It's more than possible that until the brouhaha surrounding the Chinese telecoms vendor Huawei blew up a couple of weeks ago, you'd never have heard of 5G. But all of a sudden, a telecommunications technology that had previously been discussed only in the trade press was front page news, albeit for political reasons rather than industrial. In the days leading up to and including the UK's controversial decision to allow Huawei to potentially supply equipment to the likes of Vodafone, Telefónica/O2, Three and EE, I'd been seething. With the news being reported in the mainstream media by mostly political correspondents, each weighing up the pros and cons from within the British body politic, as well as objections from the White House (which, we are told, led to a furious row between Boris Johnson and Donald Trump), I was constantly reading about the "UK's 5G network" [singular], despite the fact that anyone with a basic knowledge of the situation would say they should be reading about "networks", given that the 'Big Four' commercial mobile services, plus providers of private networks, would be the main actors in any ruling on who they could or couldn't buy 5G kit from.
Then there was the assumption that 5G could only be referred to in terms of conventional mobile functionality. Many in the telecoms industry agree that downloading Game Of Thrones in a fraction of the time you can on a 4G phone is not going to drive 5G. The bigger opportunity will be applications you'll probably never be aware of, like enabling surgeons to carry out operations remotely or making freight ports significantly more efficient. And, yes, there's always the possibility of driverless cars, although I wouldn't hold your breath for that appearing any time soon. But it's this point of what 5G will be able to do, beyond just making your mobile whizzier, that makes the whole row over Huawei more serious. And not just because of 'trust' concerns. 5G will, potentially, become an all-pervasive communications technology, one which, via a number of varieties (in other words, frequencies and wavelengths), will offer different means of access for different types of access need, including 'machine-to-machine' communications and the so-called 'Internet of Things', where devices and sensors talk to each other, speeding up everything from urban traffic to managing factories remotely from the other side of the world.
While the Huawei row rumbles on even further this weekend, a new twist to China's involvement in the development of 5G has occurred, inadvertently. Later this month Barcelona is to host an event that can actually be measured in terms of the city's annual revenue: Mobile World Congress, a gargantuan trade show for the telecoms industry, and an event on the same scale as CES, the monster techfest in Las Vegas each January. Over the last ten years, MWC has become increasingly about 5G, to such extent that the last one I attended, in 2018, was only about the fifth generation technology. Trade shows like MWC are sometimes seen by attendees and observers alike as bloated beanfeasts, wherein tens of thousands of sales people descend to schmooze. In most companies, the sales process is year-round, though contracts are still signed on stands at MWC, an arcane throwback to the days when account managers would attend their company's booths holding clipboards with blank paperwork at the ready. It's an expensive business for exhibitors - for most major vendors, MWC is their single biggest annual marketing expenditure. At Alcatel-Lucent and Nokia, employee attendance was always rigorously controlled, wisely when you consider that a major stand, plus 500 employees taking part, all staying for four or five days in hotels that clearly up their room rates for the week, adding more expense in Barcelona's tapas bars and restaurants, would run to millions.
Which brings me to yesterday's news that Ericsson, the Swedish vendor and nominally one of the three anchors of MWC (along with Huawei and Nokia), has decided to pull out of the show over concerns for the welfare of its employees and customers caused by the spread of the coronavirus. Other companies, including Korea's LG, the chip company Nvidia and China's other telecom technology vendor, ZTE, have also either pulled out of MWC altogether or announced a reduced presence, again due to concerns about the increasing coronavirus spread. These may only be a few of the 2500 exhibitors each year at MWC, but there are genuine fears that Ericsson's departure will be the straw that breaks the camel's back and that others will pullout in the coming days. Nokia could be one of them, with a spokesperson yesterday saying, somewhat inappropriately given the nature of disease, that "the situation is fluid". Like many MWC exhibitors, Nokia also has a substantial footprint in China, with that country being the supply chain base for much of the technology industry. Many Chinese nationals and expats will be travelling from China to Barcelona.
In all seriousness, however, can the major brands really afford to be absent from what is, arguably, the most important industry event this year for the telecoms industry, in the year that 5G is nominally supposed to arrive? I'm sure, too, that some companies' marketing executives are viewing a pullout, even this late in the day, as an opportunity to save money for other projects, again tapping into some of the cynicism that exists over whether these shows are worth it at all. My personal view is somewhat conflicted: MWC is an unbeatable platform for the sharing of news, views and ideas, for networking and for engaging customers and other 'stakeholders', like journalists and industry analysts. Annually, MWC gives everyone a boost. But it comes at a price. By the time everyone gets to Barcelona, they will have experienced the most intense few weeks of the new year, with many companies also having to report their annual financial results in the run up to the show. I, regularly when I attended, would get to the penultimate show day, the Wednesday, and then succumb to terminal man flu. Getting run down and then sick from all those germs travelling in to Barcelona from across the world was a constant hazard for those working at the show, and often compounded by the late nights and early starts (not complaining, but these shows are punishing). Companies are right to question whether the health risks - weighing above financial concerns by a high margin - really are worth it this year, given how the coronavirus spread seems to be getting worse, with cases now being a long way away from Wuhan where the outbreak began. The next few days could prove crucial, both for an event you've never heard of, and for a technology you probably hadn't heard of, either, until a few weeks ago.
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