As was evident at MWC25 in Barcelona, Mobile World Congress has become a tech show, not a telecom one. At the 2025 show, telcos themselves had a smaller presence and less floor space than in previous years, with only a handful of the large European and Middle Eastern operators maintaining sizable stands. Their technology suppliers […]
As was evident at MWC25 in Barcelona, Mobile World Congress has become a tech show, not a telecom one.
At the 2025 show, telcos themselves had a smaller presence and less floor space than in previous years, with only a handful of the large European and Middle Eastern operators maintaining sizable stands. Their technology suppliers – for networking capabilities, systems integrators, enterprise service partners, device and silicon manufacturers – continued to take a larger share of the floor and the newsreels.
In discussions with technology suppliers and partners, there was an undercurrent narrative that their telco customers are increasingly focused on reducing costs to improve profitability – whether in network operations or in the way they deliver services. For some, this suggests telcos are losing hope that they can drive meaningful revenue growth from service innovation and instead, must protect margins through lower costs.
However, there is a ‘glass half full’ view of this situation: telcos are finally learning to operate in a leaner way in which every investment must deliver a return – whether that’s a measurable cost reduction in operations or customer uptake of new services. Following significant efforts over the last two to three years to modernise and automate OSS and BSS stacks, leading vendors are now able to report concrete evidence of faster process resolution and improved customer traction for their telco customers. This stands in contrast to previous years when hard evidence was scant.
Meanwhile, many of the demos and presentations we saw on telco stands this year were grounded more in reality than some of the eye-catching but unrealistic demos in previous years. This suggests greater focus on solving real customer challenges than a ‘build and they will come’ mindset.
Alongside the age-old debate of whether telcos can innovation and grow, some of the big trends running through MWC this year were:
- AI was everywhere, and especially the flavour of the day – agentic AI. Every stand, every conversation, every keynote mentioned AI. You will see a special section on AI in this report, as well as the technology being weaved into each of the other sections.
- Telecom is following the money into data centres: Nokia closed its acquisition of Infinera with a view of targeting IP networks in data centres for growth, while SK Telecom announced data centre partnerships with Elice, Giga Computing and Schneider Electric to ensure a strong AI infrastructure foundation at the bottom of its ‘AI Pyramid Strategy’.
- Satellites are taking off: Vodafone and AST SpaceMobile announced the creation of a jointly owned satellite company that will provide direct-to-device (D2D) services to mobile operators. That said, constellations are still small – AST SpaceMobile has five low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites in operation now, with an aim to have 45-60 by 2026 – so we expect it to take another couple of years before satellite can address coverage gaps more reliably.
MWC was not spared the geopolitical tensions dominating the news over the last two months. On the positive side, there was genuine excitement among representatives from outside of Europe and North America around DeepSeek’s ability to offer cost-effective AI.
By contrast, for example, we saw a global hyperscaler refusing to conduct a demo of one of its AI solutions for an employee from a Chinese competitor. However, the main place where geopolitics was present was the keynotes, with representatives of EU and US regulators clearly demonstrating different perspectives. Mistal AI’s CEO Arthur Mensch saw opportunities in Europe where telcos (and other companies) might increasingly turn to homegrown technologies to avoid being caught in unpredictable shifts in geopolitics. Even the now-traditional joint presentation of the CEOs of the ‘big four’ European operators (Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefónica and Vodafone) – which again was all about a push for less telco regulation – had a slight taste of geopolitics.
The main missing topic from the show was 6G, which was only muttered sporadically. We applaud the industry for this pragmatism, as it is still working on monetising 5G. The race for the next ‘G’ can wait a bit longer while telcos grapple with the more immediate opportunities.
In addition to these big themes, we noted trends and hot topics across multiple domains: telecom strategies, transformation and culture; telcos’ consumer and enterprise services; network innovation and private mobile networks; edge computing and data centres; cybersecurity, sustainability, quantum technologies and more.
Find out more about STL Partners’ key takeaways from the event by downloading an extract of our report, ‘MWC 2025: A tech show, not a telecom one’, here.
