UC Advanced - issue #16

EVENTS

MWC ‘25 MWC (Mobile World Congress)’25 was back, bigger than ever, with over 109,000 attendees strutting the floors of the Fira Gran Via in Barcelona, from 3 to 6 March 2025. With 2,900 Exhibitors, Sponsors and Partners, it is an awe-inspiring event, presenting the very best the telecommunications sector, and all the industries that are inter-related or rely on telecommunications, have to offer now, and in the future.

Big Themes You guessed it. AI. Yes, there was a lot of talk of AI on the lips of exhibitors and attendees, and integrated into devices, especially smartphones and laptops, some concepts more future orientated than 2025. Another big theme that pundits identified was the “common cloud”, and most keynote speakers opted to discuss some form of global inclusion, breaking down barriers and sharing infrastructure, ideas and security measures. Mats Granryd, outgoing Director General of GMSA identified the pace of 5G standalone implementation, the Open Gateway opening up networks in an API era and Spectrum in his final opening speech. Other themes of interest were Open Platforms and energy efficiency, enter solar-powered devices into the conversation. Artificial Intelligence Dominating MWC 2025 was AI. From AI-powered assistants proposing to transform communication experiences, discussions around how to make AI scalable at a network level, to cloud telephony and telcos leveraging AI for network automation and incorporating it into antenna engineering, to name only a few of the areas AI dominated. AI inference is the process of using a trained machine learning model to

make predictions or decisions on new, unseen data, and applying those insights gained during the training phase to real- world situations. At MWC25 applications for image and facial recognition were showcased, and speech recognition is becoming commonplace (voice to text) and natural language processing is gaining traction with not only “understanding” spoken languages and speech patterns, but interpreting the correct required and expected responses. AI inference creates and demands a lot of data, putting immense strain on current internet capacities. Concerns were raised over whether AI inference was ramped up into everyday lifestyles and devices, which added to the MWC25 debates about storage, control and security. Common Cloud Ivo Ivanov, CEO of De-Cix, reported in his recent blog that a new buzzword was coined, “The Common Cloud”, which refers to operators moving away from siloed environments and toward shared cloud infrastructure to handle AI, IT and network functions. Red Hat’s telecom chief architect, Rimma Iontel, described it as a growing trend in which telecom operators are shifting toward shared cloud infrastructure to handle both IT and network

Ivo Ivanov CEO

de-cix.net