Back from Barcelona

Fresh from Mobile World Congress, this episode of The Path to 6G unpacks the biggest telecom trends shaping the industry—from AI-driven networks and autonomous operations to accelerating 6G timelines. We explore real-world insights on 5G Standalone, 5G Advanced, network slicing, and RedCap, plus how operators are monetizing next-gen technologies. Hear how AI assurance, non-terrestrial networks (NTN), and smart infrastructure are redefining connectivity, performance, and scalability. With expert perspectives from Spirent and Keysight leaders, this episode delivers an insider’s view of where telecom is heading next—and why it matters now.

Transcript

MJ

Hi, everyone, and welcome to episode 2 of our podcast, The Path to 6G. This is MJ Viscomi, and I'm here with Steve Douglas. Hey, Steve.

Steve

Hey, MJ. We're back.

MJ

We are back. And today we're going to talk about how things went at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Please remember to like and subscribe when you get a chance. We have a special guest with us today, too, Spirent’s Ross Kassan, who's the Senior Director of Assurance Strategy who also attended Mobile World Congress. Welcome, Ross.

Ross

Hey, thanks, MJ. Hello, Steve.

Steve

Hey, Ross.

MJ

Thanks so much for being with us. So I wanted to just start off with a little bit of my opinion. For me, it was really exciting for Spirent to be a part of the Keysight booth because we've had a smaller presence the last few years. And so it was great to contribute to building a set of our product solution demos that were accessible to any attendees who came to visit. But before we go any deeper, can you guys tell me one big thing that struck you in one sentence? Steve first.

Steve

Apple, Apple showed up and they were on the Ericsson booth doing a demo around 6G. Never been at the show before.

MJ

Oh, very cool. Very cool. And Ross, anything?

Ross

From my side, it was all AI all the time. Everyone's booth that I went to was talking about AI. All the carriers that we spent time talking with were talking about how our systems could help them deliver on AI ops and integrating AI into their network.

MJ

Very cool and probably not very surprising. Okay, all right. So let's start with Steve. I know you were probably pretty busy with your participation in multiple roundtables and panels. So can you tell us some of the details of the sessions that you contributed to and what was like your overall impression of them?

Steve

Yeah, it was a busy week, MJ. I was speaking on the Monday on power grids and energy around sort of the ongoing AI buildouts and what impact that's going to have. And I was also lucky to be invited to speak on four different executive panels or round tables around smart mobility, the automotive market, where it's going. how we're trying to unlock value of 5G standalone, 6G on non-terrestrial networks. And I thought what probably the big takeaway for me was really actually around 6G. And absolutely Ross was right. You know, AI was everywhere at the show. It was, you know, it was the AI show by a mile. But 6G was very, very interesting as well because there was big announcements and it was all about the timeline for 6G and the timelines coming in. Qualcomm put a pretty big announcement out with their ecosystem of over 60 different partners. They're targeting 2028 for a pre-commercial demo system on devices, sort of aligning up with the LA Olympics. But they're not the only ones. I'm hearing in the back corridors, the Europeans are thinking about 2028 as well. It's the big Euro soccer tournament and they're considering having a demo system there. And of course, the Chinese it happens to be the year of the Earth Monkey. And if you don't know what that is, well, it symbolizes intelligence. They see 6G in AI as the intelligence system, and they're focusing on 28 as well for the demo systems. So what that's telling us is that if the demo systems are coming in 28, 2029, probably is the year for commercial rollouts. And that was one of the big takeaways, I think, from sort of the 6G conversations I was having in those round tables.

MJ

Wow. And does that feel realistic to you to actually move it up that far?

Steve

It does. I mean, if you were on the Keysight booth, you certainly would have saw evidence of that. The very focused areas of testing the industry is looking at the moment. You're narrowing in on specific 6G radio capabilities with AI coming into the radio, the use of the new frequency range 3, how that can be leveraged. I think we're also hearing in the background, there's going to be a pretty big acceleration around now the study work around areas like the 6G core network on the system architecture where potentially assurance for the very first time is going to be baked into it, especially when you need to think about how you're going to create the guardrails for AI. So I think there's going to be a lot of work to get there to have that sort of minimal viable product or solution that they can use for the 2020 at these pre-commercial demos. So I do expect to see a lot of acceleration across the standards bodies and across sort of the narrowing in of what are the most relevant capabilities the industry wants to move forward with.

MJ

Wow, that's really fascinating. Very cool. So Ross, you mentioned AI before. I know that we had an AI demo running in our booth that you were working on. Can you tell us a little bit about it?

Ross

Yeah, let's go through it. And thankfully, we chose the right topic. So one of the things that's really great about now being part of a larger company is there are more tools in our toolbox. So we were presenting a demo that was combining both the Aspirent's traditional active test capability with passive analysis coming from Keysight and their packet broker. And so what we were demonstrating is how we use our active test and that passive capability alongside our new Luma AI agent to do troubleshooting in the network. So we're showing a scenario where we detected a problem when we were measuring the network from end to end using our over-the-air test capability. And then we had a conversation going with our AI agentic system that helped us understand, you know, where that problem was originating from. So kind of walking the user who would be like a network support engineer that was dealing with a problem in the network that we detected, troubleshoot where in the network the issue was arising from. And of course, we manufactured this issue by causing it. but it required a multi-step fault isolation where we moved from the over-the-air interface to a virtual test interface where we saw the same problem, and then ultimately being able to pick up that traffic with the packet broker and understand, you know, it was a very specific network node that was causing that issue and just walking that user through that process using our Luma AI conversational agent. So I think it was a pretty powerful demo. It showed the power of Spyric coming together as part of Keysight and then also how we're leveraging our new release of Luma and our AI platforms.

MJ 

Wow, that's fantastic. Really glad to see that worked out. Go ahead, Steve.

Steve

I was just going to jump in. I mean, this is the timing, as Ross said, was absolutely perfect for this because One of the big sort of momentums at the show was a lot of the industry was talking about moving their networks to become level 4 autonomous networks. And having that assurance capability baked in as an AI assurance capability is absolutely critical for them doing that so that they can actually provide the capabilities of doing, as Ross said, that sort of fast triage, that root cause analysis to allow the networks then to not only identify the issues, but self-recover from them. And why that's becoming so important, there was lots and lots of activity at the show around how operators and the vendor community are going to support monetizing connectivity for AI networks, especially as AI gets more and more distributed out to the edges. out into large enterprises, that connectivity part, the network is such a critical component for that. And guaranteeing that the network slices, the uplink optimization, that the core network components of it are all actually being able to support that is going to be absolutely critical, not only to make sure that the AI services, the inferencing, the applications work, but also that the SLAs, that they're monetizing are met. And there was a huge raft of announcements around all these areas, and especially around things like sovereign AI initiatives as well, where you saw big players like Deutsche Telekom announcing its sort of digital sovereignty capabilities. All of this is leading to sort of in one direction. And at the heart of that is going to be sort of the need for AI assurance baked into the solution. And I think the timing, you know, just aligned with that perfectly with what the bigger momentum in the market was going on.

MJ

Okay, great. And I, you talk about a lot of themes in that, in that area. what of, was autonomous networks one of the really big things everybody was talking about too? Like what other really big, besides XGAI? What else was everyone talking about?

Ross

With many of the interactions that I had with our carrier customers, both in pre-arranged meetings and just interacting with folks on the stand, it was exactly that. So looking at how to use AI, integrate with their AIOps systems, and then also how they're going to tackle use cases like change management. It's something that all carriers are struggling with as The network grows and they are focusing on new applications, trying to be able to deploy those faster and manage those faster, and just how they're going to leverage both the combination of active tests, as Steve was talking, and AI together to not only deliver these services faster into the network, but also to assure them.

Steve

Yeah, and MJ, 5G was 5G was there, by the way. Can't ignore it. There was clear momentum still going on. We saw that, you know, at the show, some of the announcements about the, you know, 5G standalone networks. I think there's now up to about 86 of them. The industry's estimating 80 more operators are going to be upgrading in the next 12 to 24 months. And the 5G advanced cap, yeah, and the 5G advanced capabilities as well. I think there was 14 that are now commercially available networks globally, but the industry was talking now about this potentially 61 more operators are planning to do upgrades over the next sort of 12 to 18 months. So real big momentum and there's some really interesting sort of focus areas within that. So a capability that 6G has been talking about, which is integrated sensing as part of the communication network. So basically using the radio networks as a form of radar. Well, actually, some of that capability can be already done within the 5G advanced architecture. And we saw quite a lot of activity at the show. You know, Vodafone was trialing this with a company called Tammy Networks down in Spain. China Unicom was talking this with that they're deploying it with ZTA in airports, even MTN in South Africa was doing trials. So that's really exciting. They're taking value already out of the 5G advanced network before the evolution period to 6G. And we saw a lot of range of new 5G advanced devices coming to the market as well. So a lot of the device ecosystem was at the show highlighting sort of enhanced red cap, not only chip sets, but device families coming. There's a lot of new devices also in modules for drones for the low altitude economy. And there was a lot of also fixed wireless access, CPEs, advanced CPEs for the whole, bringing not only 5G advanced, but also Wi-Fi and AI combined in that. So I thought that was a pretty cool one. And of course, I cannot forget about it, but physical AI was at the show as well. What does that mean? Robots. Robots with AI. Up until this point, MB, if you've been to any of these shows, not just Mobile World Congress, but all of these types of show you've, we've had the robot dogs for years, right, bring on the show, running, running around, so you pop them and stuff, but this was beyond robot dogs, these were humanoid robots or cobotics as well, so sort of skeletons, robotic skeletons that you could wear in addition to their, you know, the pure robots. And there's a lot of activity in the industry around this as well, because they're focusing on them for sort of three primary, sort of big societal areas. One's health and social care, especially as we're growing, elderly populations, but also then into areas where humans like ourselves are put into dangerous situations, whether they're in factory environments or sometimes in those field operations. So it was really cool to see that. They're like little mini robots that are running about. And there was a lot of interest on that. But I, you know, I think it's a good sign of direction of where sort of AIs evolving to. It's not just in our big sort of computer systems within the back ends of, with big data centers that's out there physically now as well. And some of these robotics that are being built.

MJ

There weren't any Terminator robots or anything.

Steve

They're too small and they look too cute. Okay, that's good. I think that's been the design principle of them not to make them look scary. So I think that was pretty good.

MJ

Very cool. All right, I'm going to ask you a fun question then. Okay, for each of you, what was the coolest demo you experienced and who had it?

Steve

If I jump in on that one. Yeah, no, there was one I walked. I wish I'd known about it before we'd came. Sometimes you just stumble into things, but the police force of Catalonia here in Spain had this amazing demo. where they basically on their stand, they had a command and control centre where they had police officers sitting behind huge monitors and basically integrated out to an external communication network, which they were dealing with a simulated event where the police needed to actually be coordinate through the use of drones and advanced communications, how they would capture basically a thief. And this thief who had stolen an item, had managed to get himself onto a boat out in the port and was trying to escape. And they coordinated this centrally from the Fira halls on these command and control screens and, with advanced comms, talking to the different police officers right in the field that were on boats as well, and using drones to give them visual inspection and monitoring of what was all going on. They were able to demonstrate how they could use it to apprehend that criminal, how they were then able to use advanced cameras to check that they had actually stolen the goods, what the goods were, and that they could prosecute the whole end-to-end process of dealing with that incident using an advanced communication network and using technologies like drones as part of that. And it was just, you know, it was like the future of Starsky and Hutch. I'm giving away my age now, but that's, it just was so cool.

MJ

But it was completely simulated or they actually had some people out?

Steve

people out there. So the crime was simulated. The crime was simulated. It wasn't a real criminal. But these were real people. These were real boats. These were real police officers doing their day-to-day job. And it just showed you how you can use that their capability to actually have a real time response for a massive public safety oriented issue. And it was it just was, yeah, it was such a discovery and such a cool thing to see.

MJ

Very neat. How about you, Ross? Anything?

Ross

Yeah, so I'm gonna give you 2 answers, and so just one. So, from the technologist in me, the coolest thing that I saw on the IBM stand was their System 2 quantum computer, and just... It's so different from what we have grown up knowing a computer to look like with all kinds of pipes and poses and detectors. It looks more like a piece of steampunk art than what I would associate being with a computer. And then also learning from our peers at Keysight, now that we're part of this bigger company, that we actually build quantum control systems that are used in these. quantum computers. So that was kind of the cool technologist thing. From, my mobile focus and assurance focus, there was a big focus across all the carriers and also integrating in with the network equipment manufacturers around how NTM, non-terrestrial or satellites are coming into the mobile world. And so Starlink was, pretty close to us. And then also many of our carrier customers were talking about how they're integrating NTN technology and expanding the applications for the combination of extending their range and coverage, which being a Canadian that likes doing stuff in the outdoors, I much appreciate the advances that are going on there and the ability to connect to emergency services or even just set a cool shot from the middle of nowhere. So definitely pretty cool. And then also, there's an assurance side to that, which we now have more handovers happening between different technologies where we may be moving from 4G to 5G and then even across to NTN technologies and assuring those links and making sure that those transitions are happening well and the connectivity between the various players is up and running. I thought that was a pretty cool use case.

MJ

Yeah, that's awesome. And I know that this was the first year that anybody on our positioning team actually came to Mobile World Congress. So it was interesting how we're bringing that too, which is fantastic. Okay, we're getting kind of close to the end. Anything else either of you want to add?

Steve

The only one, MJ, I'll just throw in there was something that was sort of bubbling beneath the surface. And it was an area I was actually, you know, was invited also to be part of a panel on, which was just around energy. And I think this was a, there was a lot of sort of government regulator bodies at the event and also some of the energy supply chain there who are obviously looking at, you know, the impact that AI is potentially and also the electrification, you know, of our transport networks are going to have on energy demand in the next 5 to 10 years. I'm trying to really understand what role the telecom industry can play in helping support sort of their initiatives to deal with that. I think there was two sort of dominant sort of themes that were sort of under discussion there. One was, you know, telecoms themselves, you know, being part of the answer, becoming virtual power plants. So using the large distributed sort of battery banks that the telecom infrastructure has deployed, with across the country to aggregate those together and use them as a way to sort of distribute energy resources on demand to support some of the grid activities in case they need to sort of balance or frequency manage. And I think the other one was also just around in sort of enabling the grids to evolve themselves to become more smart grids so they can better manage energy resilience because it is clear as we go forward The energy demands are increasing and it's going to require sort of pulling together distributed energy resources and having a smart way to manage that energy distribution for all the cool stuff that we're talking about today. And I thought that was a, it wasn't like a big primary thing at the show, but it's certainly sort of a real pivotal thing, you know, the industry needs to be part of. And, you know, we need to make sure that the solutions are in place for that over the next coming years.

MJ

that makes a lot of sense with all the power and everything that's being used up. And all this technology is just going to use more. So that makes a lot of sense.

Ross 

The last thing to add, just from my side, is more internally focused. You know, it's the first time, you know, we've been on a large stand with the Keysight team. And, you know, it just made me realize that, you know, we're now part of a much larger organization with a lot of, you know, really cool technology. You know, we've gone from being 1500 employees to over 15,000 now. And, the power that brings to market is really exciting, for me as a technologist and focused on, service assurance, being able to work with many of these other groups within Keysight to bring solutions together is pretty exciting.

MJ

Agreed, agreed. It's going to be a good future. Okay, great. Thanks again for the rundown, and thanks everyone for joining. And if you like what you're hearing, remember to like and subscribe. And please share with others who may also be interested. So thanks so much, guys, and have a great day, everyone.

Ross

Cheers. Thank you.