MWC 2022 – 10 Observations

SK Telecom Stand at MWC 2022 – STL Partners

GSMA’s Mobile World Congress – MWC 2022 revealed a subtle but significant shift taking place in the telco industry, showing how the market’s need is changing to ‘connecting technologies’ rather than ‘connectivity’. This has deep implications for the industry and telcos in particular.

Here are 10 observations the STL Partners’ research team came across as they traversed the halls of the Fira Gran Via Exhibition Centre, Barcelona at MWC 2022. A full overview and analysis of the event is available in our report: MWC 2022: Sensing the winds of change

1. CAMARA, the Telco Global API Alliance

Deutsche Telekom exhibited CAMARA, a new Telco Global API Alliance, which includes many leading telcos such as AT&T, Vodafone, Telefónica and Orange, as well as technology players such as Ericsson, Google Cloud and Microsoft. DT was at pains to demonstrate that it had learned from past mistakes, emphasising the inclusion of a wide range of partners – beyond just operators. Its first API came quickly to market within six months of establishing the alliance. The “Quality-on-Demand” API prioritises data packets to ensure high reliability and stability. One proof of concept (PoC) in Munich is enabling BMW to deliver Automated Valet Parking, where a BMW driver can leave their car at the entrance to a parking lot and the car drives autonomously to an available parking spot.

2. Becoming better partners

Operator’s discussed how to partner better, both on the network technology side as operations move to the cloud, and with start-ups, content and industry specific service providers to build and expand new services. Some operators expressed their wish to kill off request for proposals (RFPs) explaining how they can limit the scope of what can be achieved in a partnership, while also taking away from the customer outcome as the priority of the partnership. Some expressed instead a need to shift away from narrow partnerships with a specific focus, to more broad ranging ones that covering multiple areas across both B2C and B2B.

3. Metaverse

It didn’t take long to find the Metaverse at MWC 2022. As the buzzword de jour, it was pretty much everywhere, often accompanied by NFTs – non-fungible tokens or certified digital goods. MTN, SK Telecom and Telefónica were among the telcos talking up the Metaverse. MTN Group, for example, claimed to be first African company to enter the Metaverse by purchasing land in Africarare while SK Telecom presented its ifland social VR and virtual meet-up metaverse platform as part of its “4D Metaverse” exhibition which also demonstrated future urban air mobility transportation.  There was surprisingly little discussion about the one thing that will determine whether these concepts fly and flop – trust. Neeraj Roy, founder of Hungama Digital Media conveyed that it will be critical for “the seven big tech companies who’ve all sort of announced their plans of the Metaverse” to ensure their creations are interoperable – it ought to be a single Metaverse. If not, people won’t be able to move their digital identities and assets from one platform to another, limiting the usefulness of the whole concept.

4. AR and VR Applications

Metaverse and VR applications were popular throughout the show highlighting an emerging ecosystem of VR/AR and 3D developers seeking to build metaverse applications for both consumer, enterprise and government (education). VR for enterprise solutions included facilitating company meetings, sales and marketing of products as well as company training. Meanwhile Korea Telekom (KT) also showcased its developmental K-pop dance coaching smartphone app called “KT Real Dance” which features KT video-based AI capabilities. Users dance to a virtual dance instructor displayed on their phone.

5. Video and AI 

SKT showcased its camera and vision AI service which offers real-time safety applications for enterprise and smart city by analysing and processing live video in the cloud to monitor real-time human activity and provide alerts in cases such as patient falls in hospital settings, driver behaviour monitoring to detect when drivers’ heads drop as they are falling asleep and social distancing regulations. The camera and vision AI service is part of SKT’s efforts to enter the era of hyper connected intelligence connecting people, things and society.

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6. Sustainability

Operators such as Deutsche Telekom and Vodafone showcased their sustainability efforts which included Deutsche Telekom’s Fairphone 4, a modular 5G device with interchangeable parts that enable easy repairs and increase the overall lifetime of the device – which has a guaranteed service life of five years. Vodafone also highlighted that where customers hold on to their phone for an additional year, the device’s carbon lifetime impact is reduced by 29%. At MWC 2022, Vodafone announced its circular economy plan for extending the lifetime of devices and encourage reuse and recycling.

7. Heavy and highly physical industry emphasis

There was a new emphasis on heavy and highly physical industries: ports, airports, mining, manufacturing, construction, energy, logistics and healthcare for example. In the next ten years STL Partners believes the efficiency and productivity issues of these businesses must be addressed. To reach sustainability and carbon goals anywhere near net-zero, the profile of emissions, waste and efficiency in these businesses must be radically improved. There were a plethora of examples and use cases on show, widely varying in quality and depth, but nonetheless demonstrating what can and is being done.

8. Telco cloud

Operators such as Telefónica outlined their progress in Open RAN deployment citing its four main markets: Spain, UK, Germany and Brazil where the operator is in its last phase of its pilot programmes. The operator indicated that carrying out interoperability testing (12 weeks minimum) is a timely exercise and that due to high integration costs, open RAN as of now is more, not less, expensive, than legacy RAN. Meanwhile, Dish Network’s Marc Rouanne spoke enthusiastically of the operator’s cloud native standalone core and open RAN architecture that delivered an all software, fully autonomous, self-healing network. Having outsourced all its cloud operation to AWS in 2020, Dish’s network architecture team consists of fewer than 20 people.

9. Further Analytics, AI and automation use cases

Spirent, with IBM and Palo Alto Networks, demoed a slice management solution with integrated security. Spirent’s active assurance product emulates security attacks both at activation and on an ongoing basis. It also, provides assurance for validation of initial end-to-end provisioning and any further scaling by IBM Cloud Pak. Lastly, the Spirent solution emulates traffic loads that trigger faults to identify the fault, apply impact policy and automatically trigger remediation to the orchestrator.

Nokia demoed the use of its Network Data and Analytics Function (NWDAF) product within the telco ecosystem. Nokia discussed the ability to share network insights with an ecosystem of partners; allowing them to understand real-time quality of experience and past trends. It also provides predictive analytics from the NWDAF data to allow simple controls for the partners such as spinning up new slices or traffic rerouting when future issues were expected.

10. Xiaomi AIoT and Huawei

Xiaomi showcased a range of IoT consumer electronics, (some) with artificial intelligence (marketed as AIoT), including its popular electronic scooters. A representative of the Chinese electronics manufacturer highlighted its three-pronged strategy focuses on growing smart home, smartphone and its retail footprint (stores and telesales). The company has experienced increased demand for its smartphones, particularly from customers who were previously Huawei device owners. Huawei mobile services such as Petal Search, Petal Maps, the Huawei App Gallery (App Store) and Huawei Ads was a reminder to the removal of Google’s Android Apps and services from its devices. 

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