MWC Day 2 – The floor & 5G: Not a Demo pt. II

The floor: software takes a back seat

• With the 5G cycle in full swing, MWC has gone fully back to its roots as an equipment show.
• Boxes with lots of gold-plated plugs and odd-shaped antennae are everywhere and even Hall 8.1 has a much more commercial and mature feel to it than in previous years.
• Importantly, the box makers are all including terminals to which 5G antenna arrays that are outside the building can be attached.
• AI is nowhere to be found except for Oral. B which is pitching an AI-powered toothbrush that somehow makes your teeth cleaner than a dumb brush.
• Software, apps, network planning and management have taken a back seat to radio optimisation and testing which comes as no great surprise given the still early nature if 5G.
• In short, MWC is exactly where I expected to be which is much closer to commercial working handsets but still looking for a killer use case that will make consumers pay up for it.
• I am looking at a minimum price premium of $200 to $300 for 5G in a device that will be slightly larger than regular phones today.
• This is inevitable as the radio system remains discrete and yet to be integrated, meaning that it takes up more space.
• The good news is that 5G is not really being hyped up at all which substantially reduces the potential for disappointment when the technology finally ends up in the hands of customers.
• 5G has a slow but steady outlook and I expect it to stay there unless some clever spark comes up with a killer use case.

Qualcomm wins lap 2.

• Further inspection of 5G demonstrations reveals that Qualcomm is able to demonstrate the 5G products of other companies better than they can do it themselves.
• Qualcomm has the 5G handsets of 5 or 6 handset makers on its stand where each was demonstrated with a varying level of quality.
• Bottom of the list was Oppo which was demonstrated in a glass case but the best, ironically, is LG.
• On LG’s stand, the LGV50 ThinQ had connectivity disabled with the only demo available being one very similar to the one that last place runner Samsung has on its stand.
• However, on Qualcomm’s stand, 5G is running on the device and demonstrators were willing to disconnect the phone from the USBC plug and the demo did not stop.
• The demonstration was also robust to being handheld as well as rotated.
• Sony’s 5G device also had good performance at 28Ghz and was resistant to had blocking thanks to its 6 antennas.
• However, this demo was pretty buggy in that it crashed multiple times and the streaming also got stuck on one or two occasions.
• Competitor MediaTek did not fare so well in this test as all of its demonstrations are being delivered to the baseband via a cable.
• Middle of the road is Intel with some good VR demos that utilise the low latency tolerance of VR to show a use case, but also an industrial IoT demo that made very little sense at all.
• The demonstrations by the chip vendors are definitely better than those of the handset makers but they still fall a long way short of commerciality.
• How Samsung intends to ship in a 5G product in a month remains a total mystery based on its demos.