It’s early on Tuesday morning, the weather is brisk, and a light frost is melting on the Sussex Downs.
I’m off to London to attend Ericsson’s big pre-MWC media and analyst briefing. The venue this year is the headquarters of BAFTA, on The Strand, where UK theatre luvvies decide each year who is the luvviest of them all.
But first, it’s time to choose a vehicle. Do I opt for Austin Powers camp hilarity, or 4.2 liters of supercharged power? (I choose the Jag, obviously).
12:00 p.m.: I check in at BAFTA HQ, and meet my colleague Alejandro Pinero, from Silverlinings’ owner, Questex. (Alejandro used to work for G$MA, but he seems ok).
The atmosphere is a bit muted to begin with, but that’s to be expected. Ericsson’s shares recently slid to 2018 lows and I’m here to assess how it’s faring in the chaos of the new cloud and 5G comms universe.
I’m excited for today’s event, partly because I haven’t been to one for five years. Alejandro is also excited because he’s Spanish.
This is Ericsson’s first in person Mobile World Congress preview event since COVID. It’s a cunning concept – give people all of the news from the event before the event actually happens.
By 12.45 p.m. the room is filling up. Finger food is served. There’s a slight odour of fungus and children’s tears, signalling that the Informa team has arrived.
Blue lights
13:00 kick off.
There are some blue lights and one Ericsson logo (less than two). So far, it doesn’t feel terribly Ericsson-y. Which is a shame because Ericsson does “this sort of thing” rather well. It’s definitely not as Ericsson-y as it’s amazing giganto-booth in Hall 2 of MWC. And it’s nowhere near as Ericsson-y as the conference I hosted in Iceland a few years ago where Ericsson’s speaker was called Erik Ericsson.
Börje Ekholm, CEO of Ericsson, couldn’t make it in person, but sends a video. He has a brilliant Swedish accent, and everything immediately starts to feel a bit more like an Ericsson event.
Ekholm reinforces the message that Ericsson is all about the 5G opportunity and points out that half of the world’s 5G traffic “outside of China” is carried by Ericsson products. “Anything that can go wireless will go wireless,” he says.
He says Ericsson is excited, but he doesn’t seem terribly excited, although he’s perhaps slightly subdued by being filmed in extreme close up in front of a curtain the colour of socialized medicine.
Matt Smith, head of live marketing, and a Crystal Palace FC fan (like meeeeeeee) is next and gives us a tour of what Ericsson will be showing on its Hall 2 6000 m2 booth at MWC.
The main themes will be sustainability, XR (which isn’t actually an abbreviation of extended reality and is the same as VR, but we’re supposed to take it more seriously), artificial intelligence (AI) and security. But Ericsson has also built a weird igloo out of plastic (why? Subliminal sustainability messaging?) at the front if its space where it will be providing glimpses of the future with ground-breaking 6G demos.
A 6G bridge
This is the first of a lot of talk from Ericsson speakers about 6G. Erik Ekudden, CTO of Ericsson, also focuses on the not-yet-actually-a-technology wireless technology.
6G will be a bridge between digital reality and physical reality, he tells us. It will be a key component in a “pervasive digital infrastructure,” and will enable the “cyber-physical world.” And, of course, 6G will be faster.
When will this happen? “We’re on a gradual journey to 2030,” Ekudden says.
To be honest, I have two reactions to Ericsson’s 6G pitch.
1: The world it describes doesn’t sound particularly appealing, to me.
2: The entire conversation definitely feels premature.
But then I bump into my old friend Gabriel Brown, senior principal analyst at Heavy Reading, who explains to me that there are geopolitical reasons why 6G is being talked about before 5G has been fully spun up worldwide.
“Everyone is worried about the Chinese,” he said. “It’s all about who’s going to be first with the patents and the IPR.”
Fredrik Jejdling, executive vice president and head of business networks at Ericsson, is next, and walks us through Ericsson’s 5G product launches: new radios, based on a new chipset, with new software.
The highpoints are that the new 5G products deliver 10 times the performance versus LTE while reducing energy consumption by 30%. “No one else can do this,” he says. The radios are also 50% lighter, which is useful if you need to pick one up, I suppose.
He hints that there is more to come.... “We want to avoid being complacent. We won’t step off the pedal of innovation.”
Next, Fredrik talks about the benefits of deploying 5G indoors – a new opportunity for Ericsson.
“Why would you use WiFi indoors when you can just use 5G?” asks Fredrik.
Why indeed, Fredrik? Why indeed!
Fredrik is cool – he’s a bit like Ericsson’s own Mads Mikkelson. He’s passionate about the cool new stuff he’s telling us about. You get the sense that the room is behind him. We all want to be on Team Fredrik.
5G SA
I finish my day with a nice chat with Per Narvinger, Ericsson’s senior vice president, Business Area Cloud Software and Services, who provides a succinct summation of where service providers are in their 5G journey.
“We have 18 standalone 5G networks live now, so we’re past the threshold where the technology becomes proven. Now it’s about which use cases those networks can enable, and also what type of cloud infrastructure service providers will put their 5G over.”
Overall, Ericsson’s event was well worth attending. The energy actually increased as the day went on, peaking with a fantastic presentation by Ericsson acquisition Vonage, which is pitching a game changing API-based strategy for service providers (more on this from me next week).