The inaugural Mobile World Congress Las Vegas event takes place from the end of this month, and it is set to lay a roadmap for the issues and opportunities the mobile industry will meet on its continuing digital journey, writes Tony Savvas.
Hosted jointly by the GSMA and US CTIA (the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association), the event is the North America edition of the MWC Series. It was previously located in Los Angeles before this year’s Las Vegas switch.
Between now and 2025, a staggering US$5 trillion will be contributed to the global economy by mobile technologies and services, says the GSMA, with one billion 5G connections forecast by the end of 2022 alone. The show will study and track this growth.
MWC Las Vegas will take place at the Las Vegas Convention Center’s (LVCC) new West Hall, from 28-30 September 2022. CTIA will host its Everything Policy track, bringing policymakers together with key wireless industry stakeholders to discuss trends and developments in government and public policy.
New venue
MWC Las Vegas’s West Hall location opened in 2021 and features 600,000 square feet of exhibition space. Over half the exhibition space is column-free, and at 328,000 square feet, it is the largest such space in North America. The West Hall’s entrance lobby and atrium feature a 10,000-square-foot digital screen developed by Samsung.
The West Hall is also served and connected by an innovative underground transportation system, the Las Vegas Convention Center Loop. Designed by Elon Musk’s The Boring Company, the system transports convention attendees throughout the 200-acre campus in under two minutes in Tesla vehicles, free of charge. In addition, the Las Vegas Monorail is an elevated, all-electric train system that provides direct access to various hotels/ resorts in Las Vegas.
Keynotes
As the recently appointed executive vice president and CEO of the Verizon Consumer Group, Manon Brouillette will make her debut public keynote at MWC Las Vegas. There will also be a joint keynote from AT&T chief marketing and growth officer Kellyn Smith Kenny and AT&T chief technology officer Jeremy Legg.
Among others, there will be additional keynotes from Boingo Wireless’ chief executive officer Mike Finley, CTIA president and CEO Meredith Attwell Baker, and Red Hat president and CEO Paul Cormier.
“MWC is the industry’s long-standing destination event to convene, get deals done and exhibit ground-breaking products,” says GSMA CEO John Hoffman. “At MWC Las Vegas we will bring together the digital mobile ecosystem in a new light at the Las Vegas Convention Center’s prestigious state-of-the-art West Hall.”
Companies that are sponsoring, exhibiting and participating at the event include Verizon, T-Mobile for Business, ServiceNow, Amdocs, Celona, Cisco, Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Kigen, KORE, Kyndryl, Movandi, NoviFlow, Palo Alto Networks, Red Hat, Syniverse and Teal Communications, among others.
Show themes
Under the umbrella of Connectivity Unleashed, MWC Las Vegas will provide a platform to show how innovative solutions from the mobile and digital ecosystems are “truly transforming the digital world”, says GSMA.
Attendees will have the opportunity to dig into the themes of 5G Connect, the Internet of Everything, CloudNet and Tech Horizon, across keynote stages, networking receptions, exhibition halls, an extensive conference and partner programme, and demos.
As for 5G Connect, Alizeh Abbas, conference content manager at the GSMA, says: “There will be one billion 5G connections this year and the growth is not only significant for the telco industry, but for all industries. We will be looking at 5G Advanced, 5G private networks, rural connectivity, green issues and gaming.”
The Internet of Everything group of events will look at how IoT also cuts across different industries. “This is not just about the ‘things’,” says Abbas, “this is about how they connect with each other and how they speak with each other intelligently, and how we merge the physical and virtual worlds together. Among other issues, we will be considering digital twins, smart cities and security.”
The Tech Horizon conference segment will be considering what new technologies and solutions, not just those in mobile, organisations can embrace to tackle the world’s challenges and problems. The future of technology in manufacturing, health, financial services, gaming and entertainment, among other areas, will be considered.
As for CloudNet, the conference will consider the projection that the telco cloud is set to become a US$100 billion market by 2030, according to the GSMA. It will look at how telcos can make use of their existing relationships with cloud providers to become the new digital service providers at the edge, says the GSMA.
Las Vegas summits
In addition, GSMA summits include the eSIM Summit, held on Wednesday 28 September. According to GSMA Intelligence’s “eSIM: State of the consumer market and the road ahead” report, by 2025, 2.4 billion smartphone connections will use eSIM globally. The North America eSIM Market will see growth of about 15% during the forecast period (2022-2028).
eSIM has become more important than ever because of more devices being connected every day in every vertical market, and the requirement to manage devices remotely is increasingly growing too. Furthermore, the adoption of IoT devices in every market is increasing, leading to growing eSIM development to match different use cases.
This summit will focus on these trends and will provide the opportunity to get detailed information about the factors influencing market demand, growth, challenges and opportunities.
Matt Hatton, founding partner at analyst house Transforma Insights, says: “eSIM is a digital transformation process that mobile network operators (MNOs) have to navigate. As with other digital transformation exercises, the challenge is not in introducing a single new technology. It is in understanding the impact that the technology will have on the wider operations of the organisation.”
“While the technological hurdles are significant, adopters must equally give ample consideration to the commercial implications of deployment, challenges of integration, and how to make the appropriate changes within their organisations,” he says. “It is as hard to change organisational working practices, processes and business models as it is to adopt new technologies. And so it is with eSIM.”
Open RAN opportunity
The Open RAN Roundtable will take place on the morning of Thursday 29 September.
The mobile infrastructure supply chain needs innovation and growth to meet the increasing demands of our changing digital society. Open RAN is emerging as a critical enabler to increase supplier choice, agility and flexibility to meet new use cases.
Open RAN is an opportunity, not a threat, says the GSMA, as it enables mobile operators to use equipment from multiple vendors for differing use cases and still ensure interoperability. “An open environment expands the ecosystem, and with more vendors providing the building blocks, there is more innovation, greater service flexibility and there are more options for operators to meet the demands of the 5G era,” the GSMA says.
In the roundtable, attendees will discuss the deployment maturity of Open RAN solutions, the momentum Open RAN has created, its challenges, the opportunities that can be commercialised, and the scale Open RAN may well achieve by 2025.
On the same day, later in the afternoon, the Open RAN Summit will be an opportunity to hear about the latest Open RAN specifications, software developments, industry adoption and about successful network implementations in the US and beyond.
Also on 29 September, the 5G mmWave Summit will take place. Attendees will hear how 5G mmWave is unlocking the full potential of 5G and learn about deployment best practice from some of the industry’s leading experts.
Industry issues
Shahar Yaacobi, head of strategy and growth at Amdocs IoT, says the subject of eSIMs, will definitely be a “lively issue” at the event. He says: “The recent launch of the iPhone 14 is yet another proof point that the embedded SIM is here to stay. Since Apple started incorporating the technology into its smartphones several years ago, followed by Google, Samsung and others, for owners of these phones, changing providers meant simply downloading a virtual SIM, no matter where you are – just like any other app. To date, eSIM has been adopted by all the leading device manufacturers and is in use in smartwatches, smartphones, tablets, laptops and many other consumer and enterprise IoT devices. In the long-term, the plastic SIM will no longer be available.”
As he points out though, the ability to use an eSIM depends on both the device and the network provider supporting it. “While device OEMs widely adopted eSIMs, telcos were slow to respond and prepare for the digital transformation of the SIM card,” Yaacobi says.
Transforma Insights’ Hatton says: “The old plastic SIM will probably be consigned to the dustbin of technology history some time in the next decade. The eSIM is the future, not least because it will end up being cheaper and more customer friendly. Every MNO will need to change to reflect that.”
He says billing and IT systems, customer care, customer lifecycle management, inter-MNO relationships, product offerings and user experience will all need to adapt to the “new reality”. These are significant changes that MNOs need to make in a relatively short timeframe. They will need partners, and they will ideally use a proven and scalable cloud-based solution to deliver all of the necessary complex interwoven elements of an effective eSIM strategy, adds Hatton.
Romil Bahl, the president and CEO of KORE is looking forward to the show. “MWC Las Vegas is a great forum to reach a diverse audience of forward-thinking individuals from a variety of industries,” he says. “We have prioritised our investment in the event and expect to see engagement and growth from it.”
KORE says it will be introducing several new industry collaborations in Las Vegas, as well as sharing details on new innovations. One of its demonstrations at the show will focus on the new KORE Connected Hub, as the next key release within its Connected Health Telemetry Solution. Organisations face myriad complexities in secure data transmission between patient and provider when delivering health solutions like remote patient monitoring, medical alarms and personal emergency response systems, and medical equipment monitoring.
Bahl says: “Most connected health providers are forced to develop their own telemetry solution, when in fact, their real expertise is developing the analytics, workflow, care delivery optimisation and use of the data to improve patient care and outcomes. Our Connected Health Telemetry Solution helps these solution providers accelerate the time-to-market and adoption of large-scale connected health initiatives.”
Joe Peterson, the CEO of Ikotek, the IoT original design manufacturer (ODM), says: “Organisations looking to bring devices to market face a range of challenges, including the cost of design, development and manufacturing, as well as the complexity of global certification, all of which can delay IoT projects. At the show, Ikotek will be discussing with its current and future customers how working with a specialist IoT ODM can help eliminate these risks, reduce costs and bring IoT devices to market faster.”
He adds: “Attending is a great opportunity to introduce Ikotek as a trusted, specialised, US-headquartered global ODM provider for IoT.”
Whether it’s learning more about the evolution of IoT networks, considering the effects of the global 5G roll-out, or how mobile networks are becoming more scalable and intelligent, there’s plenty for everyone who attends the show.
MWC Las Vegas will take place at the Las Vegas Convention Center in the West Hall on 28-30 September.
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