Curving Towards a Network Future at #MWC24
The great architect and artist Antonio Gaudi once said “There are no straight lines or sharp corners in nature. Therefore, buildings must have no straight lines or sharp corners.” I love Gaudi’s architecture, the elegance of curves, the simplicity of statement that the world is not linear, it is nuanced and circuitous. As we descend on Gaudi’s city of Barcelona, one that is literally littered with many of his master works and infused by his spirit wherever one turns, his inspiration can be felt in this present moment in the communications arena.
I’ve been attending Mobile World Congress for a decade and have seen the evolution of network virtualization and the promise of 5G. We’ve discussed software defined everything, the breaking of stovepipe infrastructure, and the slicing of networks. And yet, just like a Gaudi exterior, we find ourselves curving towards a destination that we can’t quite reach. The true promise of 5G has met less than full joy, and certain promises of the standard including full virtualization of the RAN, delivery of private 5G, and even cloud native network provisioning and automation are sitting at less than ubiquitous deployments. Telecom operators, who have collectively invested billions in 5G infrastructure, are still seeking the revenue streams that will deliver ROI that they’d aimed for through creation of this technology.
The question remains: will 2024 be the year that we finally see 5G hit broad scale across all of its promise? Will enterprises push through to private 5G deployments, will RAN finally be virtualized, and will cloud native NFV finally be deployed across all network services? And the million-dollar question…will AI be the disruptive force to spark this final act for 5G supremacy?
The TechArena will be engaging with companies from across the communications and edge landscape to search for progress, evaluate industry players for breakout stars, and gain proof of the hoped for promise. We’ll look at some pretty ridiculously cool use cases featured in Barcelona, we’ll delve deep into the possible future with 6G, and we’ll sketch out our views on the state of the network and edge in a tsunami of blog posts and podcast interviews befitting the king of communications conferences. And hopefully, we’ll find some time to pay homage to Gaudi himself. Watch this space for the latest from Barcelona, and if you’ll be at MWC24 next week, please connect with us!
The great architect and artist Antonio Gaudi once said “There are no straight lines or sharp corners in nature. Therefore, buildings must have no straight lines or sharp corners.” I love Gaudi’s architecture, the elegance of curves, the simplicity of statement that the world is not linear, it is nuanced and circuitous. As we descend on Gaudi’s city of Barcelona, one that is literally littered with many of his master works and infused by his spirit wherever one turns, his inspiration can be felt in this present moment in the communications arena.
I’ve been attending Mobile World Congress for a decade and have seen the evolution of network virtualization and the promise of 5G. We’ve discussed software defined everything, the breaking of stovepipe infrastructure, and the slicing of networks. And yet, just like a Gaudi exterior, we find ourselves curving towards a destination that we can’t quite reach. The true promise of 5G has met less than full joy, and certain promises of the standard including full virtualization of the RAN, delivery of private 5G, and even cloud native network provisioning and automation are sitting at less than ubiquitous deployments. Telecom operators, who have collectively invested billions in 5G infrastructure, are still seeking the revenue streams that will deliver ROI that they’d aimed for through creation of this technology.
The question remains: will 2024 be the year that we finally see 5G hit broad scale across all of its promise? Will enterprises push through to private 5G deployments, will RAN finally be virtualized, and will cloud native NFV finally be deployed across all network services? And the million-dollar question…will AI be the disruptive force to spark this final act for 5G supremacy?
The TechArena will be engaging with companies from across the communications and edge landscape to search for progress, evaluate industry players for breakout stars, and gain proof of the hoped for promise. We’ll look at some pretty ridiculously cool use cases featured in Barcelona, we’ll delve deep into the possible future with 6G, and we’ll sketch out our views on the state of the network and edge in a tsunami of blog posts and podcast interviews befitting the king of communications conferences. And hopefully, we’ll find some time to pay homage to Gaudi himself. Watch this space for the latest from Barcelona, and if you’ll be at MWC24 next week, please connect with us!
