The Mobile World Congress starts tomorrow in Barcelona setting as every year the world agenda of the mobile industry. Samsung, Huawei, Xiaomi and other leading brands will present the news of their smartphones. However, in recent years, the congress has expanded its area of ??influence beyond the telephone, becoming a showcase for the advances in other technologies that mark the digital industry and companies in general.
Logistics, health, industry, finance or mobility are sectors that will also be protagonists of the congress. In fact, according to calculations by the GSMA, the association that organizes the event, half of the 80,000 attendees who plan to attend the congress have the purpose of discovering advances that are not directly related to mobile telephony.
Mobile is no longer as mobile as it was in its early days. And this year, the technologies that will have the most visibility will be according to the GSMA itself: 5G connectivity, immersive reality, industry 4.0, the fintech sector or artificial intelligence.
“The prominence of 5G repeats one more year and that makes all the sense in the world, since the companies that finance the congress are the telemarketers. In this edition, we will be able to see improvements in the efficiency of the 5G network and also the first functionalities of the 6G network”, comments César Pablo Córcoles, professor of computer science, multimedia and telecommunications studies at the UOC. This new generation of connectivity will reduce the environmental footprint and increase the power and quality of the connection to such a high level that homes will be able to do without Wi-Fi connection, says the professor, who adds that 6G will take at least ten years to reach a mass audience.
Another of the protagonists of this edition will be the immersive reality sector, which will steal prominence from the metaverse, a technology that caused a sensation last year due to the great commitment announced by Meta (Facebook). However, a year later, the advances are still incipient. “This virtual universe does not yet exist and the companies that make the flag of it seem too daring in the eyes of the market,” says Córcoles. For this reason, the congress itself focuses on immersive technologies, such as virtual reality and augmented reality and all the glasses and devices that allow this experience similar to the metaverse to be lived. The applications can be seen both in the video game sector and in the office sector.
Generative artificial intelligence –which allows natural language to be developed automatically and intuitively– will also make its way into Mobile this year after the boom in the ChatGPT platform. “AI will be on everyone’s lips because it has generated a lot of hype in recent months. A thousand startups have broken into in 2022 and investment in venture capital has almost doubled in one year to reach 2,600 million dollars in 2022”, contextualizes Josep Salvatella, founder of the digitalization services consultancy Roca Salvatella, citing CB Insights data.
However, generative AI does not lead major presentations on the congress agenda because it burst in at the end of the year, when the event schedule was already closed. In addition, Córcoles maintains, the operators are not as interested because data consumption is not as powerful as in immersive reality technologies, which transmit streaming videos.
This year, the congress will also highlight advances in the fintech world, especially decentralized finance or (DeFi) and NFTs, which allow the exchange of unique crypto assets. And this despite the credibility crisis that the crypto world is now experiencing after the bankruptcy of FTX, one of the largest platforms, and the value of bitcoin at levels of three years ago.
Industry 4.0 will also make a good appearance. Salvatella explains that they will highlight the new features of the Internet of Things (IoT), which allows technological devices to be interconnected in the same factory, as well as the concept of digital twins. Through virtual replicas, the industry will be able to carry out simulations before implementing technologies in reality.
These are just some of the many functionalities that will be deployed next week in the immense venue of the Fira de l’Hospitalet. They will be quite a demonstration of force of the state of world innovation, which does not come to a standstill despite the context of cuts in large technology companies, which are now seeing how they oversized their growth during the pandemic.