Convergencia Research, Consultoría especializada en Latinoamérica y Caribe
Friday, February 24, 2023

MWC Barcelona 2023 preview: Road to 6G and metaverse demos take center stage

A new edition of the GSMA event in Barcelona will open its doors on Monday. The possibilities of 6G to generate immersive metaverse and extended reality (XR) experiences, powered by Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, will focus much of the attention at stands and panel discussions at the Fira Gran Via. Convergencialatina will provide special coverage throughout next week: industrial networks and FinTech are also anticipated as key axes of the congress.

There will be a lot of talk about 6G during the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, to be held next Monday through Thursday. Commercialization, standardization, and technological capabilities of the new generation will compete for attention even with its predecessor, 5G, whose "acceleration" and certainties about mmWave, FWA, and private networks are promised, although with less hype.

Nokia, NTT DOCOMO, and NTT will showcase two technological milestones on the road to 6G, reached as part of their collaboration agreement (initiated in mid-2022). The first concerns the implementation of AI and ML in the radio air interface allowing 6G radios to be able to learn and the second, the use of sub-THz spectrum to dramatically increase network capacity. With these two steps in place, new immersive metaverse and extended reality (XR) experiences would be enabled, along with a new generation of mobile applications.

Peter Vetter, president of Bell Labs Core Research at Nokia, said in a statement released this week ahead of MWC Barcelona 2023: "For the 6G era, we are using communication as a starting point. Networks will think, feel and act, and will become the nexus point linking our digital and physical realities."

Proof-of-concept testing at Nokia Bell Labs in Stuttgart, Germany, will move to MWC 2023. As anticipated by Nokia in a statement, techniques such as beamforming could be applied in the sub-THz bands (100 GHz and above) to enable frequencies for future 6G networks.

This spectrum would be particularly suitable for high-precision radio detection, one of the key properties of 6G. Compared to 5G, which allows the location of devices connected to the network to be determined, 6G will have the ability to track the position of any object, whether connected or disconnected. In other words, 6G signals will function similarly to a radar, potentially providing users with an awareness of their surroundings beyond their traditional five senses.

Use cases around 6G - smart cities and factories, gaming, and metaverse, among others - will be discussed in the "Ready for 6g?" panel next Monday, while another session on Wednesday, March 1 will delve into spectrum for the next generation: how to find new and untapped frequencies in the 2030s will be discussed.

Showcase. The attractions of the halls in the Fira Gran Via will come from the hand of the metaverse. At the Vodafone stand in Hall 3, it will be possible to drive a drone connected by 5G through the city of Seville, 830 kilometers from Barcelona, using virtual reality glasses Meta Quest Pro. In the Telefónica space there will be five demo areas, and one of them, "Making Metaverse happen", will allow experiencing Web 3.0 and the app 'Movistar Immersive Experience', also with Meta Quest glasses: this will offer a visit to a "Movistar city" with unpublished television content and a virtual store of the company.

In addition to the exhibition, the real impact of the metaverse on business will be analyzed in the discussion areas. A panel scheduled for Monday's event is titled "From Metaverse to Matterverse", and asks "how to do it successfully". Another to be held on Tuesday will choose whether to define the metaverse as "future," "fad" or "fraud." And there will be parallel discussions on natural intelligence and the potential of AI; Web 3.0 consumers; and immersive experiences on the basis of XR, AI, and 5G.

FWA and mmWave. In the field of 5G, there will be news from mmWave and positioning, among other "real stories" and proven successes that will try to be demonstrated at MWC Barcelona 2023. Telefónica, Ericsson, and Qualcomm will present the first commercial 5G mobile network in the millimeter band (26 GHz) in Spain: after all, the Spanish company is the only provider in the European country to acquire a full 1GHz spectrum in the band and anticipates that it could allow download speeds of over 5 Gbps and upload speeds of 1 Gbps.

Meanwhile, Nokia and Bosch will showcase a precision positioning technology based on 5G, aimed at new use cases in Industry 4.0. At Fira Gran Via it will be possible to see the results of a proof of concept conducted at a Bosch production plant in Germany: there, extensive tests demonstrated an accuracy of 50 cm in 90% of the factory space. As part of this experience, an enhanced private 5G network was able to determine the precise position of assets such as automated guided vehicles (AGVs), mobile robots, and mobile control panels, tracking their movements throughout the plant in real-time.

The certainties of 5G will be showcased in Barcelona in particular for its potential in industrial private networks. A panel scheduled for Thursday, March 2 will analyze whether these deployments are overrated: it will explore use cases, challenges faced by vendors, mobile operators, hyper-scale players, and real-world deployment figures.

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