Next in Tech | Ep. 207: Mobile World Congress preview

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Eric Hanselman: Welcome to Next in Tech, an S&P Global Market Intelligence podcast where the world of emerging tech lives. I'm your host, Eric Hanselman, Chief Analyst for Industry and Company Data at S&P Global Market Intelligence. And today we're going to be talking about the Mobile World Congress. This is actually a little bit of a preview that's actually dropping just about the time that Mobile World Congress will be starting.

And to talk about all the things that we're expecting to see there are the analyst team, a set of returning guests, Lynette Luna. Mohammed Hamza and Raul Castanon-Martinez. Welcome back to the podcast. All of you. 

Lynette Luna: Thanks for having me again. I appreciate it. 

Mohammed Hamza: Thanks, Eric. I'm glad to be back.  

Raul Castanon: Glad to be here. Thank you for having us. 

Eric Hanselman: And we are of course, all looking forward to hanging out in Barcelona with only 90, 000 of our closest friends, right? It is the chaos that is mobile world Congress. And it's a conference that is all things telecom and now so much beyond. And it is just a heck of a lot of people.

And that basically take over the city and talk all things, telecom and tech. And there's a lot that's going on this year. And the theme this year is Converge, Connect, Create. Are we thinking a lot about. The converging part, I guess, where there are a lot of people who are converging on our mobile World Congress, I guess the big question is what's happening with technology convergence?

I mean, we've been through this quite a bit in terms of a lot of the integration and a lot of the promise of making that. transition between telecom being its own thing, technology and I. T. and ICT technology is really sort of standing up on their own. Do we think that this is the year where we're going to start to see things like cloud native telco starting to move into some of the infrastructure things that have been promised for a long time, but that at least the operators have had a hard time actually moving towards. 

What are your own thoughts about that? 

Raul Castanon: Yeah, Eric, if I may, I have some thoughts there. I've been attending the event for, I think, about 10 years now, and I do agree that the theme seems to be somewhat along the same lines of what I've seen over the years. I do think, however, that there are some differences, interesting differences.

I have seen the show evolve. In terms of what is highlighted, the types of technology vendors participating. It used to be, if you remember, very heavily focused on devices and it was where the device manufacturers could make their big announcements. Last year was quite different from my perspective. And this year I do expect it to be a continuation of last year, where we did see these convergence that they're talking about, where there is a collaboration between different parties.

So, it will be interesting to see what the participating startups are interested in collaborating with the large incumbent vendors, Ericsson, Nokia, Huawei, and so on. That's, uh, from my perspective what, uh, the theme of convergence means.  

Eric Hanselman: Well, if you think about it, we have gone from, to your point, what was primarily a handset show and a lot of the latest and greatest features and what's been out there in terms of the capabilities that are there, but we've had that blending and integration, and maybe that's the converge part, of so many of the technologies that extend beyond the handset and into the capabilities that go beyond it.

If we think about a lot of what's actually taking place on the floor, not only, you know, certainly there's no shortage of handsets, there's no shortage of the latest and greatest consumer technologies that are there. But there's so many other things that we start thinking about service capabilities and some of the odds and ends and well, you've been looking for a lot at what's happening with APIs and the ability to start interconnecting at the service level.

There's quite a bit that's happening there and in terms of the maturity of that. But those offerings, we've had a bunch of different capabilities that are starting to roll out. What are you going to be looking for there on the API side? 

Raul Castanon: Yes, you're right. So, the network API is mantra kind of officially came in two years ago at Mobile World Congress. 

And the idea has been floating around since forever, at least 20 years. But just looking at how this initiative has evolved in the last two years; I do think it is finally making some progress with many telcos already commercially launching network API services. And last year there was a very interesting buildup with a few announcements coming out prior to the show, but then just this huge number of announcements every single day come in starting with the, uh, GSMA open gateway initiative.

In the keynote session on the list and then announcements from the large tech vendors, as well as several announcements from major network operators, including Dutch Telecom, Telefonica, Orange, and so on. So, I do expect that. They will be holding off some of the really interesting announcements until the week of the event.

I expect new launches from different operators globally. There were many from Europe last year, so maybe we will hear more from operators in Asia Pacific and Latin America, hopefully. So that, that's what I'll be looking for. 

Eric Hanselman: Picking up some, a little bit of that, but this is an area where we've actually got some study data that's behind it, the Kagan global taco operators survey seemed to show some pretty positive sentiment. 

And that's something that if we think about some of the data behind it, it's always nice to have the backup of that perspective about where the operator sentiment is heading and what this might speak to in terms of uptake. 

Raul Castanon: Yes, last year we were able to have the collaboration of our Kagan colleagues, adding some questions on network APIs to one of the Telco surveys that they have, and this survey in particular, we looked at how network operators were advancing in terms of deploying network API services.

And in addition to identifying some interesting trends, specifically anti-fraud, uh, seems to be a top priority globally. We also saw significant advances in the Middle East and Africa. North America is perhaps a little bit behind, but the expectation is that it should catch up within the next two to three years.

So, in summary, 2025 should be a very interesting year for, for network APIs in terms of commercial deployments.  

Mohammed Hamza: I think this is all starting to come together for the operators in a sense that there's a lot of different aspects that we've been talking about. In recent years, in terms of how the network is being built up and prepared for these future services.

And I think, I think that's where, for me, there's, you know, a big change this year. Convergence is something that we've talked about. a lot in the past. It's a bit of a guessing game as to what you're talking about when you're talking about convergence in a sense as well. I think there's so many things to so many people.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I think the industry has been relatively open in terms of technology adoption and an update to an extent. Obviously, there's more game changing aspects like the open RAN stuff that people aren't. Perhaps, you know, a hundred percent ready for, I think with 5g standalone starting to come online, that opens up the opportunities for the API stuff to kick off as well, and we're seeing a lot of developments that essentially are more about kind of network preparation for the future.

And I think AI, I'm sure you're going to come to that later on, but AI is going to play a big part in that. AI? What? Yeah, I've heard of that. I hear, I  

Eric Hanselman: hear it's going to be big. Well, but I guess the thing, but before we dive into the AI quagmire, it sounds like maybe we're starting to get to critical mass.

In that, as you're pointing out, networks now are starting to get to a point at which we've got sufficient capabilities, we've got API access, so now easier integration is possible, other opportunities to go uptake a set of services. Granted, relatively limited right now. Do you think we're hovering on the edge of that next stage?

Mohammed Hamza: I mean, well, we're turbo boosting the infrastructure, right, in mobile. And I think that's really what's happening at the moment. Because those early deployments, even going back to 4G, 3G, those networks take time to develop their capabilities. And I think we're getting to a stage now where more of this is coming together.

And it's not just the technology. I think it's the broad industry. So if you're looking at Satellite operators that are now playing quite heavily in the 5G space, the whole non terrestrial network space, whether that's coyotes or video delivery or something else, you're getting a lot of the traditional, I'll say traditional, but the kind of the established tower or infrastructure owners begin to kind of monetize their Or build on their kind of infrastructure that they acquired over the years. 

There's been a lot of deals and you're seeing acquisitions in edge and things like that, that will help them prepare for the next stage. 

Lynette Luna: I also think the carrier mindset has really changed. I think a lot of carriers have seen their networks be a competitive asset and they didn't want to open them up.

And I think with network APIs and other services, they're realizing this is more of an open world and you can make money selling access to developers that then sell services to someone else. So, it's been a kind of a mind shift. for a lot of operators, especially in the U. S. 

Eric Hanselman: This is one of those things that everybody keeps talking about. 

The idea that operators got burned by the transition to over the top. And, you know, all these over-the-top applications were, you know, cannibalized all the revenue they thought they were going to get by building out the networks. And they just wound up creating the dumb pipes. And so, gosh darn it, they weren't going to do it again.

And yet they've held back. You think that this is. The, they're getting to a point where they see that they can actually monetize this and there, they're moving forward. 

Lynette Luna: I think so. And more so in other regions. I think Raul could probably speak a little better than I can, but the US is probably the last holdout a little bit.

I think carriers like Verizon have really seen their network as a huge competitive advantage. So, it's really hard to open up and give others access. But at the same time, if everyone else is moving that direction, it's really hard not to move as well.  

Eric Hanselman: Yeah, well, hopefully, again, I guess this is another critical mass question.

It's something maybe about getting to levels of infrastructure, the capabilities, some of that openness. And we talked a little bit about some of the 5G pieces, we're getting to the next stage. So, from the 3GPP standards, release 17 has been the next stage of 5G build out. And we keep going through all of these sort of next versions of 3GPP standards.

And the next one's going to be better. And Mo, you talked about non terrestrial release 17 gives us. Some more, and yet we're continuing to go back and forth with some of the investment fatigue about 5g in that the operators have, they've spent a lot. They're trying to figure out how do they actually recoup a lot of these investments.

The 3GPP is talking about 5g advanced. And of course, 6g is hovering out there. Does release 17 give us enough to do. The latest and greatest again, non-terrestrial, hopefully some good things there.  

Mohammed Hamza: There's an important note to note there quickly. And I think we've seen some parallels with the fixed line services that have been around for a while now in terms of how operators have opened up their systems to carry, integrate those OTT services, whether it's Netflix or even building.

A super app to kind of host other apps and services within that. So, we have real world examples of that happening on the fixed side. I think it's just the network on the mobile side hasn't quite got to that stage of being able to service all these new applications and benefit from them at the same time.

Eric Hanselman: And it gets back to Lynette's point that they're still trying to hang on to the network as a proprietary asset, but I don't know, what are your thoughts, Lynette? 

Lynette Luna: So. In regard to release 17, you know, that's been sitting around for a long time. Right. And that's supposed to be the vision of 5g overall, right. 

Transitioning to enhance mobile broadband and ultra reliable, low latency communications and massive IOT. 

Eric Hanselman: All we're supposed to get before. 

Lynette Luna: And there's a lot of executives that kind of argued that the five. G standard had too much flexibility in the beginning because it allowed operators to launch on 4g architecture.

And it just turned networks into ones that could offer faster broadband speeds, but none of those things that I mentioned. And I think the problem has been that carries have been busy spending on coverage and have been really reticent to spend more on network capabilities that don't have significant customer demand yet. 

So, it's that old proverbial chicken and egg issue, but there's. People moving forward. T-Mobile at t Verizon, but they're moving pretty slowly. They have standalone networks. Our last 5G Tracker, which we are about to do so it's a little old, but out of the total 290 operators that launched 5G by June 30th last year, only 69 operators had activated standalone networks at that time.

So, we'll see, I'm good to do that with my colleagues soon and look at those numbers again for the second half of 2024, but there's a lot of great things that come with release 17, but it's expensive, right? But there's this coverage centric mindset. And I think carriers need to start moving to this.

capacity centric models where they want to offload IOT off of LTE so they can refarm that spectrum and things like Red Cap should allow them to do that going forward. 

Eric Hanselman: Well, and you make a couple of really interesting points there. I mean, one, getting back to Mo's point about standalone and, and for our listeners, the whole idea about whether or not you are a single 5G network or whether or not you are in this transitional mode between 4G and 5G, and there are a lot of the big benefits that. 

Moving to standalone, a good chunk of the planet is now on standalone. You know, China, of course, rolled out exclusively standalone. Most of Europe, a lot of Asia is now getting that way, and North America has still been playing catch up on that. And hopefully the new statistics on that is you're talking about will bear out.

We've certainly seen announcements and it's something on North American market that T Mobile keeps, you know, beating its drum about as being a competitive differentiator. But it is one of those things to take advantage of the full set of benefits of release 17. You have to be able to get to standalone to do all the good things.

Lynette Luna: And it's expensive. It's a rip and replace, right? You could argue that. 4G Core allowed carriers to really launch 5G and 5G wouldn't be where it is today without that ability to do that. So, the transition is a little slower. 

Eric Hanselman: Well, and there is, we needed a path that was not going to be full rip and replace for everything and be able to have that. 

And I guess the expectation originally was that we'd make that shift a little more rapidly than we did, but okay, we are where we are. And maybe AI is going to fix all that. Mo you, you brought up the AI side of things. Do, do we have some AI pixie dust that we're expecting at, at Mobile World Congress? I did.

To my, to my 

Mohammed Hamza: shame. But yes, I think there's going to be a lot there. Uh, you know, AI is almost akin to convergence in that it, it's extremely broad in terms of the implications. Right. But I think. It's critical because it's actually, you know, you brought this up earlier in terms of the 6G stuff, which we really shouldn't be talking about at this stage anyway, but AI is like, opens the doors for 6G in my mind.

And if we're talking about kind of current relevance, it's again, it's that boost of the networks. It's about cutting costs when, as Lynette mentioned, the costs are expected to surge. Improving allocation of resources or security and ultimately performance and the ability to kind of. Segment services better and manage all of that, manage connectivity, if you like, and all the good things that come with it. 

Eric Hanselman: Well, and from an operational perspective, yes, all sorts of good benefits, but also in the services area, AI has been doing, uh, tremendous amount. If we think about what's happening with call center automation, all the other pieces that are taking place. In the delivered services that are writing, you know, on top of, and alongside with the network, there's a lot that's happening there.

And Raul, what's your take on, are there looking for big advances? We we've already seen a lot of progress there yet. 

Raul Castanon: Everyone has an AI story for sure. And definitely in the contact center and customer experience space, from my perspective, this is more evolutionary rather than revolutionary. So, I.

Honestly don't expect a significant breakthroughs in productivity, but rather maybe small jumps. There is a lot of speculation in terms of replacing light agents. I think that is bound to happen at some point, but probably I don't think in the next two years. So yes, there is a lot of potential making strides, but still a work in progress from my perspective. 

Eric Hanselman: So more to deliver on, do you think that shift towards expanded API availability will start to open that up? Is that something where we're looking at services that are, you know, integrating AI capabilities and actually starting to leverage APIs to automate some of the operational pieces, especially when you look at app integration?

Raul Castanon: Yeah, definitely. That's a big area of opportunity. And just alluding to what you and Mo were talking about previously. I think that the shift away from the over-the-top solutions, which if you think about it, many of them were really a workaround. to the lack of access to network capabilities that opens up, uh, significant opportunities on the side of a network operators in terms of monetization.

If they are willing to open their networks to developers and enterprises, there are just so many possibilities for them to access capabilities and specifically some of them, either AI. enabled services or automation opportunities just to think about what could be done having access before the call is established to all the information that can be accessed in terms of who the user is, their location, the time of day, the services they want to access, how much are they willing to pay for the services.

So yes, definitely very interesting opportunities is there.  

Lynette Luna: I think AI in the network is really interesting to me for carriers. They're traditionally been over builders, right? They have to have extensive coverage and now they can use AI to figure out where they need to bolster capacity. Where they need to add new coverage and I think we should be able to see some impact on CapEx going forward that and like you mentioned customer service is really interesting to me just being able to predict when somebody is going to churn being able to route somebody to the right person to talk about there's a problem with my handset just being able to do that efficiently.

It's a huge asset for carriers. The consumer facing AI is pretty interesting. I think Apple and Samsung, they're the ones that are going to push that on their smartphones. And I think it might take a little bit for customers to get accustomed to AI features on the handset. That'll be interesting to see if that's a driver for handset adoption going forward.

So, it's all. There's so much AI out there, so I'm trying to focus on the three things that maybe will drive revenues for operators. Well, 

Eric Hanselman: it's, it's the thing that is, I think the, I don't know, I hate to say, you know, we're looking for the killer app, but I think we're still looking for the killer app. It is that question of AI and handsets, because also don't forget Google with Gemini, but. 

All the demos are talking about really fancy picture editing, which is okay, but we're not really getting towards the things that are going to be, you know, the agent assistance, all the kinds of things that are that next stage that are the promise of AI and AI. I don't know, as I'm saying is I'm thinking, well, are we in that same sort of issue with, there was a lot of promise to 5G and, and maybe now we're starting to get to the edge of it and there's a lot of promise in AI and, and maybe we're close to getting to some of that.

We're, we're getting closer. And I guess the big question is how that will actually see at Mobile World Congress. 

Lynette Luna: Yeah. I think AI for efficiency's sake and cost reduction is interesting for me. I mean, it's not the exciting part of AI, right? The consumer facing part are the most exciting, but I think there's an adoption curve for all that.

Mohammed Hamza: You know, there's complexity in everything, more or less, right? And I think that's where AI comes in. I think if you look at the fixed line space as a comparison, reducing things like human intervention, truck rolls, all of that stuff that's like, You know, 90 percent of the cost of running out some of these network or digging the fiber in at least in there on the fixed side and on the mobile side, it won't be too different from that. 

I think if it comes to, you know, when you're talking about things that are kind of end user services, there's no shortage of capabilities for me. I think I will really kind of enhance things. Some of those services that operators already offer like the smart home that they can manage already on their mobile phones.

It's for me, it's an enhancement to everything that we have, and it hasn't kind of touched quite touched everything yet, but it's getting there. 

Eric Hanselman: This certainly is the promise. And especially if the challenge always seems to have been that it's getting enough of the telemetry from the network back to a point at which the operator can work with it.

And be able to say, ah, you know, you were in an area of low coverage or there's a problem with your handset or being able to, you know, diagnose and then triage resolution for that. That that's the big thing, you.  

Mohammed Hamza: know, even if you look at the, you know, the cost of rolling out edge networks, mobile network networks, the impact that I can have in terms of processing at the edge is.

It's potentially groundbreaking for those operators that are at the moment limiting those deployments to where they really need. 

Eric Hanselman: them. Well, and things that, uh, when we start looking at being able to monetize those investments, the whole AI RAN kind of idea starts to kick up and a lot of other things that are out there.

Maybe that's a little further out, but.  

Mohammed Hamza: I think the underlying theme is like, you know, opening up the network. Opening up the architecture in a sense, and just waiting for these things to slowly come about. And maybe the future will be here soon. 

Eric Hanselman: Well, we'll see if it's actually going to be there at Mobile World Congress.

This has been great. I'll, uh, thank you very much. Uh, unfortunately, there's so much more we could discuss, but we are at time. Uh, thank you all for being back and, uh, we'll recap what we saw at Mobile World Congress. When we come back, I'd like to have you all back on to see whether or not any of this panned out, but thanks for being back.

Raul Castanon: Yes, definitely. We should talk again. Thank you for having us.  

Mohammed Hamza: This was great. Thank you, Eric. 

Lynette Luna: Thank you, Eric. Appreciate being a part of this. 

Eric Hanselman: And that is it for this episode of Next in Tech. Thanks to our audience for staying with us. And thanks to our production team, including Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, and Kyra Smith on the marketing and events teams.

And our agency partner, The 199, I hope you'll join us for our next episode where we're going to be talking about an offshoot of this on the IOT piece, talking about smart spaces. Uh, I hope you'll join us then because there is always something Next in Tech.