The State of Mobile Today: MWC Barcelona 2022

In the before-times I used to travel quite a bit. I would go to all the CadenceLIVE Conferences (or CDNLive as we called them back then), so Munich, Bengaluru (fka Bangalore), Yokohama, Hsinchu (Taiwan), and Shanghai. Sometimes I would go to other conferences, such as the Paris Airshow, which sounds a bit like somewhere you might see the Blue Angels perform but is actually the major defense and aerospace event of the year (which moves to Farnborough in the UK on alternate years). But the event I enjoyed the most was what used to be called Mobile World Congress, but is now officially just its initials: MWC. It is held in Barcelona in the first week of March. The event itself has actually got less interesting as the center of attention has moved from handsets (that we all use) to basestation infrastructure, which I suppose we all use but are not really aware of it. The reason that this is less interesting is that the big infrastructure companies all take the back of one of the huge halls, put a wall across the whole hall, and won't let anyone in unless they have an appointment. Under those conditions, it is hard to write anything intelligent about trends in basestations. So I have always focused on other aspects of infrastructure and, of course, on the technology that Cadence and its partners are presenting at the show.

But Barcelona is one of my favorite cities in Europe to visit. La Sagrada Familia church has been under construction for a century is and aiming for completion in 2026, the anniversary of architect Gaudi's death. If you've never been to Barcelona, then touring the many Gaudi buildings (and a park) is a must, as is visiting the incredible vegetable, meat, and fish market, La Boqueria. I'll put a video I made there in 2017 at the end of this post to give you a "taste".

Last year, the conference was entirely virtual. But this year it is back to being in-person. Reports I have seen say that it is almost as busy as it used to be. I attended some from my living room. Actually, since it is during the day European time, it is during the night here, so I just took my computer to my bed.

First up of the several people presenting the keynote, and MC for the entire keynote, was Mats Granryd who is director-general of GSMA, the organization that runs the show.

His focus was on connecting the rest of the world. As he said:

Just under half the world's population is not connected to mobile broadband.

I'm not quite sure what qualifies as "broadband" in this context. There are over 6.5B smartphones in the world, and so 83% of people in the world have one. Another immediate thought is that people may be connected with wires, not mobile, but the poorer parts of the world leapfrogged (leaptfrog?) wired telecom and went straight to mobile. In fact, living in the US I access the internet primarily by laptop, but in most of the world, the internet is a smartphone. People have neither laptops nor wired connections.

Some other numbers Mats had:

• there are 27M employees in the mobile industry
• the mobile industry will invest over $600B in the next five years in capex, with well over 80% of that for 5G

Telefonica

Next, he introduced the wonderfully named Jose Maria Alvarez-Pallette, who is CEO of Telefonica, the main supplier of telecom in host-country Spain for both wired and mobile communication. 

The big surprise to me was that Europe, home to both Ericsson and Nokia, has 5G coverage under 10%.

He pointed out we are living in a new era with Web3 and the Metaverse delivering mind-blowing disruption, but it all depends on ultra-broadband connectivity from 5G and fiber.

Zero wait, zero touch, zero problems.

His inspirational pitch was that telcos change the lives of people around the world in a way like no other industry.

Without us the technological revolution would not have happened. Without us, the world would have stopped completely during the pandemic crisis.

Vodaphone

Next up was Nick Read, CEO of Vodaphone.

He had some numbers that I've not seen before, the penetration of 5G in different countries. I recently highlighted a WSJ article about how poorly the US is performing in 5G (see my post February 2022 Update) but by these numbers, it is not doing so badly. The penetrations are:

• South Korea: 90+%
• China: 60%
• USA: 45%
• Europe: under 10% "we risk being a bystander"
• Africa: very little, "not even at the starting line" as Nick put it

Nick said that last time he presented at Barcelona was in 2019 when he'd been CEO for just five months. He spoke about how industry and government should work together. But then came the pandemic and he is deeply proud of the work that our teams and networks have done to keep everybody connected. The joint efforts of industry and government truly captured the spirit of the new contract he has been calling for.

Digital will increasingly determine the competitiveness not just of companies but nations and continents. Vodaphone is a global company with scaled regional presence in Europe and Africa. How can we support the digital shift in an inclusive and sustainable way? We need a social contract for regional competitiveness. I will focus on Europe and Africa where we are most active. First, we must tackle the challenges head on. Second, we must leverage regional scale nurturing grass roots and embracing a new approach together. Clearly, right this moment, the most pressing issue is the war in Ukraine.

In Africa, M-Pesa is celebrating its 15th anniversary (see my posts He Who Goes First...Loses and 2G: Mobile Goes Digital for details on M-Pesa). This allows peer-to-peer money transfer and microloans. It enables 50M people to transfer money in a secure, affordable, and convenient way.

Telia

The next presenter was Alison Kirkby, CEO of Telia. You may not know much about Telia, they operate in the Nordics and the Baltics. For the geography-challenged, that means Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. Telia was actually founded in 1853 when the telegraph first came to Sweden. They needed an equipment supplier and found one in Lars Magnus Ericsson. Hmm, that name seems a little familiar.

She started off with her pitch about how telecom holds the world together:

We work in Nordics and Baltics and have done good things for our region and beyond, and positive things for our society. When society closed down we kept it open. When people couldn’t meet, we kept them in touch.
...
Telco knowledge in our region is unparalleled thanks to our business partners, especially Ericsson and Nokia. Citizens in our region are also tech wizards, always at the top with digital skills, number of ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) graduates, and so on. One consequence is that connectivity is practically a birthright. Sweden has more unicorns [companies valued at over $1B] per capita than anywhere else outside of Silicon Valley. Estonia is Europe's [actually the world's] most digital society and Telia is pleased to have made it so.
...
After a period where telcos have been undervalued, I see the tide shifting. The trusted nature of the business and the enabling service we provide is important for customers, governments, and societies. Now more than ever we are mission-critical.

China

Mats introduced the final speakers:

We will see three short videos from colleagues in the largest market in the world, China

To give you an idea of the scale of mobile in China, the three main networks (the three people presenting here) have:

• China Mobile 957M subscribers (roughly three times the entire US population)
• China Unicom 372M subscribers
• China Telecom 317M subscribers

The first presentation was by Yang Jie of China Mobile. He spoke in Chinese (as did the other two Chinese presenters) with subtitles. He started by talking a lot about the recently completed Winter Olympics. Memo to video editors, when your presenter is showing clip after clip of people on snow, don't put your subtitles in white. I have no idea what the first half of the presentation was about!

Next was Ruiwen Ke of China Telecom who talked about transforming his company from a Tel-Co to a Tech-Co and how they are building a "power network". I'm afraid I never really understood exactly what he meant. I think it is part of the desire of every telco in the world to be something other than a "dumb pipe". But users actually seem to want really good dumb pipes and are not looking to their telco to supply video services, cloud services, or anything much else. They look to specialist suppliers like Netflix and AWS (and their competitors, and in China their equivalents) to deliver those sorts of services.

Finally, Lie Hongliu of China Unicom, who emphasized that they were the official communications partner for the Olympics. More snow. I'm not sure that users want their telco to do anything special about the Olympics either.

He had a call to action that was meant to be inspirational:

Big connectivity. Big computing. Big Applications. Commit to the digital economy.

He did say that since the launch of 5G they have "been intimate with China Telecom to build the world". I suspect that means that as the third horse in a three-horse race, they cannot afford to go it alone.

Welcome to Barcelona

And with that, Mats wrapped up the opening keynote and welcomed everyone to the show.

La Boqueria

This is the famous market in Barcelona just off Las Ramblas, which is a street today but used to be a river (tourist board) or a "sewage-filled stream" (Wikipedia) before it was covered over and turned into a street. So something to whet your appetite:

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