100,000 telco execs descended on Barcelona in February 2019 for the annual gathering that is Mobile World Congress. The air was buzzing non-stop around the themes of 5G, Wi-Fi 6, IoT, foldable phones and Cloud-based services. The search for 5G applications is on and visitors felt the vibes between marketing buzzwords and real-life use cases.

There were loads of examples of 5G enabled cars, drones, robots, factories, smart cities, and more, all being enabled by low latency and high bandwidth. It was great to see the foldable phones creating lots of headlines.

In many MWC19 conversations, the consensus was that Wi-Fi and cellular will co-exist for the foreseeable future – there is a need for multiple ways to carry data, and these technologies are dependent on each other to enable the best possible end-user experience. New Wi-Fi 6-enabled access points are available this year and carriers will take advantage to handle offload in 5G networks, just as they rely on Wi-Fi today to offload 4G/LTE services. The combination of these two technologies is essential to create new end-user experiences, and they will continue to evolve and get better over time to enable use cases we haven’t even thought of yet. When 2G was launched not so long ago, who knew that we could do more than just send a few emails and text? Now, people are building and managing businesses over their cell phones by using Wi-Fi to make phone calls and LTE to download files – both traditional experiences associated with the other technology. We are barely getting started with what’s possible, but both technologies play a role.

It’s difficult to make out what mobile operators can do to deliver more value. The talk is around ‘network slicing’ – a solution that brings the benefits of security and improved ROI on network investment. But if all operators do this then there is little incremental value in it. The one number that stood out among all the noise was – $2.7T, the total spend on 5G related supply chain by the end of 2020.

An undercurrent that was evident at the show was how even the biggest of all industry players are starting to collaborate with disparate partners to provide differentiation at the solution level and not just playing the game of point products and cool features.

Extreme announced a 5G Subscriber Analytics and Closed Loop Automation solution for mobile operators. Based on network usage reports the solution quickly analyzes 5G subscriber density, 5G user experience to provide application-level visibility and uses ML driven predictive analytics.

Extreme Networks 5G Subscriber Analytics Dashboard

It is designed from the ground-up for elastic scalability, uses Blockchain based encryption and is implemented on modern cloud-scale software architecture. There was a lot of excitement among our booth visitors on the use of blockchain. There was a bit of skepticism followed by it’s very natural choice of technology.

Visibility Engine – Heat Map for Subscriber Density

Other recently launched solutions,  like ExtremeAI and Defender for IoT, were also on display.

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