It’s that time of the year again: MWC2020 is around the corner and no doubt once again this year the number of visitors, exhibitors and countries represented will break all records, as well as the quantities of tapas and slices of jamon consumed in the Barrio Gotico. Spectacular announcements of the latest smartphone innovation coming out of Asia are as always expected, bringing more computing power, extended memory, higher video definition, Virtual Reality support, faster wireless charging, waterproof rated , you name it.
But in the end it seems that every iteration of the show has one topic capturing all the attention from the ecosystem: we had Low Power Wide Area networks for IOT back in 2015 with various competing technology parties popping up and joining forces to capture early market leadership. 2016 was the year for Virtual Reality and total immersion headsets making some parts of the show look like a mini Disneyland.
In 2017 and 2018, connected cars was a very dominant topic.
In 2019, although cars will still demonstrate the progress towards the future, and LPWAN will keep showing the convergence and boast of from the different technology: LoRaWAN, Sigfox, the now surging NB-IoT…, it is expected to see a lot of topics around Artificial Intelligence and Industrie 4.0, amongs others and obviously the same craziness around new generations of Smartphones.
In 2020, new handsets from the major players will keep the release and announcement game going. Flying taxi thought by Uber and Hyundai and innovative automotive features will certainly keep showing their promises, but more importantly and beyond the LPWAN battle, IA and Cloud computing, major operators and suppliers will show their muscles and strength in the focus of aggressive 5G deployment.
See you there.