Telecom's biggest annual event proves once again it is the only thing in the industry that grows.
"I've seen things you people would believe," said the blond-haired replicant on Ericsson's stand. "Executives slumped over a shoulder of jamón. I analyzed beamforming jitter in a room at the Hotel Porta Fira. All those moments will repeat next time, like beers in Spain. Time to fly." Of course, the artificial intelligence shown off at Mobile World Congress, unlike the Rutger Hauer character who said similar things in Blade Runner, isn't yet humanoid and sentient. But it's hard to believe there were so many people – about 109,000 attendees this year, according to the GSM Association, the event's organizer.
If not replicants or Spanish students, herded through the gates on the promise of a free lunch to make up numbers, then who were they? Remember, headcount at the 20 North American and European telcos tracked by Light Reading shrank by nearly 440,000 between 2015 and 2023. The combined workforce of AT&T and Verizon has dropped by 44% over this period. And yet MWC, in apparent defiance of the industry's contraction, just gets bigger year after year.
The figures the GSMA has now published show an increase of 8,000 visitors this year, putting MWC 2025 on par with the 2019 event as the biggest in its history. Numbers are up dramatically from the 61,000 people who poured into Barcelona in 2022, when pandemic-inspired lockdowns outside China were finally over. Back then, few would have envisaged a return to the 2019 heights in just three more years.
It is not just the telco workforce that is shrinking, either. Ericsson, which maintains the biggest stand after China's Huawei, employed 22,000 fewer people at the end of last year than it did in 2015. Nokia has recently cut thousands after the loss of a radio access network (RAN) contract with AT&T. MWC, as the name implies, is supposed to be an event primarily about mobile, and yet RAN product sales worldwide fell by $5 billion last year, to around $35 billion, after the same drop in 2023, according to Omdia, a Light Reading sister company.
Meanwhile, there is nothing new. AI is a general topic, not one telecom-specific, and much of the AI tech discussed at MWC could be deployed in banking or energy or retail or a multitude of other sectors. Some of it barely qualifies as AI. Organizations have liberally applied the label like an MWC early riser slapping on the aftershave to conceal the previous night's rank smells. After 5G's failure to spur sales growth for telcos, hardly anyone wants to even think about 6G. "Flat" was the word a few senior industry executives used to describe this year's show.
The question remains of who all those attendees were. Do big telcos and big vendors, despite financial challenges, send an even bigger percentage of their staff? It seems highly improbable. Did startups pile in? Again, their inability to have an impact makes it unlikely. Analysts, a thriving species, seem to flock there in ever-greater numbers. But analysts without industry executives to analyze would be buzzing around pointlessly like bees denied flowers.
There are a couple of possible explanations. Hall 1, ground zero for Huawei, was reportedly rammed (this correspondent did not make it there) and the Chinese equipment vendor, in contrast to its western rivals, claims to have performed well last year, with sales up 22%. Yet to publish its annual report for 2024, it added a net 12,000 employees to its workforce between 2021 and 2023, giving it 207,000 in total. In a typical show of Chinese strength, it may have dised enough people to mount an overseas invasion.
Another possibility, however, is that more attendees than in previous years came from outside telecom. For years, trends like virtualization and cloudification have been slowly tilting the balance of power away from traditional vendors such as Ericsson and Nokia and toward IT companies, whether hyperscalers like AWS and Microsoft or hardware makers like Dell and Intel. AI is the most recent example of this phenomenon, spurring giant chipmaker Nvidia and legions of software developers to take a bigger interest in telecom. For all its problems, the sector does, after all, generate more than $1 trillion in annual sales of fixed and mobile services.
The rising numbers, then, could be a sign not of the industry's health but of its takeover by foreign powers. The real driver of cloudification is probably the simple need to ride in the slipstream of bigger companies able to generate better economies of scale. But the long-term implication is that Ericsson, Nokia and others, having already ceded part of their role in hardware development, will eventually retreat from activities like the design of custom silicon, too.
In 2023, Nokia abandoned its efforts to build cloud infrastructure platforms. "Quite frankly, we can't keep up with the innovation that's happening in the cloud, and our industry cannot," Raghav Sahgal, the head of Nokia's cloud and network services business, told Light Reading at this year's show. Ericsson continues to resist. But for how long?
Aging show attendees may feel MWC comes around faster than ever, and 2026 will undoubtedly follow another speedy year of upheaval, job losses and growing angst about a dystopian AI future. For now, at least, the replicants are still nowhere to be seen.
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