- All hail MWC25 - one magnificent bastard of a trade show
- AI everywhere and Industry 4.0 are themes to watch
- Beware the cyber-enhanced fully autonomous combat squirrels armed with tiny squirrelly laser pistolas
MWC25 will deliver. It’s just six weeks and roughly three days (about 1,000 hours) until MWC25 in Barcelona, so here’s my prediction for the major themes at this year’s tapas-fueled colloquium, along with my ranking, out of 10, on whether they deserve your attention…or not.
1. Pragmatic AI for profit, performance and progress - Ranking: 9/10
Hot? Hell, yeah!
Many of last year’s MWC exhibitors covered themselves in a thick layer of B2B shame by greenwashing the shit out of the show – up to and including printing rush orders of "Now with AI!" signage at the local El Staples (Aye! Aye! Aye!) and duct-taping them onto their exhibits the night before the event opened. Poor. Really poor.
Thankfully, 2025 is the year AI becomes meaningful at MWC25. That involves a focus on determining how artificial intelligence generates savings or revenue for service providers, enterprises, and various vertical industries.
In particular, this means AI to the edge. This is where Nvidia is heading with its AI RAN solution, which sounds like a Kurosawa film but, sadly, is not. Instead, Nvidia is seeking to revolutionize the operation of radio access networks by applying whizzy AI sciencey stuff to improve performance and reduce operational expenses on 5G mobile networks. Honestly, it’s not a bad instinct.
Carriers also wish to play in the AI pool (who doesn’t?). However, they must proceed strategically, like a Welshman in the saloon bar trying to duck his round. As Diana Goovaerts notes in her article, here, the service providers oversee that crucial territory at the network's edge, where AI inference and user data both seek to roam. That’s where telcos can make the smart move, at the periphery, as our friend Kangwarn Chinthammit, Director at VeloCloud (a division of Broadcom), also elucidated.
There’s a match here, isn’t there? (Carrier, meet Nvidia AI RAN. Nvidia, have you met the carrier looking to cut costs and drive revenue? You guys should really hit it off).
Not everything that will be presented on AI in Barca has merit, however. So what’s not hot in AI?
1a. Telcos planning to build AI factories - Ranking: 1/10
As a service provider business strategy, this is the antonym of AI at the edge. Carriers and service providers don’t have the wallet or culture to take on hyperscalers in building the AI workhouses of the 21st century. This year, the four largest hyperscalers will spend more just on AI than the world’s Tier 1 carriers will spend on all of their infrastructure combined. Think on that.
1b. General-purpose GenAI for carrier network management - Ranking: 2/10
So, let me get this straight… some vendors are proposing that carriers, who are renowned for their attention to detail and 5 9’s reliability, deploy wildly error-prone, vulnerable, complicated, ethically challenged multi-purpose GenAI bots in their networks to … what?
Make this make sense. You cannot. It doesn’t. Stop it.
AI-enabled network management software needs an array of machine learning algorithms, and a telecom-specific large language model (LLM) developed around it to even start to deal with the difficulties of network management problems. It helps if the company developing the solution has, like, literally a hundred years of experience in running telecom networks. And the good news is some of the big telco vendors are working on exactly this. But some are not.
And some carriers are partnering with cloud companies, including Meta and AWS, for these functions. That’s a genuinely terrible idea, given the hyperscalers’ “f*** it, good enough” approach to reliability and ethics. Imagine a McDonald's AI assistant, except now it's managing your network, not just spewing out unlimited chicken nugs. Yeah. That.
2. Autonomous networks - Ranking: 9/10
Hot? You’re darn tootin’!
By the end of Q1 2025 there will be three fully autonomous Level 4 nets alive and kicking around the world. I covered two here. I’ll be revealing the third on Monday next week (I’m not in any hurry. My exclusive… I’ll run it when I feel like it, thank-you-very-much).
Level 4 autonomy is what happens when your supplier gets the AI right (as opposed to wrong, see GenAI above).
Fully autonomous, hands-free comms nets are here about a decade earlier than most analysts thought, and it’s the international carriers who are leading the charge.
The biggest impediment to their activation is cultural, not technological. All of the big comms vendors now support fully autonomous capabilities, but carrier execs are leery of turning them on, because:
- They’re scared they might not work, and they’ll lose their jobs.
- They’re worried they will work, and they’ll lose their jobs.
But now, the seal has been broken, the L4 rubicon crossed, and the first movers are about to be followed by a second wave of carriers over the next two years who have no choice but to follow suit.
This is the biggest story in comms, but people are only waking up to it. I still expect to hear a lot about autonomy at the show, however.
3. Industry 4.0 - Ranking: 10/10
Hot? Very.
I had a blue with a couple of editors and analysts this morning on this one. They think this theme is really just “5G private networks.” But for me, that’s just one of the tools in the toolbox. The application is what matters. And, whether you call it industrial digitalization or digital industrialization, this is where the world will pivot over the next decade into a new global digital economy.
The winners in this new world order may not be the ones that you think they will be – especially if you live in North America and are subject to the conventional wisdom that America is No.1 in “this kind of thing.” We’re not – we’re probably No. 12, by my estimation. And that might be generous.
A recent Cisco report did a nice job of raising an important issue: Should IT and OT networks be kept separate, or merged? Of course, the knee-jerk from heavy industry cost-cutting types is that it’s a good idea to interleave them. Is it? There’s a reason nuclear power plants have air-gapped and hard-wired redundant OT systems. Assuming there are Industry 4.0 applications where it makes sense, how do you approach this? And what’s the payoff? I shall be asking these questions at MWC.
Industry 4.0 will certainly be a significant topic in Barcelona; however, much of the industry as a whole is largely unaware of the existential nature of the shift. With its global demographic, MWC presents an excellent opportunity to gain insight into how the world’s industrial base is evolving (hint: consider North-South, rather than East-West). Engage with the Brazilians, South Koreans and, yes, the Chinese. Talk to the Hungarians, the Turks and the UAE. Embrace the Singaporeans but leave the chewing gum at home. They’re all leaders in different areas of Industry 4.0. And we won’t tell anyone.
4. 6G - Ranking: 6/10
Hot? Actually, yeah, kinda. Weirdly.
We will see some wildly speculative 6G mock-ups and demos at MWC25, and that’s a good thing, as it turns out.
Bear with me on this one. After service providers reprimanded the big comms vendors last year for marketing 6G at least half a dozen years ahead of time, the pendulum has now swung back in the other direction.
As an industry, we’re not talking enough about the new standard. Just because no one will make any money from this baby until the 2030s doesn’t mean we shouldn’t place it on the ol’ radar and start anticipating how it will change things (telecom is here for a long time, not a good time, remember?).
Plus, 6G is weird science. It’s really not like anything that has come before it, and that means it’s both important and hip - with-it, daddio – bearing the promise of a funky good time when it finally arrives.
We don’t really know what apps and services 6G will enable, but the possibles include telepathjic interfaces (brain-computer-melding, Spock), ubiquitous virtual presence, smart dust and cyber-enhanced fully autonomous combat squirrels armed with tiny squirrelly laser pistolas – pew! pew! pew! (Maybe…it’s possible. We. Just. Don’t. Know).
As a species, 21st century humankind has proved rubbish at communicating - but very, very good at communications technology, and that is why we venture to Barcelona, my friends.
So, all hail MWC25, you magnificent bastard of a trade show, with your 100,000 besuited executives and 2,500 exhibitors!
I hope to see you there. And should you have news that you want to share with FNTV, hit me up.