Mobile World Congress – The Now, Near, and Next of Connectivity, Computing, and Digital Capabilities Rohit Talwar – CEO – Fast Future

I attended this year’s Mobile World Congress (#MWC #MWC2022) in Barcelona as a guest of #HuaweiUK. They had invited me along to cast a futurist’s eye over the event and pick out the developments that provided the strongest signals about how we might see technology further interweaving with society in the coming years. This was the first in-person MWC since 2019 and over 61,000 visitors attended from nearly 200 countries and territories. There was a clear buzz that suggested those involved had missed the kind of connection, random discoveries, and chance interactions that simply don’t happen in virtual events.

This year’s MWC was organised around six core thematic areas – 5G Connect, CloudNet, Advancing AI, FinTech, Internet of Everything, and Tech Horizon. As a snapshot across an event with hundreds of talks and close to a thousand vendors and startups exhibiting, for me, seven key cross-cutting focal points stood out – integration, targeted innovation, greening the sector, connectivity / 5G, artificial intelligence (AI), immersivity, and the start-up ecosystem. Let’s look at each of these in turn.

Integration – A growing concern for businesses and governments alike is the sheer speed and volume of technology innovation coming their way, coupled with increasingly complex vendor terminology, and the overall challenge of integrating it all. A number of vendors such as Huawei were responding to this need for clarity over what the individual technologies can do and how they can combine into end to end solutions. This was demonstrated in things like the overall layout of stands to show the connection between the underlying infrastructure, the various layers of operational architecture, and the ultimate user facing applications that they support.

Targeted Innovation – Innovation was evident in almost everyone’s proposition, but the UNFCCC Global Innovation Hub  also gave a stark warning that a lack of ambition on sustainability and climate action from technology firms and operators was holding back progress and not creating space for innovation. However, progress was evident and one of the most interesting aspects of the show was the impact of the pandemic on focused innovation. Two years of disruption and financial uncertainty have helped businesses and governments spotlight the areas of greatest need and where the most critical challenges are to ensure resilience and create platforms for social inclusion, greater sustainability, and inclusive advancement and growth. This has clearly helped many in the sector focus their R&D efforts, and solution targetting, and proposition development.

An impressive example of an operator innovating to pull together diverse technologies at speed was the accelerated 5G rollout by Zain from Saudi Arabia. With 12x user growth from 2019-21, by January 2022, around 38% of all network data traffic was enabled by 5G. With download speeds of 2283 Mbps and  166Mbps for uploads, Zain has won multiple awards for fastest fixed network, gaming latency, and user growth. 

Greening the Sector – ‘More bits, less watts’ was a clear theme running through the show. The challenge of delivering on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) has clearly risen up the agenda for the sector – with stark warnings over the risks of inaction.  

The GeSI digital sustainability initiative highlighted that each 1% of GDP growth adds around 0.5% to global CO2 emissions. Under the business as usual scenario, they pointed out that we could see a 20% rise in global emissions from 2015 to 2030. In response, they highlighted how increasingly sustainable ICT solutions could deliver over US$6 trillion in revenues and US5 trillion in costs savings from reduced demand for energy, water, and other environmental services.

Overall, GeSI reported that, on average across the SDGs, effective deployment of current best practice green ICT solutions could help accelerate progress  by 22% and mitigate downward trends by 23%. The size of the prize is clear for all to see, and many operators announced their commitment to hit net zero emissions by 2040 or earlier – ten years ahead of industry targets. With Huawei highlighting the potential to reduce emissions from ICT by 20% through to 2030, literally every vendor was keen to point out the increasingly green credentials and declining energy footprint of their infrastructure platforms, networking, architectures and business solutions. Examples included low energy base stations and energy smart network management architectures.

Connectivity / 5G – Naturally, given the nature of the show, a lot of vendors were highlighting their capabilities and how 5G in particular has started to become a reality for many – with some suggesting that it could and should become ‘as universal as water.’ The rollout figures look encouraging with more than 60 countries being supported by over 200 networks providing 5G access to 600M+ connections, with GSMA estimating that this could rise to over 1.2 billion by 2025. Germany was heralded as an exemplar adoption story with over 50% of network traffic being handled by 5G. Some vendors argued this could be a huge underestimate if countries like India start to accelerate their 5G programmes. The need for changes in skillsets and cultures was seen as essential for effective 5G delivery, with Telefonica highlighting the importance of operators disrupting themselves to succeed.  

Artificial Intelligence – A range of vendors and startup demonstrated the accelerating pace of AI adoption. Examples ranged from deep integration into many of the core infrastructure and networking platforms on display  through to innovative consumer and business applications such as home management. The latter ranged from robot bartenders through to a very impressive ultra-high accuracy voice recognition and transcription platform from Speechmatics that covers 34 languages. The platform draws on millions of hours of training data which has helped them develop what they claim to be the largest underlying speech recognition data model in the world.  

Immersivity – The explosive recent growth of interest in metaverses and immersive experiences was demonstrated on a number of vendor stands.

A range of experiences were used to demonstrate  the increasingly low latency of the networking offerings on display. From gaming to dancing in virtual reality with a K-Pop performer – the applications were numerous. My sense from looking at the audiences for these offerings was that the attention was coming more from younger individuals interested in the personal entertainment possibilities. There was less evidence of government and business visitors trying to understand the demands such activities could place on their infrastructures.   

The Start Up Ecosystem – By far the most encouraging and exciting aspect of the event was the incredible array of start-ups from around the world sharing their ideas and solutions. Several hundred young and very early stage companies were on show around the exhibition floors. The largest group were gathered under the ‘Four Years from Now’ (4YFN) banner in hall seven. The business vision, technological capabilities, and sheer passion of these young entrepreneurs was infectious and inspiring. Indeed, we kept finding ourselves drawn back to capture interviews with them for some podcasts that will be put out in the coming months.

Source: MWC

Two areas in particular stood out for me. Firstly health and care, where we saw a range of robotic solutions that act as rehabilitation guides or as a companion and carer for the elderly and patients in need of constant monitoring and assistance. Others included multiple apps designed to guide, coach, and support patients with chronic illnesses and a smart shoe sensor designed to provide real time performance information on factors such as balance, gait, and cadence.

A second highlight was sustainability, where the first standout solution was Damn Plastic with a strapline of “It’s not about damn plastic, it’s about damn people!” This lower tech proposition offers advice, consultancy, product sourcing, retail, and franchising in the plastic recycling space – with a strapline of ‘It’s not about damn plastic, it’s about damn people!’ Attendee attention was captured by the promise of shifting us to a more sustainable lifestyle in just ten minutes.

With a show of this size, it’s hard to do justice to all of the developments, innovations, and promising ideas on display. However, what was clear is that the industry is starting to embrace the green agenda, take the social inclusion agenda more seriously, and embrace the transformational potential of AI.

The sheer quality of the thinking, innovation, and passion of the young people behind the start-ups and early stager ventures on display was a clear indicator of the potential for positive change that could help deliver on both the SDGs and an inclusive economic development agenda.

Ultimately, the clearest take away for me was the need to acknowledge the fundamental transformations taking place in technology and society that will require vendors and operators alike to disrupt themselves in order to survive and thrive in a rapidly changing landscape and an uncertain future.

Rohit Talwar is a global futurist and the CEO of Fast Future.

rohit@fastfuture.com

Image Sources: 

Image 2: Fast Future

Image 3: UN Climate Change Global Innovation Hub

Image 4: GeSI – Enabling Digital Sustainability

Image 5: Pixabay / paulhelt

Image 6: Pixabay / Tumisu

Image 7: MWC

Image 8: Damn Plastic

Image 9: Fast Future