MWC 2016: At last the M2M/IoT community takes a pragmatic look at the future

Mobile World Congress 2016 did meet expectations: a relentless show with people walking endlessly between halls for meetings, seeking opportunities, and listening to the latest announcements from the industry, write Robin Duke-Woolley, the chief executive of Beecham Research, and Saverio Romeo the firm’s principal analyst. Over 100,000 visitors this year – the most ever – and the food at the show was even more atrocious than last year. How do they get away with it at such high prices?

The IoT community was distributed in pockets all over the show. Yes, there was a quite shy IoT Pavillion, but then there were mobile network operators, module vendors, and other IoT technology players distributed in various halls. It could be said that the IoT community has not found its place in the mobile world yet. This could be seen as a sign of uncertainty. But, instead, we saw the M2M – this term is still very relevant – and IoT community demonstrating a more pragmatic approach. The forecasts of enormous numbers of connected devices was finally gone. What a relief! Instead the focus was on real applications, on business models, on how to facilitate the deployment of IoT projects, on how to make sure that the industry grows in a sustainable, successful, and realistic way. However, there was also space for the future and for dreams. The emphasis on 5G looked in that direction clearly and the use of virtual reality (VR) as the example of data rich applications over 5G networks featured in several stands. There were quite a number of connected bikes as well – more popular this year than previously.

The IoT community was then able to show the spectrum of applications it can now serve all the way across the data rate spectrum. At the bottom of that there was the hot topic of the IoT industry: LPWAN. In a bit more than one year, the LPWAN story has developed a strong momentum. It is no longer just about Sigfox. It is about a substantial growth of the LoRa Alliance, the attention on other approaches – Ingenu for example – but, also on the cellular world. The 3GPP has woken up from a long “standardisation battle” bringing schools of thoughts together in order to provide mobile network operators with a response to Sigfox and the LoRa Alliance. At the MWC, LTE-M and NB-IoT (now termed LTE-M1 and LTE-M2) had its position in many of the mobile network operators’ stands. In a nutshell, LPWAN was in the mind of the whole IoT community. People continued to talk about it all day long from breakfast meetings into Barcelona night parties accompanied by cocktails. This continuous stream also revealed some apprehension from the community: not about too many cocktails, but about contrasting messages on some issues that are making LPWAN a very confusing topic. MWC was a good place to understand who is in the LPWAN wagon and who is not, but it did not seem to clarify how this wagon is moving exactly and what the destination truly is.

Beyond LPWAN and VR, there were a lot of well-known stories from connected cars to smart cities passing by digital health and wellness, with a specific session curated by the ECHAlliance. At MWC 2016, the IoT community was starting to show a greater maturity and moderating excessive excitement for innovations that are coming, thinking more about how they need to be absorbed by the industry.

In that sense, the location of the graphene community was a case in point. Tucked away at the back end of Hall 8.0 – a sort of quiet corner of the MWC universe – a group of nanotechnology researchers and start-ups were showing what extraordinary changes nanotech promises to bring. The time for wide adoption is not yet here, but it will not be long now before we see graphene technology and other cutting-edge technology – robotics – taking centre stage. You heard it here first.