Tantra Analyst

The telecom industry’s biggest show returned to its old glory with estimated 90,000 attendees. Also back were the expensive air tickets and hotels, long taxi lines, crowded metros and restaurants, and more. But it was all well worth for this yearly pilgrimage every serious telecom industry participant has to make.
In my view, no dominant theme came out of the show floor or the meetings I had, but many vital topics. That aligned with the organizer GSMA’s nondescript theme, “Velocity.” That was to suggest faster innovation, technology development, and everything else, in a way symbolizing the pace with which 5G has proliferated. According to GSA, in a short span, 5G has been launched in 95 countries worldwide, the fastest among all generations of cellular technologies.
The primary discussion topics included vRAN / Open RAN, Private Networks, reformed Metaverse, reformed IoT, foldables and rollables, satellite connectivity for smartphones, and others. Let’s look at each of them in some detail:

▸vRAN / Open RAN

This was a common topic across almost every exhibitor at the show. Thankfully, it was not the hype we had seen before, but more substance and tangible progress. There were numerous announcements from many companies, too long to list all here. The progress at Dish Wireless (greenfield) and Vodafone (Brownfield), and to some extent Verizon, reflects the current situation. Dish and Samsung touted their deployment plans. Vodafone has made a few announcements that it uses both Samsung and Nokia. Ericsson was pointing to its announcement with Verizon a few months ago.

One of the discussion points within vRAN / Open RAN was around the optimal compute architecture, especially for Layer-1. The best option, in my view, is using a dedicated optimized accelerator instead of generic compute (CPU). Marvell Technology announced its Octeon10 Fusion processor for such accelerators (with my quote in it!), Nokia showed a card based on it. Qualcomm had a demo of the power savings achieved through their accelerator card. Ericsson and Intel believe a CPU with a built-in accelerator is good enough. I will discuss this topic on my Tantra’s Mantra podcast soon.

Note: For more information, please check out my Fierce Wireless article about the best compute architecture for vRAN / Open RAN.

▸Private Networks

The most significant endorsement of the importance of Private Networks came from Nokia. It changed its logo to reflect its focus on the enterprise (and public) networks market, shunning the older consumer brand image.

There was no hype but much talk about products and deployment plans. There were a few announcements. But more importantly, almost everybody I talked to had a solid commercialization plan for 2023 or 2024.

Two interesting demos I saw were at Verizon and HTC booths. Verizon is building a dedicated network in NFL stadiums for coach-to-coach communications, which can also extend to the coach-to-players system. This represents an excellent case where high quality, reliable, secure, and a dedicated network for an enterprise like NHL that has the capital to invest. I will discuss the HTC demo in the next section. There were a few factory automation and industrial network demos as well. But most were repeats of previous years.

▸Reformed Metaverse (aka XR/VR/AR)

This year’s most noticeable change was companies trying to disassociate themselves from the Metaverse phrase and call it by its previous name—XR/VR/AR. Every booth had a customary XR/VR/AR section with similar applications and use cases we have seen and heard for a long time. Some realistic ones, such as gaming, Enterprise use cases (training, collaboration, etc.), were pretty good. In my view, these have the potential to be real businesses. The interesting demo was one at the HTC booth.

HTC showed a live XR Private Network-in-a-box. Its size is slightly bigger than a pizza box, with the collapsed Core Network and RAN built into it. All you need is to install Radio Units (RU) where need, connect them to the box, bring backend connectivity, and you are ready to go. The box supports 7.2 split of Open RAN with built-in XR optimizations. If you are an enterprise trying to build a private network for, say, your employee training center based on XR, you just install this setup and are ready to go, instead of working across many vendors. I will also have a Tantra’s Mantra podcast episode on this soon. 

▸Reformed IoT

IoT has been the staple of MWC for a long time. Over the years, I have seen numerous announcements and demos from almost everybody in the industry. But this year, instead of discussing concept demos, many discussions were about specific use cases for particular segments. Interestingly instead of clubbing all of them under the IoT umbrella, exhibitors named them smart agriculture, smart cities, smart this, and smart that. Despite much talk, cellular IoT still remains niche and growth challenging.

The hottest topic in IoT this year was Application Programmable Interfaces (API). This is to give the developer community open and easy access to the cellular Network. Notable announcements were GSMA Open Gateway, a universal network API framework that operators worldwide can adopt, and Qualcomm Aware, a cloud  API to access Qualcomm’s cellular IoT platforms.

There were also Red Cap (Reduced Capability in Rel. 17, aka NR-Light) announcements from Qualcomm and MediaTek in the lead-up to MWC, but no significant demos or talk at the show. Ericsson had a demo with low-latency gaming. There were lots of smaller companies showing IoT devices and demos. But nothing new or eye-popping.

▸Satellite connectivity for smartphones

Even since Apple’s announcement last year, satellite connectivity support of smartphones has become a hot topic. Qualcomm announced its Snapdragon Satellite at CES and talked it up at the show. However, the announcement of British ruggedized gear maker Bullitt Group’s live demo of the Motorola Defy 2 smartphone (and a clip-on puck) with satellite connectivity stole the show and even bagged the GSMA award. Unlike Apple and Qualcomm, they use MediaTek’s world’s first 3GPP 5G IoT-NTN standard-based MT6825 chipset.

Ericsson and Qualcomm showed 5G NR-NTN simulated demo at the former’s booth. MediaTek had a similar demo at their booth too. Both showed video calls on a satellite link. Many other booths had at least some sort of display about 5G NTN connectivity.

▸Foldables and Rollables

Being a cellular show, MWC always had large booths of many phone vendors displaying their latest and greatest devices. This year was no different. There were sizable booths of Samsung, Xiaomi, Oppo, Honor (smartphone spinoff from Huawei), and others. Almost all of them had foldables. The most notable feature touted by all of them was the absence of the infamous “gap” on the folding side on current phones (e.g., Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold and Z Flip). Oppo Find N2 Flip and Honor Magic VS all touted this absence of gap, foretelling the trend for this year.

Note: For details, please check out my reviews of Galaxy Z Fold4 and Z Flip 4.

Motorola Mobility finally displayed its much-awaited rollable phone and laptops. Both have extendable displays that roll up (unfold) when needed to make the screen bigger and roll down (fold) when not needed. As one of the Motorola product managers I spoke to at the booth agreed, this is still at a concept stage, and the use cases are yet to be worked out. The use case for a rollable display laptop is pretty compelling, but I’m not sure about the smartphone. Also, the devices at the booths were for display only and were not allowed to be handled by visitors. That showed that the technology is not yet robust enough to go commercial.

Samsung’s Display business had a sizable booth showing concepts of future foldable devices. It had devices with multiple folds and extendable displays. The most interesting for me was a display cum laptop device. This can become a 20-inch display when fully unfolded or a laptop when folded in half, where the bottom half becomes the touch-screen keyboard and mouse pad. I think that form factor has considerable potential, especially for road warriors like me who miss large desktop displays of our home/office setup when traveling.

▸Other topics and misses

There were many other topics with considerable interest from the ecosystem. They included Fixed Wireless Access, the hottest new revenue-generating service for operators, network power saving (Intel Xeon scalable demo), AI, WiFi7, and others.

Many times you find most interesting things in the booths of startups and smaller players. I found a couple of gems this year. First was the smart RU and testing solutions at Lite Point’s booth and the other was r/xApps demo of Aira technologies in VMWare’s booth.

There were a few misses as well. With the popularity of ChatGPT, I was expecting a louder buzz and more demos. But the only one I found interesting was Qualcomm’s demo of porting Stable Diffusion on a smartphone. I also didn’t hear or see much of Mobile Edge Cloud (MWC), which was a major miss considering how much interest there is around the topic. I also expected much vocal and visible discussion around 5G Advanced, knowing that standardization of Rel, 18 is fully underway. Huawei and ZTE had some demos, but all others mainly had slideware. That is understandable, as 5G operators are still grappling with the question of monetizing their current network investments before putting in more.

One memorable moment I had this year was the opportunity to attend the celebration of 50 years of making the first cellular phone call. GSMA commemorated this special occasion by honoring Marty Copper, the founder of the cellphone. In a way, he is the very reason for the existence of this show.

Wrapping up

Overall, I found this year’s event to be more grounded in reality than the hype of one thing or another that you usually see. The discussions and demos gave a peek into the products and services we will see this and the next year. I think whoever made the pilgrimage to Barcelona felt they got the worth for their money—lots of information and trends they can take back home and try to strategize their businesses around them. It will be interesting to see how those will materialize this year and what new things will spring up during next year’s show.  

Prakash Sangam is the founder and principal at Tantra Analyst, a leading boutique research and advisory firm. He is a recognized expert in 5G, Wi-Fi, AI, Cloud and IoT. To read articles like this and get an up-to-date analysis of the latest mobile and tech industry news, sign-up for our monthly newsletter at TantraAnalyst.com/Newsletter, or listen to our Tantra’s Mantra podcast.