What’s Driving the Next Wave of Mobile

5G has reached halftime, and the second half is poised to be even more exciting!

Hosts Patrick Moorhead and Daniel Newman sit down with Erik Ekudden, CTO at Ericsson as they discuss the future of mobile innovation, the exciting developments in 5G, AI, and Cloud technologies, and their implications for both private and public sectors!

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‍Key takeaways include:

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🔹5G’s Inflection Point: 5G standalone networks are unlocking new opportunities for differentiation and revenue generation, with a focus on enterprise, government, and consumer services.

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🔹The Power of Network APIs: Open network APIs are enabling the creation of innovative applications and services, driving new business models and revenue streams.

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🔹AI: The Secret Weapon for 5G: AI is enhancing 5G networks and powering new user experiences, from real-time assistance to immersive AR/VR applications.

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🔹Real-World Victories: See how Ericsson’s 5G solutions are already transforming industries, from smart factories and connected hospitals to immersive AR/VR experiences and enhanced public safety.

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Learn more at Ericsson.

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Watch the video above, and be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel, so you never miss an episode.

Patrick Moorhead:
The Six Five is On The Road here in Barcelona, Spain. Mobile World Congress 2025. It has been a great event. High level of optimism with the carriers, carrier equipment companies, the entire ecosystem, more than I’ve seen in a long time.

Daniel Newman:
Yeah, Pat, you know, we came into the week, kind of the first conversation we had was here in the Ericsson booth. We talked to Åsa and Niklas. Definitely check that out if you haven’t yet. You know, when we were really kind of setting up the show, especially on the enterprise side. But we came into this with, you know, sensing this kind of optimism. The halls were more crowded, people’s faces looked more optimistic overall about things. And then the conversations we had with the CEOs and leaders of these businesses where they’re starting to really see the light. And it’s been a bit of a tricky few years for the telco space. But after three days, Pat, I’m really starting to see there is light and there is opportunity. And I, of course, look forward to this conversation.

Patrick Moorhead:
Yeah, I mean, last year we talked about 5G being at halftime. Right. And if you look at consumer, on the wireless side, okay. Check. Great spectral efficiency and even things like private enterprise networks, private VPN, you can do the checkbox. And then the question now is, what’s next? And I can’t imagine a better person to talk about what’s next in wireless than Erik, the CTO at Ericsson. Welcome to the show.

Erik Ekudden:
Thanks for having me. Great to be here.

Patrick Moorhead:
Absolutely.

Daniel Newman:
So, Erik, you sort of heard us in the preamble, a little rundown of what we hear, what we see, what some of your colleagues have said. And I think, by the way, the halftime comment was Yossi.

Patrick Moorhead:
Exactly.

Daniel Newman:
It was Yossi. Last year, who’s also been a guest on the show. We want to talk about this kind of 5G. The halftime comment. A year later, it is well underway. I mean, 5G was fast and furiously coming since around 2017, 2018, really sort of 2019-2020 was when it started to be, you know, all the licenses were being settled. And then the next half decade it’s been about monetization. Let me get your take and you know, what does Ericsson see as the next wave, the second half of this decade for 5G?

Erik Ekudden:
Well, first I have to say I share your excitement because you can hear the bus, you see the energy around what is becoming more commercial and business opportunities rather than sort of long term technology outlooks. Of course, that’s great as well. But here we are really focusing on the business. And half time, yeah, perhaps in many markets, but we are actually very early in some markets. But we are at an inflection point now. And that inflection point really comes down to 5G standalone. So when you have a 5G network that has good performance, you use your low bands, your mid bands, you combine it with a standalone core network. That’s when you can start to offer new services. You can really start to differentiate services. You may have enterprises you add, government services, fixed wireless access. Of course you have your consumers as well. So this is really where we have, you could say four new areas to watch out for. One is about new use cases. The second one is about new network types. You touched a little bit on it when it comes to private networks, but it’s also about new business models and new capabilities. And those new business models I think have been the biggest challenge for the industry to find them, perfect them. I think we are early in that, but also to get them proven in the market. So you have customers, new customers in some cases willing to pay for service. Could be in the enterprise space, could be in the, in the government space, but also in the consumer space. So that’s really where we are. The next wave is really about capturing the opportunities that come from a strong 5G network with standalone, with network slicing to be able to differentiate services and then expose them over to your own applications or anybody else’s applications that are being developed with the use of what we call an open network APIs. Ways to order services, get them delivered, tailored to your needs. That’s really where we are right now.

Patrick Moorhead:
Yeah, I think it’s a great assessment. I’m glad my principal analyst of networking agrees with that. He’s written a bunch. So it appears to me that this latest wave of Generative AI and the Cloud are somewhat, I would say disconnected with mobile. Or maybe I’m just seeing it. But is there a way that mobile connects these two worlds at this point and it’s not just from a technological standpoint, but also from a business case standpoint?

Erik Ekudden:
I believe so. I think there is a connection and it’s going to be stronger going forward. But just take the fantastic gains that we get with Gen AI already today. I mean, down here we’re showing a lot of that capability being integrated into networks, making networks easier to run, but also more power efficient or energy efficient, creating better user experience all the way down to advanced radios that use AI core networks all the way up in the stack. So AI and Gen AI comes in in the networks. I think that’s a very close connection to your point, but it’s really just the hidden part. When you think about your average experience of Gen AI today, maybe on a laptop or on a phone, you’re using one of the bots. But think of that in the next iteration when you’re starting to get help in real time. Could be navigation help, could be help in terms of translation signs, but also direct voice translation. When that then gets integrated into your glasses. The things that we see, we are pioneering, we’re working together with Apple and Meta on the Ray Ban glasses and many others as well. When you start to see that AI experience integrated into new form factors, of course it needs a really good network because that network is carrying signals, not just text, voice, video, perhaps other media as well. To an AI that needs to see you, needs to hear you. And then of course the performance in both directions really matters. So I think there is a closer and closer relation between great user experience and you could say the best network also for AI. We are just tapping into that now, but give it a few years when the new form factors come out. I think this is a great opportunity to create a better experience, but also create new business opportunities for operators.

Patrick Moorhead:
Yeah, as a side note, it’s just more of an editorial comment. Dan and I both meet with the world’s largest CSPs, the cloud providers that we’re talking about. And there’s definitely a sediment that I’m hearing that they can achieve what they’re trying to achieve without a really good networking ecosystem all the way down the line to the carriers, to this. And I think that’s a, you know, it takes time for some companies to realize this, but I feel like more than ever right now they’re truly embracing and realizing that, yeah, that they can’t do what they need to do without your innovations and your customers’ innovations.

Erik Ekudden:
And I think that link now I went talk a little bit about the consumer space and the advanced AI and AR glasses. I think there will be no mass market AI assistance on their glasses without a really strong 5G network. There’s no doubt about that. But I think you make another great point which is that there’s already a need to think of enterprise, think kind of the CSP side, cloud service provider side. How do you connect those applications with great experience, no matter whether it’s AI or non AI. And that realization has to do with pervasive connectivity, indoor in transit, when you’re working from home, when you’re traveling abroad. But it’s also about security because that doesn’t come only with connectivity. You need to have great connectivity, but you also need to have security knowing what goes on in the end point and down the floor. Here we’re actually showing some of those cases with partners could be a 5G in the laptops, could be 5G, of course in more advanced use cases as well. But it all comes as an end to end solution.

Daniel Newman:
I think it’s a really interesting inflection if we hear sort of where the world wants to go. Right At CES when Jensen Huang gave his keynote and talked about kind of the future physical AI, which basically brought this kind of moment of data center GPUs to the edge. Okay, that’s really what it was. You want humanoids walking among us. We have an incredible amount of data we’re gonna need at the edge. You want autonomous vehicles driving on our roads, you need an incredible amount of data. And by the way, even the use cases of securing and managing oil fields, farms, smart cities, all these things that sort of haven’t happened I think is, you know, to get to the augmented reality world, we need the AI, the pervasive high speed connectivity. And then you start to be able to realize these use cases. And one other thing editorially on that is that the data that’s going to be required to get from here to humanoid, I mean all that fake physical real world data that we hear about, it’s not synthetic. We actually need to watch these things move and roll and people inside and out of buildings and all the things. And so that data is going to come from the edge. That dumb pipe that people like to pick on is not so dumb. It becomes very critical. And this is where I think this connection between cloud and edge. So let’s talk a little bit about this evolving 5G. How do you, how does Ericsson meet this demand? Because I think what we just set up collectively is you got demand from hyperscalers, you got demand at edge, demand from automakers, demand. There’s a ton of demand. And this seems like a moment for you guys to really capitalize.

Erik Ekudden:
I think it is. And I think it comes back a little bit to anticipate some of those needs. I mean, some of the commercial models are still being formed, some of the complete solutions are still being formed. But when we anticipate some of those needs, we can help our customers, whether it’s carriers, operators or enterprises, to build the right networks, the highly programmable, high performance networks. That sort of underpins some of the things that you mentioned. That is something that Ericsson is really well equipped to do all around the world. And that also goes into how to make it efficient to run, create better user experience through AI and automation. All of those things I think are in our core business. Private Network, virtual private 5G network 5G in your fire trucks or first responders, you have solutions and network capabilities all across these use cases. But we are early, so we’re working with the front runners to make sure that we can create these solutions together with partners and that they can then be scaled. Because one of the tricks here is really to not make so many bespoke solutions. All the things that you mentioned are true, but if you can ride on a scalable platform, a 5G innovation platform that actually can be deployed all around the world, multiple use cases, then we win, then we have the scale to really support it. And I think you see a lot of those examples down here. You probably talked to Åsa about some of them. What we do in the smart manufacturing case. JLR is on display down there with 5, 6 partners.

But they use not just the best 5G network, private 5G network, they also use network capabilities such as precise positioning to know where the tools and the people are. And that is using a network capability that you get from the network through open network APIs. Also something that Ericsson is doing. Take the hospital case there. It’s not just about having good 5G connectivity in an indoor hospital environment. It’s also to keep track of who is where, who is moving where, and what you do with access control authentication using the 5G network through other network APIs. And again, take the first responders. Yeah, of course they need good 5G connectivity, camera, drone surveillance and all that. But it also could be very helpful to know how many people are in an area and that’s another network API. So if you’re under an evacuation, how do you know that everyone is really evacuating? Network knows that because you have people density network APIs that can be used in those applications that the first responders use. So all across these use cases you will see that Ericsson capability from the network, through the automation of it, all the way to the network APIs and ultimately to the applications we have on display here. So I think it goes across multiple domains here actually.

Patrick Moorhead:
So Erik, are those examples that you rattled off, are those next generation opportunities or are people actually doing this right now?

Erik Ekudden:
I would say what we are trying to show here is what some of our customers are doing right now. So these are commercial operations, cutting the copper cable and really going into using these things. I think when it comes to network capabilities and network APIs, we’re still in the early days. In fact, you probably heard from Niklas that we are getting good traction when it comes to Arduna. And this aggregation platform that builds Trust with network APIs is going to scale up during 2025 and 2026. So enterprises could expect to get much more capabilities over the coming one to two years. But when it comes to the networks, Pat, I think it’s important to realize that this is 5G technology that’s kind of halfway in. So we have matured it both technology wise as well as how to deploy it. But there are things that we also need to work on there, making sure that you have good indoor coverage, making sure that you have the right technology here.

Patrick Moorhead:
As we wrap this show here, are there some prerequisites for the next generation of 5G? You talked about the SA core, you talked a little bit about APIs, whether they be through Avonage or Aduna or even GSMA APIs. What else technologically needs to be there to enable what we just talked about?

Erik Ekudden:
Now you asked the technology question, but I think the biggest question is really that of changing the business model to offer services to new customer groups with differentiation. Dynamic business models. When Sony and their production team shows up on a scene covering an event, maybe a stadium, they need to know that that service is available there and then, and that is a business model change. I think that is really the thing that is really, you can say we’re in the middle of that. But when those dynamic business models are put to work in a network that is using network APIs that have these differentiated services which are implemented through network slice technology that needs a standalone network. If you have that high performance radio network underneath with the best radios, better uplink than anybody else and has great energy efficiency and so forth. The high performance programmable network that we are offering here, then I think you are in a good shape to be able to offer services to a completely new user group. So this is not rocket science. That’s what we’re trying to say here. These are technologies that need to be put to work. The inflection point is to put them to work. Now with that stack, we stand alone and then the new businesses are really around the corner.

Daniel Newman:
Yeah, it’s a very encouraging set of examples. I gave some, I said about oil fields and you added some great ones with, you know, hospitals, first responders manufacturing.

Erik Ekudden:
You mentioned hospitals here again. And did you notice we had a medical doctor here, Dr. Gao, he was on stage with me here just a few days ago. He’s a year into his real, he’s a surgeon. So he’s using this in the operating theater since one year now, sort of 5G in the indoor environment, helping them to create better patient outcomes, less or lower mortality savings of course for the hospital, but they digitalize their whole hospital based on 5G and of course an edge cloud to your point earlier. So there are frontrunners that I think the rest of us can learn from.

Patrick Moorhead:
And it is interesting. I think two years ago we were talking kind of in a visionary way of what could be done. And this year, you know, this is actually here, people are doing it and it’s not that everybody’s doing it, but at least there are lighthouse cases. It’s very similar to the conversation that we have about Gen AI that 2025 is the year where Gen AI starts to deliver ROI. A very similar case here.

Daniel Newman:
Yeah, I think the time horizon here has caused some consternation within this market. But I think it also goes back to why we started the conversation talking about the optimism; the positivity. What I see as private public partnerships, what I see is even sort of traditional edge telco service provider infrastructure and enterprise infrastructure companies coming closer together and then really understanding that to monetize this you have to put it together. It’s core to edge, to the device and the handset and all the way back. Erik, it was wonderful to have you on. Thank you for sharing your wisdom and for joining us on the show. We hope you had a wonderful MWC and will join us again sometime soon.

Erik Ekudden:
Thank you.

Patrick Moorhead:
Thank you.

Daniel Newman:
And thank you everybody for being part of this Six Five On The Road. We are here in beautiful Barcelona, Spain. It is say three. It’s been a great show. Subscribe. Join us for all of our coverage here. So much great content. And of course, we love having you as part of the Six Five community each and every day. Take care, everybody. Bye-bye.