What STL Partners expects to see at MWC 2025

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AI and what else? Here is what the STL Partners research team expects to see at MWC 2025

The STL Partners research team is getting ready and excited about heading to Barcelona in a couple of weeks for this year’s Mobile World Congress (MWC). We haven’t started packing our bags yet, but we are already thinking about what to expect from MWC 2025.

Here are our predictions about the discussions and the innovations that will dominate the show.

AI everywhere, all the time

Last year, AI was a major theme alongside network APIs, but the way it was talked about the technology was very hype-y. There will be more substance this year because, as indicated by our Telco generative AI adoption tracker, telcos have made real progress. In fact, and according to a cloud provider client of ours, “telcos are actually one of, if not the best, performing industries for AI, which is surprising given that they are traditionally slow adopters” (ouch – but so true!).

We expect to see specific examples of AI applications in the network and other telco systems, some enterprise AI use cases and AI-enabled consumer services. However, it is unlikely that operators (apart from the Asian ones) will be able to demonstrate any revenue generation from AI services yet.

The buzzword around artificial intelligence will be agentic AI. We expect a lot of interest in how autonomous AI agents may be used (in all industries, not just in telecom) to complete tasks with minimum human supervision and how multi-agent systems (MAS, another potential buzzword) will need to come about to support higher levels of network autonomy.

Telcos will be keen to demonstrate that they have the partnerships and the network capabilities needed to support AI agents in their network and deliver these newfangled capabilities to their customers (see Orange’s and Iliad’s recent collaborations with Mistral AI).

Questions remain around AI in telcos, though – in particular, how the huge investments made by some will actually prove profitable. Large-scale industry events tend to provide little real answers to big conundrums, but MWC should bring at least some discussion about the need to make AI and generative AI (GenAI) less power-hungry, as well as to change both its economics and carbon profile.

6G and other fancy technologies

There will be too much 6G hyperbole at the stands and meeting rooms at Fira Barcelona Gran Via, but with a significant minority of attendees talking sense. These sensible people will suggest that it may be time to stop calling them ‘Gs’ and think about a long-term evolution, and what fixed and mobile networks can do to provide a wider, ubiquitous mesh of reliable connectivity.

It is still too early to be talking in too much detail about what 6G may deliver, but we expect to see more imagined future services that are unlikely to find any market and bombast about how mobile companies will deliver them. There will also be some conversation about the potential sensing capabilities of the next generation of wireless technology, more flesh on the bones regarding tangible use cases and benefits from 5G-Advanced, and the migration path from there to 6G.

In addition, there will be more prominence for quantum technologies (the topic is on the roundtables’ and summits’ agenda), but not yet a huge splash. Last year, quantum was very much a tiny fringe sideshow, but the beginnings of standardisation in post-quantum cryptography have shone a bit more spotlight on it. We will meet quantum specialists at some of the stalls (they were hard to find last year) and see some demos on bigger telco/vendor stands – especially around quantum safety.

We have our own research on quantum which can be found here and here.

Differentiated connectivity and verticalisation

We expect focused discussions on some of STL Partners’ sweet spots around differentiated connectivity and industry verticalisation of telco propositions – be it network APIs, private networks or edge.

Network APIs were big at MWC in 2023 and 2024. They will continue to be so this year, but we expect that they will play second fiddle to AI as there is, in all honestly, nothing very new to report. We hope that focus will be less on standardisation and technical feasibility – and more on revenue models and, crucially, on actual monetisation examples (i.e., more production deployments and fewer proofs of concept, or PoCs).

There will be much noise about the latest and the greatest in various partnerships (the JV between Ericsson and telcos, dubbed Aduna; Nokia’s acquisition of Rapid, etc.). Indeed, these are all good signs of the industry progressing in the right direction – one of collaboration within and outside of telecom to build that bridge to the developer community. For instance, Sinch (one of the recent partners of Aduna) and Rapid are generic developer platforms with no particular telco pedigree. In comparison with last year, we expect several more demos showcasing innovative network solutions, such as Quality on Demand (QoD) in automated guided vehicles (AGVs) or more likely in broadcast/extended reality (XR) again.

Telcos will be tearing their hair out about private networks, deep in the trough of disillusionment. There will be a lot of discussion about what the barriers to scaling are and maybe why they are affecting some more than others.

Already spotted at MWC 2024, we hope for a revival of the edge (as in edge computing/multi-access edge computing – MEC!). AI is spurring renewed interest in network edge solutions, including computer vision (the new moniker for good old video analytics). This is good news for telcos and their network edge play, but we anticipate that some will also look to be channel partners for on-premises edge solutions. There may be a shift from telco edge propositions being marketed as providing ‘low latency’ to providing a ‘sovereign environment’ (in light of the regulatory focus on data residency and autonomy across the world and particularly in Europe). Telcos are not the only players looking at the sovereign edge and will continue to vie with cloud providers to offer it.

Going hand in hand with telcos’ ambition to verticalise their services through differentiated connectivity, we expect increased presence of companies looking to partner with telcos for growth in beyond core communication services (e.g., fintech, health technology, cybersecurity).

The consumer corner

In the consumer space, we may see examples of new services on telcos’ stands as they try to harness the enthusiasm for AI. Smartphone vendors may not have done enough to boost it so far, but it’s early days and telcos are already looking at monetising some AI services in the future.

Furthermore, the connected home will be an area of focus for some MWC exhibitors – and we expect an increasing number of telcos to market such services through specific platforms or marketplaces. The smart home is a field that telcos once pioneered in and quickly abandoned, but it is now enjoying regained interest as a bolster to dwindling average revenue per user (ARPU). Telcos with well-established smart home platforms (such as NOS and Veon) are leveraging these offerings to consolidate their presence in home environments and to sell extra services to households (including insurance, security, managed services, pet solutions).

We expect to hear many mentions and a few demos of consumer robots following the intensified activity in this area recently. These autonomous – and importantly, eye-catching – machines will be used to demonstrate 5G capabilities, but some of them will likely be showcased to signal innovation and future focus by telcos, likely from Asia.

Network talks

A significant proportion of the floor area will be dedicated to demonstrating the technological prowess that a modern telecom network can achieve.

We expect a lot of attention on AI-RAN and the prospect of running enterprise AI applications on RAN infrastructure. Large telcos will likely drive this discourse (including SK Telecom, T-Mobile, SoftBank) and position it as a crucial part of their vision of the 6G base station. We have significant scepticism on how such infrastructure ‘sharing’ works in practice and what its monetisation prospects really are, so we will look for more flesh on the bones of that particular idea which was born at MWC 2024.

Still in the RAN, there will be a number of updates and progress reports on open RAN, virtualised RAN (vRAN) and cloud RAN, including some possible big announcements such as the results of the long-awaited Vodafone request for quotation (RFQ).

At the network level, we hope for progress reports from operators including Orange, Telecom Argentina, China Mobile, Telefónica and Virgin Media O2 on network autonomy as part of their journey to Level 4 as per TM Forum’s Autonomous Network Framework.

For non-terrestrial network (NTN) watchers, there will be some exciting announcements of direct-to-device (D2D) services, partnerships and low-Earth orbit (LEO) constellation buildouts – largely on the fringes or on telcos’ blind side.

More disappointment expected on sustainability agendas

As in 2024, we expect disappointing progress in relation to telecom sustainability activities.

Many countries, including the US, are prioritising AI dominance by expanding data centres, often placing sustainability lower on the agenda. Their desire to be ahead in the race will not help with carbon emission reduction targets. At company level, many organisations are not slowing down in their GenAI adoption, aiming to reap the benefits first and address any sustainability issues that arise later.

On the upside, small language models (SLMs) will become more prominent this year and because they consume less energy, this will be a positive trend for environmental sustainability.

On the diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) front, there might be a certain level of debate about the future of such initiatives in the telecom space, given recent statements indicating that technology companies are scaling back on their DEI investment in the face of economic hardship.

Last words

Overall, the increased politicisation of technology and the growing geopolitical tensions will have an impact on the show. Regulation will be a thorny topic. Europe, the host of the congress, will try to balance its way between its US allies and Chinese business partners. The region already got challenged at the AI Action Summit in Paris on 10 and 11 February 2025 by a strongly worded speech by US vice-president JD Vance – and at present, there are more questions than answers. Does Europe want to maintain its high level of regulation? Can it do it? Will telcos prefer the US model: less regulation but also the abandonment of values such as safety, diversity and sustainability? And what is the long-term play of the tech companies? We hope to hear discussions about this.

A few years ago, as the financial crisis hit, we began to see telcos pare back their presence at the show, ceding space to tech vendors. This year, major telecom vendors will also be scaling back (for some, scaling down even further). We’ll continue to see an increasingly diverse show, with smaller vendors that are leading in more promising growth areas – network software, GenAI, data centres – and technology transformation specialists that bridge the divide between telecom and industry (e.g., Accenture).

It is likely that we will discover growing disparity between companies (both operators and vendors), demonstrating concrete progress with new technologies/business models/solutions, and those talking about change but having little to show for it in real-world deployments and in revenues. This will be seen most obviously in the case of Huawei/China vs Europe, but potentially also between vendors with a big presence in the US vs Europe-focused companies.

We hope to have some discussions or see evidence of the attractiveness of the telecommunication industry as an employment prospect for tech talent. What are telcos doing to improve their ability to access tech skills? Considering the many changes in the senior management of large telcos in the past months and years (examples include Orange, Vodafone, Verizon, AT&T, Telefónica), will these moves also bring a change in tone to the show?

We will be looking for the answer to this question and more at MWC 2025. Stay tuned for our insights following the show.

We wish you safe travels and hope to see you in Barcelona!

Check out our Reports section for our MWC report once we are back