In this column I was hoping to get myself — and our great readers — pumped up for the annual MWC Barcelona mega-event. You know, the place where you and 100,000 of your closest friends gather each year to talk about all-things mobile and also why you can’t find a place to eat dinner before midnight.

Of course, now we know that such pumping would be just hot air as event organizer GSMA cancelled this year’s event due to health concerns regarding the deadly coronavirus. Obviously, that decision did not come lightly, and, in fact, GSMA up until two weeks before the show was set to kick off was still sending out updates on how it was going to deal with health and safety measures for attendees.

This is all understandable as the annual MWC event is a significant revenue generator for the non-profit GSMA. Plus, thousands of organizations rely on this conference to be a central meeting point for the mobile telecom market.

But, as we have all seen, the coronavirus outbreak added a layer of uncertainty that was too much to overcome. The biggest concern is obviously the thousands of people that have died since this outbreak began. While the actual impact the virus would have had on attendees is debatable, most of the event’s largest exhibitors were already cancelling their plans, and it was clear that the GSMA had to make the call.

We here at SDxCentral actually decided to not attend the event a few days before GSMA called it all off. Our reasoning was that a number of larger vendors were already pulling the plug, which reduced what we expected to “get” from the show, but also because we in good conscience could not ask our staff to risk their health to attend the event.

GSMA CEO John Hoffman did state that the organization would continue working with Barcelona for the event to return next year.

And the GSMA is not the only event organizer dealing with this situation. The Linux Foundation, for instance, is also watching events tied to its KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe event schedule to begin March 30 in Amsterdam.

The event’s cancellation does come at a critical point for the mobile telecom space, which is building on last year’s initial 5G hype and ramping up actual 5G deployments. Analysts have noted that the impact could be felt throughout the technology’s ecosystem.

“With the epidemic arriving at dawn of 5G’s mainstream deployment phase, the coronavirus has the potential to disrupt the progress of the next-generation wireless standard, as the crisis slows or threatens to slow the production of key smartphone components, including displays and semiconductors,” research firm Omdia noted in a report. “The global 5G value chain is projected to generate $3.6 trillion in economic output and support 22.3 million jobs worldwide by 2035. As a result, the stakes for players throughout the technology industry value chain couldn’t be higher.”

Despite the MWC Barcelona event being cancelled, we still wanted to put together some insight into what we expected to hear about from the event directly and will now likely hear about from vendors and operators in a different manner.

Supply chain security is obviously one of those topics that has come to define the 5G ecosystem. The topic itself is of upmost importance to all parties involved, though geo-political biases have also come into play, which has added a source of distress both real and strategic.

5G use cases also continue to be a difficult model to nail down. While most expect an initial push targeted at deep-pocketed enterprises, to this point in the technology’s evolution there remains a lack of those use cases to really drive enterprise adoption.

The continued evolution and adoption of advanced software systems like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) could help better define such business models or might themselves become the models that drive 5G adoption.

We also expect to hear more on the environmental impact these new networks will have as they continue to expand. 5G deployments are going to support millions of new devices and need millions of new radio resources, each of which will be built from materials that will impact the environment in some way and need a power source that will also have an impact. Vendors are already moving toward models that are targeted at reducing this impact, but that will be a tough balancing act.

We hope you can take away some insight from our coverage on these topics that will better inform your conversations tied to news and announcements that will come out over the next week or so. And please make sure to check back with us each day during the show for the latest updates. – Dan Meyer, Editor-in-Chief, SDxCentral