Mobile World Congress is coming up, February 24 to 27 in Barcelona.
It is the world’s largest Telecom and Connectivity event and a great gathering of industry leaders. We have been attending every year for close to 15 years now. It is crowded and full of noise (audio, marketing and wireless), but it is also a great opportunity for us to meet up with people we have been seeing there every years for a long time.
Below, we provide a quick preview of what we will be looking for. If you are attending, please drop us a line and we can find a time to meet up over Jamon Iberico, Café con Leche or Sangria.
One of the best parts of MWC is that it is full of new things. It is hard to predict what we will see. And in the past, we usually cannot tie all the strings together until the last day. Nonetheless, there are a few things that we will be looking for.
5G? How about 6G
Of course the big topic of discussion this year will be 5G. We will be watching for three things. First, carrier deployments of anything 5G in the next twelve months, expect lots of data. Second, carrier schedules for mmWave deployments, expect a lot less data. Third, 6G. We know some vendors are already talking about 6G, but we will be keeping an eye out for things that everyone expected in 5G but are being pushed out and swept up into 6G, we imagine this will not be a short list.
5G problems
We published a list of hurdles blocking mmWave adoption. We want to see how (if) operators are looking to overcome them.
IoT
The perennial topic at all things telecom. This year we have a lot of interest from clients who want to see specific use cases with a special focus on connectivity. Cellular for somethings, Wi-Fi for others, and maybe Bluetooth for many others.
Software eating the world
There has been a growing current of software in Telecom for years. Slowly but surely carriers are deploying all the acronyms – SDN, NFV, AI – this is a big part of 5G and has some important implications, maybe.
Gaining an Edge
Another big theme that touches on a lot of other subjects is Edge Computing. We have written a bit about the ‘Edge’. Now we want to see what companies are actually going to use those Edge Data Centers for. Spoiler Alert: Autonomous Vehicles (someday), Low Latency Applications (For example?) and Gaming (More from us on this soon).
Security
Spend a few minutes reading about security for 5G and you won’t be able to sleep for days. Fortunately, reading about security software is a sleep aid. We will be looking for new exploits and solutions to them.