Big trade shows have been struggling to recover since the pandemic. This year, with attendance expected above 101,000, MWC Barcelona is a show that will be worth attending.
This year's MWC Barcelona trade show is one not to miss.
That's not because of RICs, APIs, NTNs, ORAN, 6G or any other inscrutable telecom buzzcronym (yes, I just made that word up). Instead, it's going to be a pivotal show because of the wider economic, technological and geopolitical pressures – think trade war and super AI – that are pushing on executives both inside and outside the telecom industry.
Oh and don't forget about the world's richest man (you know, the one trimming the US government) who also happens to own the satellite company that's upending a big chunk of the world's communications industry.
All those factors (and more!) are why the GSMA – the trade association organizing the event – expects this year's MWC attendance to surpass last year's 101,000.
That growth likely comes as a relief. MWC mostly collapsed in the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic. At that time, there were questions as to whether big trade events gathering attendees from all over the world would ever recover.
They have recovered, and this year's MWC will be one worth visiting. Here are three reasons why:
Trump's going to be all Trump
We're about a month into President Donald Trump's second term and already there are big questions about the future of 5G spectrum in the US, the government's $42 billion telecom subsidy program and network operator megamergers.
That list doesn't even include how Trump's tariffs will affect global shipments of gadgets ranging from 5G radios to smartphones.
Already Acer said its laptops will cost 10% more due to the tariffs.
But wait! What if Trump orchestrates a US purchase of Nokia's mobile business? Incredibly, that idea may be back on the table, especially in light of Nokia's new American CEO.
Trump often governs through chaos and doing whatever feels right at the time. How that strategy will affect the US and international telecom industry will undoubtedly hang over MWC this year.
One final word on the Trumpiness of it all: Many Europeans are rightly concerned about the president's impact on everything from NATO to Greenland. Americans – whether or not they voted for Trump – will need to at least be aware of those concerns as we head out to Spain.
Super AI
Artificial general intelligence (AGI... or maybe just "super AI"?) might happen. Maybe. At some point.
Happy to buy into the hype, most of Big Tech has been caught up in an arms race over who can get to AGI first. After all, the development of AI is closely tied to the amount of computing you can throw at AI training models. That's why OpenAI announced a $500 billion "Stargate" project to build more data centers. And it's why the company's CEO is now musing about additional spending of up to $5 trillion (yes trillion with a "T").
Whether super AI actually happens or not, the AI arms race has major implications for the telecom industry because AI training demands lightning-speed communications among massive AI data center training facilities. And the delivery of AI services might also require broader telecom investments farther out into the network in order to support AI inferencing at the edge.
Already companies like Verizon and Intel are investing in the concept of low-latency AI inferencing. But should they? There's some debate.
Telcos "are in a good position" to provide AI inferencing services, argues Nvidia's Chris Penrose, global head of business development for telco. Nvidia, of course, is the primary supplier of AI-friendly graphics processing units (GPUs) that has been working to drum up support for its inferencing ambitions among telecom companies like Fujitsu, SoftBank and T-Mobile.
Penrose told Light Reading that in many countries around the world telecom operators are viewed as a "trusted" provider of domestic computing options. He said Nvidia is already working with more than a dozen telecom operators globally that are providing various levels of AI inferencing.
Disruptive Wireless analyst Dean Bubley is skeptical, however. He wrote on social media that many cutting-edge AI functions – like agents and reasoning – won't benefit from the low latency connections that telecom companies could provide through inferencing.
"Will AI applications need 1ms, 10ms, 100ms... or 10 minutes or 10 microseconds? Unless you can answer which order of magnitude is relevant, the idea that the RAN (or fixed network) is a suitable edge for client workloads is a fantasy," Bubley argued.
Telecom's ultimate role in the evolution of AI – whether as a computing supplier, data transporter or simple bystander – will be another critical topic at MWC.
The end of telecom's winter
MWC Barcelona is held at the beginning of March every year. That's springtime for much of the world, when the chill of winter yields to the buds of spring.
And so too is the telecom industry showing signs of emerging from its own period of hibernation.
"The momentum and recovery we saw developing earlier in the year with our US service provider customers translated into solid revenue growth in the second half," said Bruce McClelland, CEO of telecom equipment supplier Ribbon Communications, during the company's Q4 earnings call. "And we have a number of incremental projects in both the US and Europe that we expect will maintain a solid growth trajectory in 2025."
Many other telecom vendors have voiced similar comments. Indeed, IDC analyst John Byrne recently noted that top US telecom operators collectively plan to spend 4.2% more on capital expenses this year than last.
"There are lots of factors driving the increase," Byrne told Light Reading. "Telcos largely worked through the excess inventory they had amassed during and after Covid – that took much longer than many suppliers had thought it would but we finally saw a turning of the corner from several in Q424."
Byrne added: "AT&T and Verizon have aggressive fiber buildout plans that will keep their capex high for the next few years. Lumen has specifically earmarked building a network that is optimized to provide the backbone on which AI training and inferencing can be supported. And underlying all of the telcos is the reality that demand continues to grow and efficiency measures can only take you so far."
This increase in telecom spending dovetails with the tremendous investments Big Tech is making into AI. For example, the financial analysts at Evercore now expect hyperscalers like Microsoft and Meta to collectively spend $333 billion globally in 2025, up from their prior expectations of $288 billion. It's an AGI arms race for the ages.
How will all this spending affect the telecom industry broadly? And what about the wireless industry specifically? Finally, will this frenzy of investment spread across the world, or will it be locked into the US by an increasingly nationalistic, isolationist Trump administration?
Those too will be topics worth discussing at MWC Barcelona this year.
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