stein@opensky
Here we go again. I did not post anything about MWC24 last year since I was there in another capacity – but here is an update again (you can, however, find updates from some previous MWCs here, if of interest). Every year since MWC started out in Barcelona I have been there – as well as in Cannes before that. Some of my impressions from the event are given, however, it should be noted that the summary is my personal observations and impressions and not a comprehensive report on everything that happened at or around MWC. It is not possible for a single person to get a full picture of an event like MWC, however, there are official reports from GSMA and also lots of professional reporters from various tech media that may provide or have already provided more comprehensive MWC reports.
This time I attended the opening keynote but skipped all other keynotes. These might be more or less entertaining - but there is normally little learning in these sessions. You can always expect CEOs from large European operators to complain about the regulatory situation in Europe (which they also did this year) – but I decided to drop these keynotes this year and focused on other sessions. The main purposes for me in general have been 1) to get a general industry update and 2) to catch up with old friends and colleagues. I also had a few business meetings, but this was not my main purpose. I always try, however, to do a mix between attending a certain number of conference sessions and to have a few meetings – and also to walk around the exhibition to get a general impression of what’s going on – but for non-experienced MWC attendees, my advice is that a random walk-about is not recommended. You should always have a nominal plan set up in advance.
If we look at MWC numbers from GSMA, this year’s event was practically back at the record numbers from prior to COVID. According to the GSMA, there were more than 109.000 attendees this year – which more or less equals the record number of attendees from 2019.
If we look beyond numbers and statistics, what really happened at MWC?
MWC is the largest annual global meeting place for the mobile industry – and this year was no exception. The number of visitors from all over the world was at record numbers and, in addition to the exhibition and conference itself, a lot of business meetings and wining and dining took place as usual. What has been a trend over the last years, however, is that the visitors at MWC increasingly come more and more also from adjacent industries.
If I should make a personal impression about important industry news this year, I could not see many of them. As the buzzword on previous occasions, for example, has been things like the metaverse (which is totally gone now), this year’s buzzword was Artificial Intelligence (AI). The word AI was all over the place at the Congress, but it is still early on and there is just a lot of uncertainty around it. I feel that I did not get any revelations about AI at the Congress – although I attended a few conference sessions on the topic.
In today’s scenario of geopolitical instability, security was another main theme at the conference sessions – and I prioritized attending a few of these. There were also several sessions on 5G, 5G Stand-Alone, 5G Advanced etc – but I skipped most of these. I was quite happy to see that there was not too much focus on 6G. Of course, the big vendors obviously had something (early) to show about it, but at the conference arena there was not much to see or hear. As a reference, you could also read my latest article on “Making 5G a success – or waiting for 6G?”.
Some specific impressions from MWC include:
Opening keynotes: This was the only keynote I attended this year – and, as usual, this keynote session is set aside for the most prominent CEOs on the GSMA Board. Typically, this includes the CEO of Telefonica, the Chairman and the Director General of the GSMA, some of the (very large) Chinese operators – and one or two newcomers to the GSMA Board. This year the new CEO of Telefonica, Marc Murtra, was an obvious speaker, welcoming the visitors to Barcelona. Others were Sunil Bharti Mittal (chairman of Bharti Airtel), Vicky Brady (CEO of Telstra), Benedicte Schilbred Fasmer (new CEO of Telenor), Biao He (CEO of China Mobile) – in addition to the outgoing and incoming DGs of the GSMA (Mats Granryd and Vivek Badrinath, respectively). Of things to note from the opening keynotes were the (quite usual and) general messages on US tech company dominance and EU regulation, the need for operators to redefine themselves, need for more spectrum, the need for operators to collaborate etc. Benedicte also mentioned security – and Sunil mentioned financial inclusion and satellites. Not many surprises!
Artificial intelligence: As referred above, AI was all over the place at the Congress and also in several conference sessions. I attended as session on “Capitalizing on the AI revolution” in which the obvious use cases for marketing, productivity and customer service were mentioned. Also, Orange referred to their own “Dis nous tout” solution. Some comments to note, however, were that enterprises are generally not ready for AI yet and that working with AI can be hard for engineers – simply as AI outputs are unpredictable and not easy to verify.
A session on “AI-driven RAN” ended up being a general session on AI across the network and one of my concerns on optimization / automation in parts of a network (RAN, transport, core) was confirmed that it could hamper the optimization of the end-to-end network. The data collection needed to optimize a network end-to-end is still not readily available.
Another AI session I attended was on whether “telcos are behind on the AI curve” – in which the common conclusion was that this is not the case. Telcos have huge amounts of data and AI is critical for telcos – so they are all working hard on it. Speakers included KT, Rakuten and e&, all claiming to do a lot on AI, in addition to Huawei. There was a quick comment on AI regulation or not but no conclusion. It was, however, commented that “AI cannot be run by committee”. I finally visited my old company Telenor’s stand as well for a session on sustainable AI – for which Telenor is having a joint project with NVIDIA on AI and they are currently building up a large data centre in Oslo totally based on renewable energy. I also know Telenor has been working on “ethical AI” for years already. It is probably quite old now, but six years ago, I wrote the following article “Artificial Intelligence - Friend or foe?”. Although the world has moved on since then, most elements in the article are still valid – including the geopolitics around it (see also this later article from this year on “Taking the digital lead”).
A final interesting thing to mention from the GSMA sessions was that they had included an AI based real-time translation service for 5-6 different languages so that you could listen to the conference sessions in a language of your choice. I did not try it myself, since I listened in English – but it is an interesting feature.
Security: As a topic of particular interest to me, I also attended several sessions on security, including the “Security summit” on Tuesday and (parts of) “SEC CON” on Wednesday. As I have been engaged in company security as well as industry security, I already know that the threat picture is increasing year-by-year (which was commented on) and also that operators are quite good at industry collaboration in countering fraud and security threats. Of points to note, one is that AI will be more and more used by security actors for cyberattacks and that AI will be needed to counter such attacks.
What is 5G really for? I skipped all dedicated sessions on 5G this year – not because I am not interested but because I prioritized other sessions. There were sessions on “5G Advanced”, on “5G SA”, on “Monetizing 5G”, on “5G FWA”, on “5G IoT” and on “5G use cases” – and I skipped them all. I have previously written a number of articles on 5G (and 6G), the most recent earlier this year on “Making 5G a success – or waiting for 6G?”. Earlier ones from 5-6 years ago include also “5G or 6G? The story all over again?”, “5G will save the world – or will it?”, “5G is all around us – but who will eventually benefit?” and “What will really happen with 5G?”). These are all 4-5 years old now, but surprisingly mostly still true. The bottom-line is that 5G has been designed mostly with a B2B focus in mind, be it for industry automation or for IoT. The only problems are that 1) the historical success of mobile to date has been B2C, i.e. with huge global volumes and scale – which will not be the case for 5G (apart from being “just a better broadband”) – and 2) consumers don’t care about B2B.
I noted, however, one particular topic of interest in a session on mission-critical with various people from the space and defense industry, requiring ultra-low latency, very high reliability, satellite integration, sensing, etc. These are all elements designed into 5G or 6G and it is understandable that from e.g. a military perspective, these are all very important elements. They also all want the innovation cycle to go down – as it will do if it is part of a commercial global standard rather than dedicated military or other mission-critical systems. An interesting comment from one of the panelists was that today you can “guess the rank of any police officer by the number of devices he is wearing”. Making 5G and 6G a “universal singing and dancing machine” will obviously simplify life for mission-critical services, but it will also hold up the development of commercial networks and likely increase cost. Mission-critical use cases will, however, not help global volumes and scale significantly and neither will military-grade devices. Devices to be used and who will operate such mission-critical services might be up for debate though.
Open gateway: The GSMA And the mobile operator and telco vendor community started pushing the “Open Gateway” initiative two years ago (see my commentary from 2023) – and it seems to be getting some traction as it seems to be implemented in some 35 countries across all regions of the world. Aduna is a company that has been created by the industry to drive this forward. This is good, but it requires that the operators actually manage to engage the developer community to drive scale towards a long-tail set of network services. In my mind it still needs to be proven before it can be called a success.
Satellites / Non-Terrestrial Networks: MWC25 had a “Satellite and NTN Summit” on the Wednesday which I did not attend, with several speakers from the satellite camp including Globalstar, SES, Intelsat, ESA and others - along with GSMA, Qualcomm, Ericsson etc. In the market, we also see some success with Elon Musk’s Starlink - and Skylo’s new MSS service based on 3GPP standards and integrated with standard Android 15 phones is an interesting new development that could expand the mobile coverage to most places in the world and for most operators beyond the main population and traffic areas for global reach and human safety.
Although I have lived through some phases of “competition” between terrestrial and satellite mobile communications (refer my quite old article on “Will satellite comms happen this time?”), it seems now that the terrestrial and satellite communities are in a more cooperative mode, so let us hope that this will work – as long as business models work out. Satellite integration will obviously drive towards global mobility and coverage – which may drive a certain increased global penetration and (hopefully) also some revenues for mobile operators.
Private networks: I attended a short session on “Scaling private networks – What is holding us back?” with Vodafone, Boldyn, ZTE and a Finnish hospital in Oulo. The consensus was that “nothing is holding us back” – but a challenge will (continue to) be a need for professional services, e.g. for network planning, installation, integration and operation – of course depending on the type and size of the network. In my view, the issues of spectrum and devices are also important – and there are also different needs for different types of private networks (hospitals, industrial use cases etc) – so there may be challenges with scaling. System integrators may therefore have important roles – maybe not the operators? Boldyn recommended (of course) a private network as a service. See also my earlier article on “Looking for a private 5G network?”. There are also differences between indoor and outdoor solutions – and there may be a need for WiFi hotspots (at least as a starting point) to accommodate all the legacy devices that are already in operation.
The show floor: I did some quick walk-abouts but did not really do this extensively. As always, I did, however, visit the large stands of Huawei and Ericsson. Huawei this year had a larger stand than ever covering more than half of Hall 1 – obviously showing off being a large global vendor despite the bans they are exposed to around the globe (including several countries also in the home region of Barcelona). Ericsson as usual also had a very large stand, but this year including also an open area for all without having to go through gates to get a view inside. In my view this was about time and a good move. Both vendors showed off their latest 5G equipment and also had many areas with exhibitions of various enterprise solutions. In addition to all the telco equipment vendors, also many of the largest operator groups had their exhibitions. One area I did not go to this year was the 4YFN exhibitions in Hall 8. This is not my area of focus, but for those interested in small startups, this is a good place to visit (but it is very noisy and busy).
Gadgets and devices: There were lots of robots, cars, drones, goggles and AR glasses around the show floor at MWC. For mobile handsets and consumer devices, I did not notice any major announcements – but these normally happen before or around MWC, either at separate events from Apple, Samsung or others – or at CES in January. I must admit that gadgets and devices are not my main focus areas, however, there were foldables and there were AI-based devices – and there were various Chinese device manufacturers with something to show.
In my previous job pushing indoor 5G solutions for properties, 5G laptops used to be a focus area for me. I noted in this area that several 5G laptops are coming on the market soon. Lenovo has several new generation laptops that come with 5G modems, e.g. Lenovo Thinkpad X13.
GLOMOs: As usual, the Global Mobile Awards (the GLOMOs) were handed out for the 30th time this year with 33 awards across seven categories – with the most prestigious award handed out for the CTOs' Choice Award for Overall Mobile Technology - China Mobile International Limited and Huawei for the Telecom Foundation Model. As one of the GLOMO judges myself, I am proud to support the winners of all these GLOMO awards.
Side events: Like a few times before, several organizations had organized side events to MWC, capitalizing on the availability of the global mobile industry. These included the Mobile Ecosystem Forum (MEF) and Telemedia 8.1 – and also the World Broadband Association with its BDC Barcelona 25 event. I could not find time to attend any of these, however.
Geopolitics: I did not directly notice much influence from geopolitics in the Congress itself – apart from the ongoing issue around Chinese telco vendors like Huawei and ZTE since some years back. However, the emergence of the new and bullish US President and his supporters was a regular topic in various conversations around the show and in bars around in Barcelona. For this I might simply refer to the following article by telecoms.com on “MWC was more political than ever in 2025”.
To summarize my impressions:
Not much new this year: I may have missed a few things, but my impression is that there was not much new this year. 5G in its versions is being rolled out, 6G is too early – and MWC25 was all about AI – although mostly something everyone was worried about.
MWC back at its peak attendance: Although not much new, the Congress was back at its peak with 109.000 attendees.
Same old story complaining about EU regulation: The usual complaints about the EU regulatory regime were there from the large European operators.
Security and AI: were topics of particular interest to me – and AI will be used against us. We will also need to use AI to protect ourselves.
Open Gateway: seems to be getting some traction – but its success in the developer community is still not proven.
5G, 6G etc: There were many sessions on the various phases of 5G and vendors of course had something to show. The large question in my mind is: How can all the B2B use cases foreseen in 5G as well as 6G create scale and a business case for mobile operators? Maybe not?
Satellites and private networks: were on the agenda and will be seen also going forward.
As always, although MWC is an exhausting exercise, I really enjoy going there. I will most likely be there next year as well – and MWC is equally as much about networking and making business as getting a technology and industry update.
Finally, I have some more fundamental comments though. The mobile industry is no longer just a mobile industry and the GSMA is no longer just the trade association for mobile operators. According to the GSMA press release from MWC, 56% of the attendees are from industries adjacent to the mobile industry and the decision process for many GSMA deliverables has been opened up to the wider industry.
The GSMA as such is more and more focused on advocacy and the conference business (i.e. MWC), which provides most of their revenues, and less on securing the needed interoperability between operators – which was the initial reason for existence. As a multi-local industry with multiple operators in every country across the globe (and locally regulated) it is hard to compete with large global companies with a single technology platform and competing services without heavy regulations.
As such, interoperability is essential! It remains surprising to me that the tool needed to secure global scale and competitiveness is not more prioritized (?)
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