Mobile World Congress 2024 - Things to watch out for

Welcome to the 22nd edition of the Beyond the Next Billion newsletter. This edition will be more of a short and quick blog entry than a typical newsletter, and will touch on some of the key themes that we expect to be in focus at Mobile World Congress 2024. Many vendors and operators have already been busy making announcements so that these are not lost in the cacophony of news flow once the show starts. But as analysts, one of the perks of the job is the many sneak previews that we receive before the event.?

MWC 2024 - Key expected themes

MWC24 is a few days away, and much ink has already been spilled on what to expect from the show. We will save the more detailed write-ups and analysis for the post-event roundups, but there are definitely a few key areas that we will be looking out for. Some are relevant to our core coverage areas, others are linked to the prevailing industry buzzwords like GenAI.

• Private 5G - it has been over 5 years since we first stuck our neck out for private 5G as an idea whose time had come. Sadly, that wave never quite gained enough momentum globally, never mind becoming a tsunami that would herald massive change. There are a number of reasons it has played out this way, mostly because private 5G, despite many similarities in architecture and commercials, is largely a local affair in the sense that specific countries’ policies will largely determine momentum for private 5G. Last year, we had made some of these points in our post-show roundup, which you can read here. In 2024, we expect private 5G narratives to continue, with multiple vendors seeming to double down on their investments. But the value points are shifting away from the radios and mobile cores towards the distributed edge and seamless orchestration of workloads across enterprise IT/OT environments. This is the area that we expect to see increased traction around at MWC24.?

• Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) - FWA is another technology that has been a mixed bag. While there is significant traction in the US, FWA has been relatively subdued in the rest of the world. The first challenge for FWA was solved when chipsets based on sub-6 GHz 5G have started ramping up and CPEs shipping in volume. However, operators focused on monetization are now faced with a different, if related, problem. Success with sub-6 GHz FWA is one thing, but the traffic generated by FWA users is disproportionate to available bandwidth. In the early days, this was not an issue but as interest in FWA grows, operators will face hard decisions on which sites to enable for FWA and how to optimize bandwidth. Very few can actually dedicate a “slice” to FWA as things stand. We had asserted last year that eventually, mmWave becomes the “overlay” network for FWA as sub-6 starts to get clogged with consumer MBB traffic. We expect to see many mmWave based products and demos on the show floor this year. Qualcomm announced a new FWA product, Ericsson’s Cradlepoint subsidiary announced an enterprise-focused FWA product, and we expect more momentum in this space. Some notable announcements were under embargo at time of writing so we will cover them in the post-show note. ?

• GenAI, GenAI, GenAI - seems like these days, one can’t open an email or click on a URL link to an article without a GenAI mention or plug. At times previously, we confess that we have wondered whether GenAI is a solution searching for a problem to solve. Perhaps GenAI is like nearly all technologies going through a hype cycle, or more likely it is here to stay. The more relevant question is about the relevance of GenAI for the telecom industry. In other words, what are the use cases for GenAI in telco? Again, much ink has been spilled on this but we are finally beginning to see some live examples, and we should be seeing a lot around this topic at MWC24. One example is KDDI announcing their “Alpha U” or ?U, a metaverse and Web3 service, with several use cases rolled out across shopping and other lifestyle services. KDDI has built ?U on top of Google Cloud’s GeminiAI to enable GenAI use cases in these daily life scenarios

• Sustainability in the network - Sustainability is a hot topic within the telecom industry but unsurprisingly, it means different things to different stakeholders across the industry spectrum. Much of the attention is given to renewables and reduced energy consumption, but it is a much broader topic. As we look across the globe, the transition to 5G is well underway. In some places, the second wave of 5G CAPEX has already begun as we look at upgrades to Standalone and eventually 5G Advanced. This has major implications for the RAN, not only with new sites required but also densification to support growing data traffic. The tradeoff naturally is increased energy consumption in aggregate, even if the per bit rate is lower for 5G. Research from GSMA Intelligence shows energy consumption by the RAN accounting for over 80% of total network consumption. That is a very big “nut to crack”. How do operators go about planning this transition with a view to driving sustainability into the RAN? One thing is for sure, there needs to be big strides made in network planning, leveraging new tools and features that are coming online. We will be moderating a Fireside Chat with EDX Wireless and Ericsson on the topic on February 27th.?

There are several others things we will be watching out for, including the latest telco industry obsession with open APIs for monetization. But for now, the above trends will have to suffice, until we complete our post-show roundup. In the meantime, here’s wishing everyone safe travels to Barcelona and a fantastic and productive week at Mobile World Congress 2024.??

#5G #MWC24 #Barcelona #GenAI #FWA #Private5G #Sustainability

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