Navigating the telecom technology future at MWC Barcelona 2024

After the flurry of semiconductor news about Intel, TSMC, and Nvidia last week, industry attention turns to MWC Mobile World Congress Barcelona 2024. Taking place from February 26 to 29, MWC is the largest global telecom industry event and expects to attract over 2,400 exhibitors and 109,000 visitors to this year’s event.

One of the major themes of the show will be generative AI. It will be interesting to see how many manufacturers show smartphones supporting on-device AI processing using the latest chips from Qualcomm and MediaTek. Indeed, MediaTek is already moving rapidly in this direction with the company’s recent announcements that it has enabled support for Meta’s Llama 2 and Google’s Gemini Nano LLMs on MediaTek 8300 and 9300 SoCs using the integrated APU and the NeuroPilot toolkit.

5G will also be under the spotlight at the event, with a lot of noise around 5G-Advanced, the next edition of the 3GGP 5G standard which is expected to arrive in the summer of this year. The key benefits being touted for the technology include higher uplink speeds for large data workloads such as video surveillance, better support for IoT, and more reliable connectivity for industrial control devices and vehicles.

A scaled-up cloud and edge infrastructure will be essential for telecom providers and enterprises to take full advantage of the speed and bandwidth of 5G. Leading Taiwan technology vendors such as QCT, Gigabyte, and Asus will be out in force showing how they can accelerate this process with their latest edge servers for AI and HPC (High-Performance Computing) applications. At the dedicated Taiwan Pavilion at the event an additional 15 companies including D-Link, Nexcom, and Alpha Networks, will showcase their 5G and Open RAN hardware, software, and networking solutions for commercial deployment.

Following the launch of the Apple Vision Pro, immersive VR, AR, and mixed reality technologies are set to gain attention at MWC 2024. To showcase the huge potential of these rapidly developing technologies for enterprise, education, and consumer applications, HTC will be demonstrating a wide variety of hardware and software innovations including its flagship device, the HTC VIVE Focus 3.

With a strong exhibitor lineup and a raft of interesting new generative AI, 5G, cloud-to-edge, and mixed reality technologies, the prospects for MWC Mobile World Congress Barcelona 2024 look to be very positive. It is of course early days yet, but the event could help spark a period of renewed growth for the telecom industry and its supporting ecosystem.