I am so thankful I get to meet my friends, clients, ex colleagues year after year and to witness how our industry is moving first hand.
2025 was probably my 23rd congress or so and I always find it invaluable for many reasons.
Innovation from the East
What stood up for me this year was how much innovation is coming from Asian companies, while most Western companies seem to be focusing on cost control.
The feeling was pervasive throughout the show and the GLOMO awards winners showed Huawei, ZTE, China Mobile, SK, Singtel… investing in discovering and solving problems that many in Western markets dismiss as futuristic or outside their comfort zone. In mature markets, where price attrition is the rule, differentiation is key.
On a related topic, being Canadian, I can’t help thinking that many companies and regulators who looked at the banning of some Chinese vendors from their markets due to security preoccupations are now finding themselves in the situation to evaluate whether American suppliers do not also represent a risk in the future.
Without delving into politics, I saw and heard many initiatives to enhance security, privacy, sovereignty, either in the cloud or the supply chain categories.
Open telco APIs
Open APIs and the progress of telco networks APIs is encouraging, but while it is a good idea, it feels late and lacking in comparison with webscalers tooling and offering to discover, consume, and manage network functions on demand. Much work remains to be done in my opinion to enhance the aaS portion of the offering, particularly if slicing APIs are to be offered.
Open RAN & RIC
Open RAN threat has successfully accelerated cloud and virtualized RAN adoption. Samsung started the trend and Ericsson’s deployment at AT&T has crystalized the mMIMo +CU+DU+non RT RIC from a main vendor and small cells + rApps from others as a viable option. Vodafone’s RAN refresh should see maybe more players into the mix as Mavenir and Nokia are struggling to gain meaningful market share.
The Juniper / HPE acquisition drama, together with the Broadcom / VMware commercial strategy seem to have killed the idea of an independent Non RT RIC vendor. Near RT RIC, remains in my mind a flawed proposition as host of 3rd party xApps, and as an expensive gadget for anything else than narrow use cases.
AI
AI of course, was the belle of the ball at MWC. Everyone had a twist, a demo, a model, an agent but few were able to demonstrate utility beyond automated time series regression as predictions or LLM based natural language processing as nauseam…
Some were convincingly starting to show Small Models that were tailored to their technology, topology and network with promising results. It is still early but it feels that this is where the opportunity lies. The creation and curation of a dataset that can be used to plan, manage, maintain, predict the state of one’s network, with bespoke algorithms seems more desirable than the wholesale vague large and poorly trained models.
Telco Cloud and Edge computing is having a bit of a moment with AI and GPU aaS strategies being enacted.
All in all, many are trying to develop an AI strategy, and while we are still far from the AI-Native Telco Network, there is some progress and some interesting ventures amidst the noise.
