MWC Barcelona 2026

The framing figure should appear in more discussions of AI adoption: in the markets under consideration fewer than twenty per cent of people are using AI at all, with benefit concentrated in developed markets. Every debate about economic impact assumes access, and this session concerns the four-fifths for whom the question has not arisen. Digital literacy is named as the representative constraint, and it matters more than infrastructure because the sequence has already run once — mobile reached these markets faster than forecast, and those who missed out were not the uncovered but those who could not use what coverage delivered. The technical description is a distribution argument rather than a product one, and depends on the layers above being built by people with local knowledge, which the same conditions suppress. The operational discipline is what makes it credible: segmented retention reviewed every week or two, because aggregates rise while intended beneficiaries leave.

panel

The number establishing how fast this changed is that around seventy per cent of the global telecommunications market now holds at least one non-terrestrial partnership, against a situation twelve months earlier where most operators with anything had exactly one. The framing offered is pragmatic partnership rather than competition, and the word choice does real work: satellite connectivity spent most of its history as a competing answer to the question terrestrial networks answered, and lost comprehensively on cost wherever people actually live. What changed is the question. The coverage gaps identified recur weekly or monthly and are heterogeneous — maritime, remote industrial, disaster response, rural — each with different latency tolerance and willingness to pay, which is why no single answer covers them and why the connected-device case is stronger than the consumer one.

panel

The chart defining this industry's problem is described in one line: traffic keeps rising while revenue per user steadily creeps down, which the speaker rightly calls the narrative for the sector. The adoption figure offered — a tenfold rise this year with a projection past half of users by 2030 — is real growth from a small base attached to a projection that assumes the curve continues through the part where adoption gets hard, which is where forecasts in this industry have historically failed. The observation about spectrum holdings shifting is easy to skip and shapes more than it appears, because spectrum is the one input that cannot be manufactured or competed into existence, which is why competitive analysis here differs from other technology sectors. The most useful moment is an aside about getting caught up in evolving networks, and the numbers above are why that instinct is correct.

presentation