WWT's Key Takeaways from Mobile World Congress Barcelona in 2024

In the major topics and trends we observed at the conference, a vast majority of the exhibitors had AI messaging interwoven into their overall solution offerings and branding. 

Let's take a look at the key takeaways.

With MWC (Mobile World Congress) having its roots as a mobility-focused conference, innovations in mobile networks had various prominent themes this year: 

• There were very limited discussions on 6G, which was healthy to see as mobile network operators (MNOs) continue to digest their 5G investments and focus on growing 5G capabilities and profitability.
• Open RAN is slowly but surely moving along in the market…
  • AT&T's recent Open RAN announcements
    • "Beginning in 2025, the company will scale this Open RAN environment throughout its wireless network in coordination with multiple suppliers such as Corning Incorporated, Dell Technologies, Ericsson, Fujitsu, and Intel."
    • Chris Sambar (Head of Network, AT&T) appeared on stage with Michael Dell to talk about AT&T's push towards virtualized and open networks – Our Network is Open (RAN) for Business
      • "Our recent investment in Open RAN has allowed us to take a very important step for AT&T's wireless future and is the next phase of our cloud journey. It will accelerate our 5G implementation nationwide and move 70% of AT&T's wireless network traffic to "open" hardware and software infrastructure."
      • "We're in this together. AT&T, alongside many other major network operators, share this vision and have assembled a broad consortium to build an Open RAN Testing, Evaluation and R&D Center in the Dallas area, with a satellite location in the Washington, D.C. area. This is all made possible thanks to the NTIA's funding towards wireless innovation."
• As highlighted by the Intel and Ericsson announcement, there is a continued focus on API programmability of mobile networks, enabling differentiated service offerings and better security. Additionally, Intel announced its new AI Development Kit, demonstrating AI's potential to enhance network energy efficiency and service quality.
  • Intel and Ericsson Leading Open Network Transformation - Intel Community
  • Intel Builds on vRAN Momentum with New AI Development Kit, Future Intel Xeon Processor - Intel Community
• Energy efficiency, cost savings and sustainability continues to be a focus, especially as energy costs remain high in many parts of the world combined with heightened energy regulations in certain regions such as the EU
  • As an example, Parallel Wireless unveiled their GreenRAN™ solutions, targeting the reduction of power consumption as a top priority for mobile network operators.

Edge, private cellular and neutral host: Are all systems go and ready for takeoff now that AI has arrived?

• There is noticeable optimism that now is the time to shine for Edge with deployments set to take off in the market in large part due to the emergence of AI and, specifically, the push for AI inferencing at the edge.
• As a prime example, Qualcomm's Snapdragon processors are producing exciting new AI services at the Edge as we were able to see live at MWC in the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra demonstration (featuring Snapdragon 8 Gen 3) where – through AI inferencing within the phone itself (i.e., at the Edge) using Samsung's Live Translate feature – a user can quickly comprehend text and voice conversations from a separate user using a different language than their own.
• NVIDIA CloudXR™ Suite — combined with the power of NVIDIA RTX™ GPUs and NVIDIA RTX Virtual Workstation (vWS) — was included in NVIDIA's AI Technology Showcase for Telecommunications. This solution is geared towards enabling extended reality (XR) applications on iOS and Android devices at the edge, helping to advance the adoption of wireless augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) experiences.
• Intel made multiple announcements throughout the week seemingly designed to accelerate the adoption of edge solutions, enabling "enterprises to build, deploy, run, manage and scale edge and AI solutions on standard hardware with cloud-like simplicity."
  • Intel Announces New Edge Platform for Scaling AI Applications
  • Intel Brings AI Everywhere Across Network, Edge, Enterprise
• It is our belief that when enterprises scale deployments of edge applications and solutions, it will drive the need for Private Cellular (4G/5G) connectivity as enterprises look to provide dedicated, secure and high-performing connections to various endpoints at the Edge.
• And, if an enterprise is deploying a private cellular solution on its premises, it makes sense for it to include a Neutral Host element as a cost-effective alternative to traditional distributed antenna system (DAS) implementations, allowing them to improve their customer and employee experience on public cellular network connections.

Mobile network operators are reassessing their strategy in the virtualization space

There will be more to come on this, but we would be remiss to not mention this being a big topic with our mobile network operator customers.

Prompted by Broadcom's $69 billion acquisition of VMware toward the end of 2023, there were various conversations around reassessing virtualization strategies in their environments. 

WWT is eager to guide clients through this assessment process. 

As such, our team has developed a Virtualization Strategy Briefing to help organizations understand the key decision points that affect their strategy selection and to better understand common strategies other organizations are executing. Additionally, for organizations that are making strategy decisions based on cost-versus-benefit metrics, our Virtualization Platform Cost Assessment offering provides organizations with the discovery and findings they need to inform their short- and long-term strategies. 

We encourage you to reach out and learn more about the approaches we are advising for our clients. 

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