up site creation and reduces costs by providing error free and automated end-to-end processes with integrated intelligent SON (iSON) capabilities.

- Location Area Based Subscriber Balancer enables automated subscriber balancing of Mobile Switching Center Servers (MSS) for better network availability for end users at a lower cost.

It will also be talking about its SON Operations Manager and its Network Cloning Service which reduces the time needed to upgrade network infrastructure.