Is this the 5G you’ve been looking for? Looking ahead to MWC Barcelona 2020

With the start of the new year behind us, the mobile community and the technology world at large are now turning their attention to MWC Barcelona 2020, the world’s largest annual gathering of mobile industry leaders focused on showcasing the technologies, products, and services that will benefit end users in the coming years.

As in years past, the list of topics to be discussed at MWC is somewhat dizzying. However, here are the top items to watch out for on the show floor and some of the top headlines coming our way in Barcelona this year. Of course PwC will also be there yet again, so please check out https://www.pwc.com/mwc for details and do stop by to see PwC’s team in Barcelona!

Is this the 5G you’ve been looking for?

While 5G technology was notably absent at January’s CES 2020 show in Las Vegas, it seems that the mobile industry won’t be able to avoid questions around the outlook for 5G networks, devices, and use cases at MWC. With 2019 having seen the launches of dozens of commercial 5G networks around the world, when will the technology become truly mainstream?

Even in the United States, where PwC’s 5G mobile index shows that 5G is now available to roughly half of the country’s population, adoption has been weak, driven by a lack of compatible devices, uneven performance, and an unclear value proposition. PwC expects much discussion on this topic in Barcelona, including debates on spectrum limitations as well as questions on whether the industry will need to invest in standalone (SA) versions of 5G networks rather than the 4G-dependent, non-standalone (NSA) setups currently rolling out in many countries.

These are the voyages of the enterprise

While it may seem a little out of place in an event that historically focused largely on consumers, this year’s MWC may be the first to focus on the enterprise. Driven by stagnating consumer growth, increased commoditization, and uncertainty around the path for 5G, many in the telecom industry are looking to the enterprise business to help drive future growth and profit.

Last year’s MWC show floor was covered in enterprise demonstrations of 5G technology, but with little detail on the feasibility and business cases for them. This year, PwC expects more refined demonstrations on 5G use cases, including those that require only localized, mobility-dependent network coverage and which address the deployment challenges of last year's featured use cases.

May the phones be with you

It wouldn’t be MWC Barcelona with at least a few new mobile device introductions. The 2019 event was all about the fold - whether long and skinny or short and fat - though post-launch reliability proved to be a significant issue for some. Advances in cameras and image processing have also been a consistent theme in recent years, though few devices managed to capitalize on this to gain market share or premium pricing.

This year, PwC expects to see many more new devices, particularly from Asian vendors, as well as a plethora of 5G device announcements which may see their way across the galaxy. Finding a truly breakthrough design should continue to be a challenge. Look out for a new batch of folding OLED screens, as well as some creative attempts to splinter the consolidated operating system market given recent intellectual property challenges and risks.

Finding the spectrum to achieve warp speed

As 5G networks have rolled out, the vast differences between the performance of low, mid, and high band spectrum have become extremely obvious to users, even if they don’t fully understand the cause. Though we don’t expect anyone to be “demoing” spectrum at MWC Barcelona, it’s sure to be a hot topic in keynotes, panel discussions, and backroom conversations.

Most 5G deployments to date have been greenfield in nature, forsaking the refarming and reuse of existing spectrum for newer, wide open pastures, particularly in the mid and high band (millimeter wave) frequencies. The industry is rapidly running out of capacity in some countries, however, and finding that millimeter wave is less effective than previously hoped, particularly for mobility. One potential new swath in the spotlight is the C band, where the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has announced plans to conduct a public auction for 280 MHz of spectrum in 2020. Look for this to be one of the main topics at this year’s MWC.

Moving to the mobile galaxy’s edge

It may be a bit out there, but perhaps the newest topic to hit the show floor in Barcelona is the path towards edge, or multi-access edge computing (MEC) as it is formally known. Edge computing aims to support extremely low latency and reduce transport costs by enabling cloud computing capabilities and an IT service environment at the edge of the mobile network.

MEC technology is expected to be widely showcased at MWC Barcelona, but the real questions are what applications and services will take advantage of this new architecture and, even more importantly, what will be the business model for its deployment, usage, and operation? This is a topic of great interest not only to mobile network operators, but also tower companies, infrastructure OEMs, and enterprise users of mobile technology. Look for this and more in the halls of the Fira Gran Via!