With MWC just days away, we’ve already seen plenty of announcements and launches as companies get stories out ahead of time.

Wildfire will be at the show for our tenth year no less — so what do we think are the big themes the media will be quizzing our clients about this year?

5G

Only this time last year it seemed that the mere mention of 5G was a daft idea, but just look back at the last 12 months and the volume of updates and announcements on the topic — even though we don’t know what it is/might be/could be.

Expect 5G to be a big topic for the media at MWC this year, with one already posing the ‘inevitable 5G question’ as part of a recent interview.

If you haven’t already thought about how your story fits into 5G then it’s not too late — just don’t be ‘that company’ claiming to be showing something that we all know doesn’t really exist yet.

The changing shape of networks

Potentially linked to 5G, the word this year looks set to be virtualisation (or maybe NFV, or possibly a variation of SDN. But you get the idea). Bringing the power of cloud computing to mobile networks, virtualisation brings a lot of questions but undoubtedly a lot of potential. This year plenty of standards bodies, vendors and new market entrants will be showing how they can use virtualisation to make networks work harder.

New applications for contactless

Thanks to Apple finally discovering NFC and the growth of contactless payment cards, NFC and contactless technology has really taken off in the last year. With this new ecosystem in place, it’s time to look at what other markets and applications can take advantage.

IoT and M2M networks

Ok so IoT and M2M is hardly a new trend, but progress to date has often been based on either 2G or proprietary networks. What we’re expecting to see more of this year is on M2M/IoT standards — specifically LTE-M. Huawei has already made some announcements in this space, but as M2M and IoT finally start to see traction, expect network operators and vendors to make their own play.

photo credit: IMG_9410