Brace yourselves; Barcelona awaits. To prepare attendees for the media blitz, we shall briefly rattle through what we expect will be the main themes. While we try to go into every Mobile World Congress with an open mind, we never fail to fall face-first into the facts of the matter – that these MNOs we so studiously cover week in and week out are hopelessly inflexible.
This institutional inertia, the ossification of the operators, means that any new technology must fight through departmental disputes, naked careerism, and board-level politicking, to actually reach the field. Short-termism ruins roadmaps, and for all the talk of developmental agility, the MNOs have turning circles the size of small cruise ships.
Consequently, much of the bleeding edge that is teased at MWC is literal years away from deployment. Some is just around the corner, sure, but anyone hoping for a significant technical uplift should be aware of just how much of an uphill battle it will be.
AI
The term ‘AI’ will be plastered all over the stages and booths, as vendors attempt to woo operators, and as operators attempt to convince the world that they are in possession of a coherent AI roadmap.
In terms of distinct elements, the AI-RAN trend is going to be quite prevalent, as the various RAN vendors attempt to upsell the MNOs with shiny new AI-enabled edge computing capacity.
We have written previously about the challenges facing MNOs in securing demand for these inferencing services from the market, and so the likes of the AI-RAN Alliance will be keen to assert that there is enormous latent demand from enterprises around the world for compute capacity housed inside the MNO RAN.
Tying into this, the GPUaaS pitch from the likes of (chiefly) Nvidia will be noticeable, and with Nvidia’s recent investment into Nokia, the pair are likely going to make a splash at MWC 2026.
Ericsson might have a card to play here, as could Samsung, but Huawei is unlikely to lean into the GPUaaS hype, as evinced by its approach to Network APIs – more on those later.
6G
Last time round, we heard differing opinions of how different 6G would be to 5G. Initially, most agreed that while the new Radio Access Technology (RAT) would not be compatible with 5G radios, the 5G Standalone core would be evolved to support the new 6G RAT.
However, since MWC 2025, some dissenting voices have been heard, which argue for a distinct 6G network core. This, in our opinion, would be a mistake, as half the battle of the 5G era has been managing the migration from the 5G Non-Standalone stopgap to a properly 5G Standalone network.
5G-SA is still far behind 5G-NSA, to this end, and MNOs that are struggling with that migration will not be pleased to hear their primary vendors discussing the need for a new 6G core, given that much of the initial sales pitch for 5G-SA was its ability to clean up the headache of supporting the legacy cellular generations. Adding a new network core rather undermines this slate-cleaning opportunity.
We saw some initial demonstrations of the 6G RAT at the previous MWC. We expect to see rather a lot more this time round, and hope to pin down the progress made behind the scenes – to get a proper answer about the state of the 6G core.
Outside of this technical question, we also hope to gauge the MNO interest in the new generation. With the bad taste of 5G’s over-promising and under-delivering still in the mouth, MNOs the world over should (operative word) be a lot more wary of vendor promises regarding new monetization opportunities.
However, vendor pitches concerning operational simplicity and cost reductions are going to be well received. For many MNOs, the 6G cycle will overlap with the 5G-SA cycle, and so if we are able to focus on 5G-SA network cores as a guaranteed upgrade path to support 6G, much headway can be made in the next few years. Perhaps we should re-read our own introduction, to lower our expectations, just in case we are seen to be too optimistic?
Network APIs
Last year’s MWC allowed us to really get to grips with the Network API trend – wrapped up as it was between the GSMA’s Open Gateway initiative, which had then morphed into the Linux Foundation’s Camara Project, and then been embraced by the Ericsson-backed Aduna coalition.
Somewhat lurking in the background was Nokia’s Network as Code offering, which used Camara APIs but in a single-vendor ecosystem, and it should not be forgotten that Huawei also has Network API offerings inside its vast portfolio.
There are similar concerns to 6G here; that MNOs are being promised that Network APIs are going to be a new monetization opportunity for these operators, bestowed by virtue of them having networks that developers would happily pay money to access and leverage. There remain a few concrete examples (mostly related to the ‘know your customer’ value), but wholesale industry-spanning examples are harder to come by.
Network Automation
This is one of the smaller points, but has a lot of overlap with the AI trend. However, for those that have narrowed their focus, Network Automation as a trend manages to avoid most of the hype surrounding AI and 6G and is instead more pragmatically focused on operational savings.
Here, the goal is to use machine-learning and AI-based tools to identify network problems and optimizations, and automatically respond to them.
For now, most retain some level of human decision-making in the loop, but the goal is to eventually not need a manual decision to be made.
Unsurprisingly, there is a lot of overhauling needed under the hood to get an MNO’s OSS and BSS systems ready to feed the required data into these automation systems. As such, Network Automation projects usually have an air of IT overhaul about them, and such upheavals are not something that MNOs tend to salivate about. Still, expect to see lots of grand claims about operational efficiencies.
Smart Glasses
Something far more tangible than the other categories will be the crop of smart glasses we expect to see at MWC. Transsion’s Tecno brand will undoubtedly attract another large crowd, but this year, we might resort to violence in our attempts to muscle our way past the humanoid robots Tecno and its like wheel out to draw in the punters.
Samsung might also have glasses available to examine, and it might also be announcing its new Galaxy phones at MWC. Similarly, Huawei is another likely suspect among the major OEMs. Outside of these two, there are going to be dozens of glasses demonstrations, most of which are going to be quite disappointing, we should note.
However, we will be able to take the temperature at MWC – discerning the current state of the art, the average consumer reaction, and hopefully the OEM roadmaps too.
We believe that there will be hundreds of millions of these glasses in the wild in the next five years, but the price points are going to be much more like the Xiaomi Mi Band than the Apple Watch, to use a smart watch comparison.
Sovereignty and satellites
Our final prediction will be a low-level undertone regarding the ‘digital sovereignty’ of MNO networks and platforms, in the wake of the increasing unreliability of the US as a trade partner.
This will be especially prevalent in conversations concerning European MNOs, and while MWC is not an exclusively European show, most of the largest MNO booths are occupied by European operators.
In related fashion, much of the discussion concerning ‘direct-to-device’ (D2D) is going to now focus on how these satellite constellations can enable coverage along these national security lines. There are plenty of governmental contracts to be won by promising a network that can only be knocked offline by orbital weapons and EMPs (electromagnetic pulse weapons), and it would not surprise us to see defense applications on show at some of the largest booths, to this end.