Industry leaders showcase B2B ambitions at MWC

This year’s MWC saw a renewed push to grow the 5G enterprise market with a mix of announcements of partnerships, rebrands and new use cases from telcos, vendors and cloud hyperscalers.

Nokia kicked off the show with a new “brand to reflect who we are today – a B2B technology innovation leader.” It also announced it is partnering with Dell to increase the processing power of its Mission-Critical Industrial Edge (MXIE) to make it easier for manufacturers to use their operational technology (OT) data.

Several communications service providers (CSPs) were talking about 5G B2B solutions. Deutsche Telekom, for example, unveiled tests of autonomous delivery drones for enterprises by its research project, “Drone4Parcel5G”. The German telco has also teamed up with Microsoft to provide a low-cost, pay-as-you-go, private 5G network for small and medium enterprises. It is currently running a field trial of a campus build of the solution, based on Microsoft Azure Private MEC technology and Azure Private 5G core software, for a German pharmaceutical company. The trial includes the use of artificial reality glasses for remote maintenance and object recognition to monitor inventory and automatically scan barcodes. Microsoft separately announced it is trialing connectivity between its Microsoft Azure Private MEC. Fujitsu’s 5G network technology.

Private networking could also be the use case for Vodafone's recently announced Open RAN in a box, which was on display as a prototype at MWC, according to Telecom TV. The Open RAN in a box is made up of software-defined radio (SDR) chipset developed by Lime Microsystems and a Raspberry Pi 4 personal computer

KDDI and Telefónica, meanwhile, are targeting the retail sector with collaboration on a 5G-enabled extended reality project for a digital twin store.

Manufacturing, however, remains a key target for many CSPs' 5G B2B ambitions.

Juan Cambeiro, manager of 5G customer innovation at Telefonica, believes the biggest opportunities for mmWave deployments by businesses were logistics and industry, according to a report by Mobile World Liveof a round table discussion at MWC23.

Cambeiro said enterprises could replace cabling and WiFi to use the spectrum for “control of everything that moves”, including continuous route optimization of robots in factories using on-board cameras.” Meanwhile, Verizon VP of device technology Brian Mecum said the company has deployed mmWave across more than 40,000 locations, explaining enterprises are “waking up to the notion that managing Wi-Fi is a losing proposition”.