BARCELONA—I know the show is over but I’m leaving the dateline on because, of course, I’m still here. Mobile World Congress was good; so good, in fact, it’ll take me a few months and a couple of off-schedule visits to my therapist to make sense of it all. But Thursday, when the stands are being broken down and the cloakroom is hopping, deep in Gracia over rounds of increasingly obscure cocktails, that’s where the narrative comes together. Artificial intelligence is obviously important. It will obviously change companies and countries, markets and industries. When exactly that’ll happen is muddy, but that’s not the important part.
Here’s the important part: the telecoms industry is excruciatingly good at figuring out technology—how things work, how to make them work together, how to make them work together better, how to make sure the box or app or the whatever gets better with each product cycle. There aren’t any concerns around the how. That’ll all come along. And I don’t mean that to denigrate the work of brilliant engineers working in labs all over the world. I mean that to say the real focus needs to be on why.
Five years into 5G, why haven’t things gone the way we said they would? Why is there this tension between the hyperscalers and operators over the best way to do cloud? Why does it feel like there’s some major consolidation in the offing (Looking at you, HPE; I see what you’re doing over there—got your eye on any US-based radio specialists by chance?). Why, why, why?
Here’s why. We’ve all got a problem that is existential for telecoms, existential for business as usual, and existential for the folks in parts of the global South who couldn’t give a shit about 5G. Do I have the solution? Of course I don’t. But I think I understand the problem space. The internet is hungry and telecoms is that trope from cartoons where a desperately hungry character sees their companion morph into a turkey leg. The internet wants that distributed infrastructure, it wants those fiber lines that connect it all together, and it wants to keep serving its customers better, faster and with more personalization.
This leads us to cloud. All problems are scale problems. For this particular scale problem, cloud is the solution. Enterprise knows that. Operators will figure it out or it will be figured out for them by the bankers. Cloud needs commoditized hardware, it needs customized silicon, it needs software developers and it needs power. Lots and lots of power.
One at a time now, and back to MWC: On cloud hardware, I hope you popped by the Dell stand, and I hope you checked out their Feb. 29 earnings. On customized silicon, I hope you ducked into Arm and assume you know how to adjust stock trackers back to Feb. 7. On software developers, I hope you got to chat with someone from AWS who could give you an idea of the absolute breadth and depth of their ISV partners. Of note: All at MWC and all not really telecoms companies. On power…I’ll get to that in a second.
Now, the AI. Rakuten Symphony’s Chief Marketing Officer Geoff Hollingworth describes himself on LinkedIn as “not a normal CMO.” I know Geoff. This is a correct statement. He posted something on LinkedIn six days ago that’s worth a read. Some of my favorite lines in no particular order: “Some people say Open RAN, cloud, and automation will not change economics or business. If that is the case don’t do it with them. Rather, relax into gentle decline and turn the lights off… If telecom can stay focused on what must be done to be a viable business, we can more clearly recognize AI developments as solutions to help achieve a collectively desired outcome…AI is cheap. But if you try to buy success, you will pay a premium and have to know how you will get that money back.” I’m not going to editorialize on any of that in the effort to build out a narrative. Not right now at least.
To recap…We understand this cloud-silicon-software continuum. We know it’s coming for telecoms. Geoff gave us some AI insights (and then some). This leaves us with the power-part to address. Brands push sustainability narratives and they should; but they should also push themselves and their partners to apply those narratives to the real world and report real world KPIs and progress far and wide. Because all of that stuff above—those clouds, that silicon, all the software there is, those gen AI co-pilots— is capable of doing great things. It can better facilitate commerce, it can help fight hunger, it can upskill populations; it can very materially change the world. But it has got to have that power.
Thomas Edison had a right-hand man called Samuel Insull who started as Edison’s personal secretary and became the guy that figured out how to make electrification ubiquitous (a word you might have heard at the Fira). Insull had a philosophy that lives in my head: generate electricity so abundantly and at such scale that you can sell it so cheaply it’d make candles look like a luxury item. We need more of that, but let’s do it without destroying the planet. Those types of scientific breakthroughs don’t come along too often. But they do come along from time to time. Fingers crossed we get to see it.
In the meantime, we all know how to do the thing. That’s what we’re all good at it. So why? Why are we figuring out how? Because for all of the amazing stuff you saw at Mobile World Congress to happen, for all that stuff to have a positive global impact, we need time. But climate change means the clock is ticking. There’s this cartoon that, like Insull, lives in my head. It’s a businessman in a tattered suit, sitting around a campfire with three young children against a desolate background. “Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders,” he tells them.
I’ve maybe lost the thread. But go back to your offices, pull out a picture of your loved ones, take a breath, and quit focusing so much on how. Focus on why.
