I attended Mobile World Congress for the first time in four years. My goals were to reconnect with friends and colleagues; share SDxCentral's perspective and predictions for emerging technologies such as the metaverse; and offer updates on what we're working on.

First, my takeaways on MWC Barcelona 2023.

Predicting the Metaverse's Future

I've done my best to dodge answering questions about the metaverse. However, the photo at the top of this article, which I captured at the top of the escalators on the second-floor walkway, perhaps sums up the metaverse's future. The technology world is littered with promising solutions to problems that don't exist. It's time to ask ourselves if the metaverse is one of those? It's a complicated question, but regardless of how you answer it, it's fascinating to see just how far Facebook (Meta) has fallen – just four years ago, the company had hundreds of people handing out freebies and telling us about our future.

Private Networks Face Slow Adoption Curve

It's hard to overstate how much show buzz there was about private networks. While there are a number of good proof points and large potential markets for private networks, this is clearly still an early market. One challenge to broad market adoption is that the industries with the potential to gain the most from private networks are industries that are traditionally slower at adopting new technology.

SD-WAN and SASE Train Chugging Along

SD-WAN is dead; long live SD-WAN! Contrary to populate belief, SD-WAN is thriving – alongside secure access service edge (SASE). This matches SDxCentral data as well, and I'm not surprised. For more than 20 years we had branch routers and firewalls, which were replaced by SD-WAN and SASE. While marketeers don't want to admit this – based on SDxCentral data – we have another four to eight years on the SD-WAN/SASE train.

Cybersecurity Touches Everything

It's no surprise some of the busiest booths were those hosted by cybersecurity vendors. This also matches SDxCentral data (cybersecurity surpassed networking as the top keyword on SDxCentral in 2022). Expect the security impact of decisions based on identity (person, device, app, and data), networks (SIM, IP, geo), and function (consumer, private networks, IIoT, data centers, cloud) to increase.

Open RAN vs. Legacy Networks

Like private networks, this is an early market with positive proof points. While this makes a ton of sense for greenfield deployments, the jury is out on how widely 0pen radio access networks (RAN) will be deployed on legacy networks.

6G Isn't as Far Away as You May Think

I kept hearing people say it's too soon to talk about 6G. To a degree, I understand that point. However, it's more real than most people realize. Radio chips will be tapped out and are expected to be shown at MWC 2024. This means we'll have trial radios using early standards in 2025; some initial deployments in 2026; and if progress stays on schedule, initial phones and deployment by 2027. I wouldn't bet on a 20th anniversary iPhone with 6G quite yet; but this market has a reasonably clear timeline. Maybe we'll see a more active Meta booth promoting the metaverse on that timeline.

SDxCentral Updates

In addition to getting a sense of where the industry is headed, MWC was an opportunity for me to share some of things we're working on at SDxCentral. If I missed you at the show, here's a recap:

Over the last few years, SDxCentral has been building a platform that sifts through our data to understand where technologies are in terms of market adoption and which verticals and geographies have adopted specific technologies and when. These objective insights let us better serve our readers and the industry to help them make better-informed technology, product, and marketing decisions.

Another challenge we hear about from engineering, operations, product, marketing, and sales leaders at global enterprises and service providers is building leaders, driving organizational alignment, and training across their teams. To address that, using Slack integration, we created a way to help multiple teams within organizations stay informed about the infrastructure industry, key verticals, customers, and competitors. It's easy – for each public or private channel in your Slack instance – to select custom filters to ensure only the content relevant to a specific team is pushed to their channel.

Insights and Slack integration are currently in private beta. For those of you with Microsoft Teams, don't worry, that's under development. If this data or being part of the Slack beta could help your organization, please contact me.