25 February 2018 (Barcelona, Spain) – The Mobile World Congress is my toughest event to cover. It an event that will have aspects of all the technology fields I cover: artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, e-discovery, mobile/digital media, plus just about every facet of social media. It’s why this year I have brought a 5-person crew (including two video teams), and I will introduce a new member of my team, Saloomeh Ashrafi. A long-time colleague who is now based in Barcelona, she is a civil engineer and has been focusing on the mobile industry, but is also an aspiring actress and model. A very cool lady.
This year the event has 110,000+ registered attendees (not including the 4,000+ vendor staffs and event support staffs), with 700+ educational sessions and 3,300 vendors spread out across the 260,000 square meters of exhibit halls. It takes … roughly … 20 minutes to walk from the North end to the South end across the eight exhibit halls. Yes, a lot to cover.
We’ll have our first “live” video tomorrow from the exhibit halls. Over the weekend we shot about 8 hours of video in and around Barcelona to give you a flavour of the town which we’ll add to tomorrow’s footage.
But just to get you started …
The theme is …
The theme of MWC this year is “Creating a Better Future”. What’s wrong with things now? Mainly, that we don’t have 5G. The next generation of mobile connectivity will dominate the show this year. There will be demos of futuristic 5G-enabled devices, and every bigwig on stage will explain how the new standard will, naturally, create a better future (see next header below).
Another major talking point is the future of chipmaker Qualcomm. It is fighting against a takeover bid by rival Broadcom worth well over $100 billion, spoiling the approach by trying to buy smaller semiconductor group NXP. And if that wasn’t enough to juggle, Qualcomm is also entangled in a legal tussle with Apple, which is rumored to be replacing its chips with ones with Intel or another manufacturer for the next generation of iPhones. Apple doesn’t come to MWC, but for this reason it will be a frequent subject of conversation among the chipmaking cognoscenti. [NOTE: Apple folks are actually here but incognito.]
There will also be the usual flagship phone and device launches from just about every manufacturer not based in Cupertino. Barcelona this week is a reflection of what the world’s smartphone market is actually like, dominated by Chinese manufacturers instead of the Apple-Samsung hegemony seen in much of the West. All over the city, people are carrying phones from Huawei, Xiaomi, and others … and seemingly succeeding in getting through their day.
If you want to sound like you know what you’re talking about when it comes to 5G, knowingly drop one of these three acronyms into casual conversation:
Massive MIMO: This stands for Multiple-Input Multiple-Output, describing the vastly greater number of antennae that can fit on 5G base stations compared with what’s currently possible. These arrays could improve the use of radio spectrum by a factor of 22, research has found.
3GPP: It sounds a little outdated now, but this stands for the Third Generation Partnership Project. It’s the technical body that coordinates development of the various connectivity standards, like 5G and its predecessors. As you (now) know, 3GPP is still working on the final 5G specifications in “Release 16,” which is due next December, so everything else is just marketing hype.
3DBF: Three-dimensional beamforming is a software technique that allows the advanced antennae used in 5G base stations to transmit radio waves that find their targets more efficiently. For extra credit, pair this with mentions of massive MIMO arrays and-a bonus term-mmWave (that’s Millimeter Wave) spectrum bands.
Handsets, handsets … and MORE handsets
I do not (really) cover the handset madness at MWC. There are more versed media mavens for that stuff. And the “official” programming doesn’t start until tomorrow, but handset makers try to make an early splash with high-profile launches for the press. But just a short note to say I covered it.
Samsung unveiled its latest flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S9, just a few hours ago. As I noted last year, the Korean tech giant sat out last year’s MWC, as it was still smarting from the embarrassment of its Note 7 phones’ unfortunate tendency to explode. Bummer for the marketing department, for sure. But based on the buzz at today’s media show, I think this year’s S9 will build some momentum for the company.
Huawei’s kickoff event at MWC follows a rather “colorful” keynote, at the Consumer Electronics Show in January (as reported last month by my CTO, Eric De Grasse), where CEO Richard Yu went off-script to rant at U.S. carriers for their unwillingness to carry the Chinese company’s phones. (Huawei has struggled for years to break into the U.S. over its alleged ties to the Chinese military, and hours before his speech AT&T had pulled out of a distribution deal). Will things go more smoothly this time around?
YOUR “CHART OF THE DAY”
Ok, you knew this already, but these days the mobile internet is the internet:
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