9 Things to know from MWC Americas 2022

Here are my top take-outs from last week’s MWC Americas in Las Vegas. I commented on the opening keynotes for Mobile World Live , facilitated a panel on ‘Limitless Data’, and talked to a lot of great people. Observations cover: sustainability, 5G & Telco Cloud, Private Networks, Metaverse and Partnering, Limitless Data, FWA & Fibre, and thoughts on the strategies of the US operators AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon.

Progress on Sustainability must accelerate

• GSMA 's Director General Mats Granryd shared that according to 埃森哲 , 5G could deliver 20% of the CO2 reductions possible[1] in the US economy, yet only c.1% of industrial machinery is connected today.?These figures show what a massive opportunity - and challenge - there is for telecoms to enable resource efficiency in the physical economy and deliver sustainability (part of what we call the Coordination Age).
• It is great to see the GSMA continuing to promote the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) strongly, and to see many in the telecoms industry working hard towards these aims. For example, against our Telco Sustainability Scorecard criteria, Verizon is currently doing best of the US telcos, and was #3 overall of 50 telcos and 7 techcos.
• However, progress overall is not fast enough. For the climate science, see this United Nations report United in Science: We are Heading in the Wrong Direction, for example. In terms of human experiences, 2022’s climate extremes in China, India, Pakistan, the US and Europe are a worrying foretaste of what could be ahead. The damage will be hard to reverse and these are not signals that should be ignored.
• Telecoms cannot deliver everything, but it is uniquely placed to enable significant change in sustainability, and to act as a leader to enable many other industries to change too. It starts with a commitment to continually challenge ourselves, our organisations and partners to do more[2].

Making the case for 5G and Telco Cloud is hard - but it’s coming

• Adolfo Hernandez , Vice President, Global Telco Business Unit at Amazon Web Services (AWS) , showcased four telco case studies ( Spark New Zealand , NTT DOCOMO , SKT and Telia ), ranging from digital twins to healthcare AI. More generally there was a lot of discussion about vRAN and oRAN, and the challenges facing telcos implementing cloud in brownfield contexts.
• Geoff Hollingworth , CMO Rakuten Symphony (a greenfield cloud telco), described the benefits of being able to run your radios in the cloud as the telco cloud equivalent of drinking your own champagne. By running the most fundamental building blocks of the business in the cloud you prove to your customers that what you are selling them has compelling quality.
• We also met Gibson Ang , VP of Technology and Product Management at Casa Systems, Inc. , who told us that the company has developed highly efficient cloud RAN software by building on their roots as a partner to cable companies who naturally demand high efficiencies at the edges of their networks.
• Turning the sound logic for Telco Cloud into a ROI case for telcos is challenging. It is hard to pin value on the development of a range of capabilities and new way of operation. Telco Cloud is not really a direct cost reduction exercise, it is a change to the economic and technical structure and operation of the business model. Our Telco Cloud team have been talking to a lot of people about this and are working on models which we will publish soon.

Private networks are hot

• Michael Lee Sherwood , CIO City of Las Vegas announced that NTT will build a private network for Las Vegas, with the aim to support smart city and municipal activities like education.
• T-Mobile demonstrated its Advanced Network Solutions (including Private Networking) in the exhibition area. It did not reveal numbers to date but suggested it was seeing good growth in demand over recent months.
• There were numerous companies interested in developing their approach to Private Networking – and we met many of them.?

Metaverse & Partnering: “Gaming does not have a seat at the table of culture”

• In the 5G Partnering session, chaired by Ralph Simon FRSA , Founder & CEO, Mobilium , Zach Katz , President & Chief Commercial Officer of gaming company FaZe Clan , eloquently captured the paradoxical status of gaming and esports in the above quote. These massively widespread activities are already worth more than online music and film combined. Yet its businesses and its customers are regarded as somehow subprime by many who are not part of those communities.
• The consequence of this is the risk that some (though not all) telcos and others fail to fully embrace the community and the opportunity.
• This led me to think about what real partnership means. Partnership is not one party controlling or leading the other, but both being able to co-exist independently and bring value to each other. I sometimes get the impression that telcos try to ‘manage’ partners (e.g. the AT&T and Time Warner deal sometimes gave me that vibe) because they have a sense of cultural superiority. This is a trait that must be unlearned for success as a partner.
• There was of course much talk of the Metaverse (see The three telco Metaverse strategies for our take). Many of the most advanced applications I saw at MWC Americas that carried that sobriquet were on display at the Korean K-Metaverse stand, and I was intrigued to see that lot of the innovations there were designed to address challenges in education and training in some form. When I asked one of the exhibitors why, he said that they wanted a global opportunity that others had not addressed, which I felt was an interesting comment in itself about how global industry business models are - or are not - working. In a world where people can end up with huge debts for education there must be a space for something better.

Limitless Data: managing the quality vs quantity trade-off

• Isabelle Mauro , Head of ICT Industries at the World Economic Forum (WEF), shared that 80% of the world’s data would be owned by private companies by 2023, and amounts to $21 trillion of market value today. The scale of data in trade today is stretching current business, technological and regulatory frameworks.
• Jonathan Morgan , Vice President, Network Security Product Management at Akamai Technologies , said there were 1.5 billion IOT data attacks last year, and shared data on the nature of attacks it has traced more broadly. 63% of DNS attacks came from malware and 31% from phishing, and of the phishing attacks, roughly 30% were against targets in each of high tech and financial services.
• From a content creator and advertiser perspective, since COVID, these has been massive wastage in ad data due to changed behaviours. Facebook in particular has been slow to adapt and Nick Venezia , CEO Centillion, said Facebook’s declining share price reflects the decaying value of its ageing and outdated data. Nick also argued that users should be paid for their consent to data use, benefiting both the users and the advertisers who get valuable and validated data to make experiences better. He also described how the value of some data in e-commerce declines in minutes as it’s relevance decreases.
• David Kline , EVP Technology & CTO News Corp , shared challenges from a content distributer perspective - particularly 1) keeping up with changes in algorithmic patterns, 2) that it might inadvertently miss a piece of data that indicated future preferences and 3) managing the relevance and consent of application of user preferences (e.g. consent for WSJ content versus another title.
• Matthew Leib Lieb, Senior Product Marketing Manager, IBM said that each Tesla generates 2 Terabytes of data a day, and Cole Edmundson , IoT Solution Architecture & Strategy, 甲骨文 , described how increasing numbers of sensors in industry, manufacture and building are creating a growing volume of valuable new data. Both IBM and Oracle (and many others, of course) create solutions that help their clients manage and make sense of all this data.
• Ultimately there is a trade-off between the incremental value of keeping and using a bit of data, and the costs and challenges of storing it for that use. All users and IT partners are engaged in an ongoing process of attempting to refine and balance the equation for their context. They need to identify and improve the sources of value, reduce waste, and reduce the unit costs of managing the vast quantities of data - and of course, protect it from malign actors.

FWA and Fibre were much talked about at Mobile World Congress Americas

• Krista Bourne , COO and Erin McPherson , Chief Content Officer, Verizon launched a new 5G Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) proposition, Verizon 5G Home with new hardware. It looked quite cool and was very well presented but it’s hard to say yet how the substance will fare from what we saw in the announcement. It seems Verizon intend it to be a significant push, and more announcements are planned about the device in mid-October – good timing for a Xmas marketing push.
• More broadly, I think ‘confluence’ might be a better word than ‘convergence’ to describe what’s happening with fibre and 5G. The technologies are increasingly intertwined much of the time, rather than truly technically converged - as in enabling you to move seamlessly from one experience to the other. (See Fibre for 5G and edge: Who does it and how to build it?)

T-Mobile US is serious about Enterprise

• T-Mobile’s Callie Field , President, Business Group, described how she sees 5G’s (and T-Mobile’s) advantages playing out by using its enhanced capabilities to solve new problems in Enterprise. The company will clearly continue to flaunt and build on it's current lead in 5G coverage due to the spectrum it acquired through Sprint.
• In enterprise, it’s strategy to move from 15% to 20% market share is two-fold. 1) “We have more of the magic 5G elixir, so come to us!” 2) It is building up and reorganising significant capabilities in its enterprise sales and marketing engine to deliver on the promise – though this is a less publicised game that will take longer to play out.

AT&T must re-establish its meaning, not redesign its logo?

• AT&T has had a tough time recently, expensively de-coupling from Time Warner and losing ground to T-Mobile’s Uncarrier attack.
• The company sometimes gives the impression of being managed by people with a spreadsheet rather than people with a purpose. It has some significant strengths (e.g. its progress in Telco Cloud) but needs to cut out the ‘typical carrier’ PR fumbles and communicate and deliver consistently against a compelling purpose to regain its market mojo.
• Interestingly, some of its focus at MWC Americas was on what it’s doing with some State and regional authorities to help address the digital divide. Perhaps it’s quietly wondering if the ‘A’ for ‘American’ could be it’s heart? It has the heritage – so why not make that a virtue?
• Telecommunications is an intangible service, and buyers will always seek an emotional backstop for its purchase. If their instinct and reason can’t fairly easilt identify ‘why should I like/but this?’, they will seek alternatives. Sometimes ‘because I’ve always done this’ is enough - but not always.

Vegas: so bad it’s good.

• Even for a non-gambling, non-drinking, sustainability-anxious Englishman like me, Las Vegas’s effervescent joyfulness somehow outweighed it's gaudy squalor. I really enjoyed the show and it was a pleasure to meet so many great people and work with our partners at the GSMA. ?The venue, it’s staff and facilities were highly functional and welcoming, like Vegas itself. Thank you all – I look forward to next year.
• Particular thanks to my STL Partners colleagues Amanpreet Singh Pattar and Grace Donnelly , with whom it was a great pleasure to spend a few days working and exploring Las Vegas. Also to Alexandra Clarke , Justin Springham , Kavit Majithia , Colin Bareham , Christina Patsioura and Peter Jarich of the GSMA, and the entire crew at Mobile World Live TV who were brilliantly professional and a pleasure to work with as always.

[1] Whether the 20% is true depends on a) if the method is sound (which is to some extent academic) and much more importantly b) if we are going fast enough to hit climate goals in the next, critical 5 years.

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[2] I’m aware of the conflict between flying to Las Vegas and writing about sustainability. My personal commitment on this front is to travel mindfully, making sure any journey matters, and as little as possible.