UPDATED 05:25 EDT / FEBRUARY 23 2017

EMERGING TECH

Beyond the phones: IoT and 5G announcements to expect at Mobile World Congress

The world’s largest mobile industry event, Mobile World Congress, is set to kick off on Monday in Barcelona. With an expected attendance of more than 100,000 people, MWC will have a strong focus on the Internet of Things and 5G technology.

The MWC Innovation City will allow visitors to interact with various demonstrations, including smart parking, smart waste management, environmental monitoring and several developer kits designed for the acceleration of new Mobile IoT solutions. Innovation City will also showcase the progress the mobile industry has made in Smart Cities with demonstrations of smart traffic management and water disaster management solutions.

Here are some of the companies that will be making announcements in IoT, cloud and 5G technology at MWC:

Internet of Things

At this year’s MWC in Barcelona, IoT will be one of the main themes at the event with a particular focus on devices using Low Power Wide Area technologies and the use of IoT in smart city initiatives.

Qualcomm

Qualcomm Inc. has announced that its Snapdragon 210 chip will support the Android Things operating system. With the announcement, Qualcomm becomes the first company to offer an LTE-capable chip that supports Android Things. Google announced the IoT operating system, Android Things, in December.

The Snapdragon 210 processors running Android Things will allow developers and manufacturers to use the Google Cloud Platform and Google services over 4G LTE in their IoT solutions.

Qualcomm will demonstrate its LTE chip next week at MWC, but the official launch of the Snapdragon 210 with Android Things support will only take place “later this year.”

Qualcomm, together with Nokia Corp. and General Electric Co., have completed a private-LTE network trial for IoT, which will be demoed at MWC. The companies are planning to conduct field trials throughout 2017 with Qualcomm providing the chipsets, Nokia proving the base station and network management while the connections will be integrated into GE’s Predix IoT operating system.

Smart cities

Comba Telecom Systems Holdings Ltd., a wireless solutions provider, will present various products for smart city development at MWC. These include vehicle-to-everything technologies in Advanced Driver Assistance Systems and smart mobility, location tracking, facial recognition and video orchestration.

Cloud

Huawei

Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. is taking  “concrete steps” towards evolving into an All Cloud architecture, according to Zhilei Zou, president of the carrier business group at Huawei who spoke at the pre-MWC 2017 media briefing.

In addition to focusing on video and 5G at MWC, Huawei will also unveil seven new all cloud products and solutions.

5G

A wide range of 5G products will be on display at next week’s MWC. The “5G Impact” panel discussion at MWC on Thursday will showcase 5G in action today and includes speakers from InterDigital Inc., Qualcomm, Intel Corp. and Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson.  

Ericsson

Ericsson will have a variety of prospective 5G products at MWC and has also partnered with various other companies to showcase various 5G and gigabit technologies.

Ericsson together with Sprint Corp. will also hold a demonstration of gigabit connectivity, which will showcase the transfer of data at 1Gbps over a 4G LTE connection. To achieve this the companies will make use of a high-frequency transmitter, multiple LTE signals and multi-antenna 4×4 MIMO technology.

Intel

Ahead of MWC next week, Intel announced a range of products and partnerships that it hopes will help it capture the 5G products and services market. The Intel products launched include its 3rd-Generation Mobile Trial Platform, XMMTM 7560 Modem and a new Mobile Edge Computing Portfolio.

Intel and Ericsson, together with Honeywell International Inc., GE and the University of California Berkeley, announced the launch of the 5G Innovations Initiative. The initiative will explore 5G applications with the initial focus on Industrial IoT, including augmented reality and virtual reality applications for drones and first responders.

Intel has also partnered with Nokia OYJ and launched two new 5G Acceleration Labs.

Qualcomm

In addition to its IoT announcements, Qualcomm is also set to make a number of 5G announcements at MWC. This includes a demo of its 5G New Radio, which uses its sub-6GHz NR prototype system.

Image: Mobile World Congress

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