The Mobile World Conference is fast approaching, and is one of the highlights of the connectivity calendar. On Episode 8 of The Connectivity Matters Podcast we were joined by Kaitki Agarwal from A5G Networks, where she is the Fo-Founder, President and CTO, to talk about the upcoming event. Kaitki has created a culture of innovation and has over 50 patents pending and granted, making her the perfect person to talk us through the innovations we’ll see at the upcoming conference.

What are you expecting from the Mobile World Conference show?

There are a lot of evolutions happening in the mobile industry and in our network. Technologies are coming together. I’m excited to see how these technologies are impacting our day to day life, what are the new use cases, and so on. The real use cases will appear when we start using these technologies in our network, and when we have connectivity based on 5G. An example would be in healthcare for remote patient monitoring. Eventually, as we start using the technology, new use cases will start coming in as well. We’ll start using technology as a tool. As we start exploring new ways of doing things and new solutions, there’s going to be an evolution again. It’s going to be a journey.

I view MWC as an event where everyone comes together to share thoughts and innovations. It will be a great event to see how everything is coming together and how people are approaching problems. It shows us what we’re working on as an industry, and how our innovations are being realised as solutions. At A5G, we will be demonstrating some of the innovations behind realising the autonomous network in our vision. It’s a huge undertaking to enable autonomous networks in every part of the network, and A5G is doing its part. We’re focusing on autonomous packet core for 4G, 5G and Wi-Fi converged packet core for enabling self-optimising, self-configuring and self-healing networks. That’s what our charter is, but it will be good to see what other areas the audience are interested in developing during our demonstration. MWC allows us to bring all these things together, learn and share our knowledge.

You mentioned autonomous networks; other than that and 5G networks, is there any other tech that will be featured that we should look out for?

MWC covers almost all the aspects of the network. It starts from the radio network, all the way to different silicon and software innovations, use cases, verticals etc. I think we’re going to see a lot of conversations about why we need certain services, how telecom is going to evolve, whether to use private cloud or public cloud or hybrid and how the telco cloud infrastructure is going to evolve, what is the better approach? All these things are going to come together when we can hear from different thought leaders. There’s a lot to learn and discuss. I’m looking forward to learning from my peers at MWC.

Are there any verticals in particular that you think the show will have a big impact on this year?

I don’t think there’s any particular vertical I would single out at this point, because it’ssuch an evolving industry. There are a lot of different things happening. For example, everyone is talking about IoT convergence and bringing sensors into their network. There are several use cases based on our discussion with the customers and the problems they are trying to solve. They are evaluating if 5G is the right technology for them to use to solve those problems, mostly because they need either low latency or mobility, which cannot be solved with the current technologies and infrastructures. What we will see is how innovations in a particular area are being monetized and creating impact. I don’t expect to see a big announcement that we’ve proven that 5G is the best thing out there. We’ll see progress and evolution.

What would your top three tips be for somebody attending MWC that’s coming up?

Get good shoes; you will be walking a lot.

Look for different areas of technology. There are a lot of different things being covered at MWC. It’s not technically possible to see everything or listen to every panel, so be prepared to identify beforehand what your priorities are and create a map of those things. I always figure out, ‘What sessions are important to me? What technologies do I want to understand better? Where do I want to build connections from a 5G point of view?’ Machine learning is one area that is big this year, and AI is becoming our new normal. I would recommend getting involved in that and finding the touch points that connect with what you’re doing.

Try to learn as much as you can, and keep an open mind. There are a lot of new things that you may not see the relevance of immediately. It’s always good to keep an open mind and learn things that may not be there that may not seem relevant immediately, but from more of a long term thing that may become irrelevant. So that’s what I would say.

To hear more about Kaitki’s work in the 5G space, tune into The Connectivity Matters Podcast here.

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