Mobile World Congress is just a few short days away! The busiest mobile trade show on the planet (probably!)! Can you tell we are excited?
There you can pound coffees from dawn to dusk, attend endless vendor briefings about some form of 6G vaporware, get lost in the gothic quarter, and have your laptop stolen from right under your cafe table!
For many of us, it will be our first time in Barna since COVID-19 struck hard in early 2020. So, as the impressive spires of Sagrada Familia finally loom into view once more, what’s happening in the cloud-native 5G space at the show?
Well, the cellular nimbus news stream has already started, from Deutsche Telekom, Ericsson, and Google Cloud’s lab work in speeding up the deployment of cloud-native functions to Samsung’s delivery of 24,000 5G radios for Dish’s cloud-based network. The wind is already up among the tech Cirrus.
Daryl Schoolar, program vice president of telecommunications at IDC, said that we will see more cloud-native 5G adoption at MWC proper. “Very much so,” the analyst said, adding that he was hesitant about what he could reveal yet, because of NDAs.
Gareth Owen, associate research director at Counterpoint Research is expecting some announcements on 5G standalone (SA) in Barca. He noted KDDI’s recent choice of Samsung’s SA core for its 5G networks across Japan as a sign of recent movement in the SA space.
“A trend worth watching is the trend away from NFVi to bare metal server infrastructure,” Dave Bolan, research director at the Dell’Oro group observed -- a point that Ericsson also made to Silverlinings earlier this week.
The majority of these folks, as well as yours truly, will be on the ground in Barcelona next week. Keep an eye out for the hat!
Spot Dan in his hat at Mobile World Congress? Tweet it to us! Follow us on the ground at the show @GoSilverlinings.