What can we bring home from Mobile World Congress 2025?

This used to be an event where vendors unveiled new products and features, and press releases would hit the market in a steady stream. The telecom industry is eagerly searching for new monetization opportunities as most mobile network operators (MNOs) have invested heavily into 5G and are now looking for ROI on that investment.

Walking around in the many exhibition halls feels like visiting a tech entertainment show. Many are the buzzwords that are thrown around, replacing concrete product launches with impressive booths with futuristic design all over the exhibition.

This blog is not a complete summary of the show, but rather some observations we gathered from a huge number of customer meetings. Meetings are a very good reason for going to MWC. It is convenient when everybody in the industry is in one place, reducing environmental impact and time consumed by travelling.

Is AI the solution?

A signal of health is that we had several discussions that showed signs of moving from “AI is the solution – where is the problem?” to “This is the problem – can AI be a solution?”. It signals an increased maturity and there are many applications where the industry already uses AI. For example, Tietoevry develops commercial solutions for Gen- AI driven chatbots in customer interactions for MNO’s.

The more hardcore issues of making sense of the massive amount of network data, connecting that with ticketing systems for fault mitigation, and evolving towards autonomous systems were topics that propelled fruitful discussions. We brought some new solutions and demos to the event for network system analysis, and network co-piloting that created interest and fueled further conversation.

Energy efficiency is high on the agenda

Because of the challenges with 5G monetization, it is natural for MNOs to intensify their efforts to reduce operational expenses. This is not something new, but once the low-hanging fruits have been picked it becomes a more complicated mission.

With energy costs on the rise, it is natural to focus on reducing those alongside the vision of autonomous networks. There are several streams for reducing energy. The first is reducing the power consumed by radios through steering traffic, shutting down cells that are not needed during times of lower traffic, and other similar optimizations. Tietoevry has partnered with Rakuten in an R&D project to address energy savings in mobile networks.

The other main direction is to address the power consumed by telco data centres by optimizing the compute layer. This means observing the workloads, adjusting clock frequencies, and utilizing various other features. Tietoevry showcased a solution together with AMD for power optimization of the compute layer. It is a topic that caught significant interest.

AI-RAN

One of the bigger campaigns during MWC was that from AI-RAN Alliance. The basic concept is that the future of AI will require a much more distributed AI factory for inference. Such a distributed AI factory implies that GPUs are distributed across the network, and once that is the case a natural workload on such fabric would be RAN.

The AI-RAN Alliance celebrated its one-year anniversary collecting many of the key stakeholders. One of its founders, Softbank, made several announcements on its AITRAS implementation during the MWC. This is a very early concept that is still to be proven, but it has the potential to change the value-chain of both telecom and the cloud. The key aspect is to validate the concept of Edge AI for enterprise use cases.

Tietoevry is engaged in several projects and is a member of the AI-RAN alliance, so obviously we had a lot of discussions on the topic.

Summary

Overall, this was an event with an increased activity level compared to last year. Despite gloomy forecasts for the entire 5G market (and especially for RAN), which is bad news for vendors, the forecast for software-related solutions looks much brighter. As Tietoevry is entirely in the software space, we observed an increased activity level in the customer discussions and an optimism spreading.

There are many other topics, such as Private 5G, that we will come back to in future blogs.

Reach out to us, should you want to know more!