Closing the books on #MWC23

It was great to be back for my 19th MWC after a 3 year pause. The preliminary attendance numbers indicated about 80.000 attendees and the main aisles in the most popular halls was jam packed. According to my smartphone, my step count on Monday was 20.259. The buzz was back and the venue was vibrating with (pent up) energy.

Some of the lasting impressions was:

• 5G permeated the show as expected
• There was much more of a B2B focus than usual. Consumer products and services didn’t get a lot of “air time”
• IoT was still very much present, but the claims and expectations were much more realistic.
• Lots of announcements about satellite complementing terrestrial IoT in a standards and cost effective way including announcements from lots of leading operators partnering with satellite companies.
• Private Mobile Networks (PMN) was featured in a lot of stands, not the usual suspects like equipment manufacturers such as #Ericsson and #Nokia and Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) such as AT&T, DT, Orange, Verizon and Vodafone but every Systems Integrator (SI) regardless of size, suddenly seems to have a productive offering.
• Sustainability has moved from greenwashing to become a board level initiative for many of the tier one companies looking at the complete footprint including supply chain and own use.

As usual there were many great and informative session delivered by many organizations like the one below with a lot of DT executives including Mishka Dehghan from #T-Mobile US talking about what they do for businesses:

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Miniaturization was another trend. Vodafone showed a 5G base station on a credit card sized board. #Wirepas has taken it one step further with a 5G standards compliant base station on a chip the size of a nail:

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#Ericsson had their usual 6.000 square meter stand full with exhibits:

The weirdest experience was actually on my way home flying with Swiss and having a 40 minute connect in Zurich. At the airport in Barcelona the gate staff made an announcement about flight crew being delayed due to a traffic jam. Nothing out of the ordinary, flight crews arriving late from a late incoming aircraft is sort of the “new normal”. When seated in the aircraft, the first officer showed some Swiss honesty and transparency and admitted that the crew had been stuck in a physical traffic jam in central Barcelona in a car…. Somebody must have forgotten to brief them about MWC going on. We landed 18 minutes late and when I deplaned, there was 15 minutes left to departure time for my connecting flight. I made it and one more but apparently we left 4 passengers behind. Thank god for small and effective airports and not sitting too far back in the plane.