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The fact is that 5G
has not been the roaring success it was expected to be, certainly with
consumers, there’s arguably not been enough progress on sustainability and
while 6G has become a regular discussion point, the world seems on the point of
bifurcating west and east, putting the future of the global internet at risk –
all key questions that will be on the mind of exhibitors and attendees at MWC
2023.
More than 80,000
people are expected to attend MWC this year, topping the 61K who made it to the
2022 event, where sustainability is top of the agenda. The key MWC 2023 themes
are 5G Acceleration, Reality+, OpenNet, FinTech and Digital Everything.
MWC 2023: Doubling
down on green
On the one hand
energy efficiency is now rated the top priority by telcos with 80% rating it
important or extremely important to their planned upgrades, in the most
recent Global Trends 2023 report from MWC owners and telco lobby
group, the GSMA.
This speaks
primarily to a cost savings and environmental story for operators. For
equipment vendors, it underlines the fact that power efficient kit is now a
competitive selling point.
But the report is
mixed. The GSMA claims telecoms is among the leading industries in terms of
climate commitments but in the next paragraph says less than half of operators
have committed to the UN Race to Zero pledge.
Renewables account
for 9% of energy consumption among operators, per GSMA, although there’s
considerable variation by region. European operators use renewables for the
majority (70%) of their energy; African and Asian groups (including China) are
at less than 10%.
On the plus side,
climate impact disclosure is now commonplace with the majority of operators
worldwide reporting on CO2 emissions. There is less uniformity on policies
related to e-waste. The GSMA says increasing these reporting rates will depend
on investor pressures, consumer attitudes, and reaching a consensus on accepted
KPIs.
Climate change will
be highlighted at MWC2023, notably in an address shared by the CEOs of
Vattenfall, Telia and Vodafone and, in another keynote, by Alejandro Agag,
Founder & CEO, Formula E talking about racing electric SUVs.
But as Iain
Morris of Light Reading, remarked, “Green is [being] promoted by executives who
will just have flown hundreds or thousands of miles to do what could be done
online or via an old-fashioned phone call. For an industry with a dodgy track
record on the environment the optics are hardly ideal.”
He cited research
from Omdia (a Light Reading sister company) that reveals emissions from China
Mobile soared 111% between 2018 and 2021 and points out that Western operators
may only appear to perform better “because they rely heavily on a controversial
market-based methodology when reporting their Scope 2 emissions – those
stemming mainly from the electricity they buy. This system means they can
report massive cuts simply by acquiring cheap renewable energy certificates
that make no real-world difference.”
Morris also calls
out the lack of diversity among attendees to MWC. Despite the efforts made to
foreground women and people of colour in its conference, the exhibition floor
will be predominantly white, male and middle aged.
Both charges could
be equally levelled at any trade show. The diversity issue will probably take
at least a one generation to shift out white middle-aged males into retirement
and before the efforts of education and recruitment programs bear fruit.
An uncomfortable
aspect of the recent ISE show, also in Barcelona and likely to be replicated at
MWC2023, was the prevalence of younger women hired by exhibitors to act as
stand ‘guides’ or badge zappers. If they were employed for the same job,
younger men were less obviously doing so.
MWC 2023: 5G - Show
us the money
5G is in danger of
being seen as a damp squib. While the industry heralded the first billion 5G
connections by the end of last year, the promised supercharged economic uplift
and whizzbang applications have yet to materialise.
“You will struggle
to find a market that has seen a real and sustainable growth in ARPU in line
with 5G launches,” Matthew Iji, director of modelling and forecasting at GSMA
Intelligence, explained to Mobile World Live, the content arm of the GSMA.
The industry
remains upbeat, arguing that it is only now with the rollout of 5G Advanced
that the technology’s benefits will be realised.
New network and
service deployments will drive 5G “beyond vanguard markets” in Europe, North
America and Asia, said Peter Jarich, Head of GSMA Intelligence. “New use
case development beyond [faster mobile broadband] which has driven early 5G success
will see 5G get closer to realising its full potential: think further cloud,
edge, slicing and maybe even API monetisation momentum.”
If any great return
on their multi-million Euro investments is to be made by operators it will be
in the enterprise. Yet the GSMA’s own research identifies only 5% of operators
having defined an enterprise metaverse strategy. While consumer interest in the
speed of 5G is considered positive – it doesn’t extend much further than that.
“Speeds are not
what will ultimately sustain pricing premiums (and therefore revenue growth),”
the GSMA reported. “A ‘wow’ factor is required to attract new customers or
incentivise existing ones towards higher spend.”
XR is a candidate
here, with the potential to usher in a new age of (immersive) consumer
experiences that benefit from 5G’s advanced capabilities in areas such as
speed, latency and capacity.
However, a GSMA
Intelligence Operators in Focus Survey suggests AR/VR is a not a priority among
operators. Sales of AR/VR headsets remain flat and a reduction in headset
pricing and an increase in content are needed before AR/VR moves to the
mainstream.
It reiterates its
expectation of a “flurry of metaverse/XR content developments” in 2023, with
gaming, video and music at the forefront. There’s a metaverse summit at MWC
2023, based around the enterprise and a keynote on the topic with speakers from
Web3 platform developer Dimple and Sebastian Borget the co-founder of virtual
world Sandbox.
There’s also a
first ‘immersive storytelling space’ at the show and a focus on the growing
relationship between mobile and sports ecosystems, in collaboration with Barcelona
FC.
MWC 2023: Can the
splinternet be avoided?
The gap between
5G’s game changing promise and its prosaic reality is of concern if the
industry is going to persuade investors including national governments to bet
big once again on 6G.
The
sixth-generation wireless network is now being pitched as the missing component
in the 5G topology that will finally deliver transformational improvements for
real-time internet applications such as driverless cars or remote surgery.
According to Light
Reading doubts are creeping in among governments and the investment community
about whether another ‘G’ is worth it.
“The 5G experience
has been a long-overdue wake-up call,” wrote Iain Morris. “It began with
the usual publicity frenzy about new revenue-generating service opportunities
(remember self-driving cars and robot surgeons?), few of which have
materialised.
“Politicians joined
in, telling voters 5G was an economic game-changer. Somewhere in this process,
the realisation struck that 5G was basically 4G on caffeine – a bit faster, a
bit more cost-efficient, but (despite all the money spent) no great cause for
excitement.”
This matters if
investment is to be galvanised for 6G. Already, there’s a race to reach 6G
milestones with South Korea predictably stating its intent to beat the
rest with commercialisation as soon as 2028.
China is also
piling R&D into 6G development. The country is smarting from having its
leading mobile tech developer Huawei outlawed from much of the national
communications infrastructure in the US and Europe. The current geo-political
situation has exacerbated cooperation on global standards with some observers
pessimistic that a unified internationally recognised 6G will ever be agreed.
Ericsson CEO Börje
Ekholm admitted as much during an interview last year; “If the tech world
is fragmented East and West then it is going to mean competition between two
ecosystems.”
Standards body the
ITU has been attempting to avert a splinternet in which core tenets
of a shared and interoperable Internet are no longer available around the
world.
The GSMA will hope
to play a role in bringing the industry together. Huawei is far from ostracised
at MWC2023 where more than a dozen executives have been given speaking
platforms. China Mobile’s president and CEO is also keynoting.
In the absence of
definitive proof that the company is, like TikTok, syphoning data back to
Beijing, it is right to continue to engage with the Huawei which after all is
one of the world leaders in 5G technology. That it has achieved that feat on
the back of state funding continues to feed the fear of those who believe that
reliance on network components engineered in China puts the West at a long-term
disadvantage.
MWC 2023: Quantum
preparation
The next giant leap
in computing is on the horizon and operators are being asked to get ready for
it. Quantum computing leverages the duality of qubits to calculate sums at
speeds unimaginable with today’s electronic systems.
At the same time
there is a risk that future Quantum computers can break the security of the
internet and mobile networks, according to the GSMA.
A cross section of
the industry has contributed to a white paper assessing the threats and
potential of Quantum compute to the telecoms.
While saying
there’s no need to panic, the paper recommends that the mobile
industry prepares for the adoption of Post-Quantum Cryptography.
Luke Ibbetson,
Vodafone Group Head of R&D said: “This industry-first whitepaper
is an important step towards securing telco networks against future attack by
quantum computers. The transition towards standards based post-quantum crypto
algorithms will take time and has to start now.”
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