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Hello everyone and a warm welcome to Ericsson's opening broadcast of Mobile World Congress 2026 in Barcelona. My name is Cecilia Ataval, and I'm here with our President and CEO, Börje Ekholm.
Thank you, Cecilia. It's great to be here as always.
It is, and this year we have a new theme for our show. We're talking about entering new horizons, and one new horizon you often talk about is hyper-connectivity and how it places new demands on our networks and how we build for AI. Can you tell me a little bit more about that?
I think we're facing at least three fundamental forces. First, AI is moving into the physical world, with real-time inference at the edge of the network becoming more important. Second, everything will be connected, with massive sensors and devices providing data for models. Third, telecom is becoming part of national security, including mission-critical and defense networks. We're entering a new era on 5G standalone networks, which allow us to realize the promise of service-based architecture and move to the cloud. We need to supply the best networks for AI to scale to enterprises, public services, and other mission-critical applications.
Thank you. What I find really exciting this year is that we have gathered many customers, partners, and industry associations to showcase these opportunities. The commercialization is real, and we're building for the use cases you mentioned. It's happening right here on the show floor.
And not only that, we're also bringing all our customers and partners into panels and seminars to really bring forward the message of how the ecosystem is ready and there to scale with us. I'm very happy you mentioned the ecosystem, and I think that's actually the key now going forward. We look at the total ecosystem, and it's all about generating revenues to the whole industry and the whole digital stack. For me, it's less about competing in your own horizontal area and more about driving total revenues. So working with partners is going to get more important going forward. I'm really excited. I think about half of the exhibitions and demos here have partners involved.
I think that's a good sign. Another important sign is the Aduna joint venture we formed last year to commercialize network APIs. It's another way to see that the industry starts to come together to work and form ecosystems, because ultimately the telco network will be one critical part of the digital stack going forward.
Thank you. And when you talk about strategic partners, one of the partners you had an opportunity to talk to earlier today was with AT&T. In 2023, we signed that strategic landmark agreement on open programmable networks. So with that, let's look at the conversation that you had, Börje, together with John Stankey, CEO of AT&T.
Well, thanks John for joining us at this broadcast. We signed a deal in 2023. As part of that agreement, we'll help you move into a cloud-based architecture to run faster with new services and new revenue streams. It would be interesting to hear you take stock of where we are now, a few years into the agreement. Do you see it realizing the promises? Do you see we're moving in the right direction?
We're clearly moving in the right direction. We've made a lot of good progress. But as you know, these things aren't easy. They require a fair amount of operational change and mindset change. I think we've done a great job of getting the infrastructure set up and in place. By the end of this year, we'll have about 70% of our traffic on our network flowing over an open architecture. But we now need to move to the next stage, which is how do we become a scaled cloud operator in this environment. How do we take that flexibility and start to evolve on it so that we can offer new products and services and operate our infrastructure differently? That's where we're now starting to move into in that next chapter. We have a great partnership, we've made some really good progress, got a little bit more work to do.
For sure, and the key really of course costs are an exciting part of any transaction and any operation, but it's also about the new revenues you can drive, right? Are you starting to see something there?
Yeah, we've gotten especially in the enterprise space starting to see those green shoots forming. We see manufacturing as an interesting place. Factory floor assistance and help. Hybrid networks, public private are actually starting to have some benefit. We've shown we can walk into a factory floor, move equipment around in a more effective fashion, get inventory moving, drive some improvements in operations and productions. As a result of that, we're starting to see where slicing is coming into play big time. Some interesting applications popping up at some of the sports venues that we work with and what we have with some of our clients that have distributed operations where you're trying to record a lot of action over a large area. Starting to put slicing in place so that cameras that are out there picking up all the content can operate effectively, not have to put in a bunch of fixed infrastructure. Gives our customers a lot of flexibility when we do that. So, we're starting to see that happen. And I also would tell you if you think about the consumer market, let's not underestimate just the efficiency that's come in, the spectral use of 5G and what that's been able to do to take fixed applications both in backup and enterprise and what we've been able to do for primary broadband access in the consumer space that is in fact driving new revenue streams.
Yeah. No, and the exciting part and you highlight that is actually the move to a cloud-native infrastructure. It will allow us to get new services faster and I know you're doing a lot here in moving to 5G SA standalone. I think it's a critical move. You get the cloud-based service-based architecture that's really going to be needed for these new type of services. So, how do you see the industry moving here towards 5G standalone fast enough? Do we need to move faster? What can we do?
Well, in the US, I could say we're all on the cusp of that occurring. And everybody's in a little bit different stage of maturity. Whether we've gotten here fast enough, you can always debate. I think the important part is I think we're past the tipping point. So, now that the infrastructure is in place, I think we're going to start seeing the applications break on this in a more effective way. And as you said earlier, when we get to cloud native and we start getting to the separation of the hardware and software and what we put out there, that gives us a lot more flexibility as to how we go and iterate on these things. And that's when I said we have to shift our culture and our dynamic around that. Moving from maybe an internally driven engineering culture where we think about technology for technology's sake to one where at least at AT&T we're trying to understand what the customer needs coming back in and then shape our execution around that. I see that starting to take form and actually get some benefits out of that.
Yeah, that's really interesting. But I think also if we take a step back to look now, we see in a way telecommunications connectivity is starting to form an even more important part of the digital stack and I do believe we can start to talk about the digital stack almost as a national security question and trust in that digital stack will be critical. I know you've done a lot of work and a lot of thinking on the security of the stack. How should we, what can you share of what you've learned and what should we go in that direction?
Well, first of all, I think the fact that we're doing what we're doing where we're really going into the core and modernizing so many elements of the infrastructure that opens up an opportunity. The reality is we'd assembled so many different components of the network over a period of time, all coming from a different generation and really a different state-of-the-art in what security was at that time that those components were built and manufactured. So, the fact that we're now at this point where we're kind of doing a fresh start in key elements, it allows us to apply capabilities like a zero trust mindset, constant authentication and validation. And really when you think about what we're trying to do in a software operating model that we're working on with your company, the fact that we have this consistent fabric across our entire network allows us to begin to apply software into how we examine security. And I think given how fast things are moving right now, if you're not in that software flexible environment moving forward, there's no way you keep up with the bad guys. And so I think this fresh start being able to apply the newer concepts that we've all learned over the last couple of years and then having the flexibility of using a software operations model is going to be a big step in the right direction for us.
I think you're absolutely right. In reality, the bad guys have an easier task than we do. They can choose just and go on one point and get access. We need to protect for everyone. That's correct. So we really need to keep that up. But moving on to another area and you know 6G I think is exciting and everybody talks about it as we'll integrate connectivity AI 6G into one intelligent fabric that really can see intent, it can do real-time adjustments of the services we offer but reality is we can actually do this already in 5G and 5G not 5G non-standalone but when you have migrate to 5G standalone. We can actually do that.
