MWC26 Recap: Industry Momentum Around Open Networks and AI
- Telecom Infra Project
- Mar 17
- 5 min read
Mobile World Congress 2026 once again brought the global telecom ecosystem together to explore the future of connectivity. For the Telecom Infra Project, the week was an opportunity to engage with the community, share progress across our Project Groups, and advance the industry conversation around open, disaggregated, and AI-ready networks.
A subset of the TIP leadership team attended MWC with two primary objectives: to convene with the community and expand TIP’s ecosystem, and to support the TIP Board in communicating the organization’s mission and strategic direction.
Across four days, the TIP team held more than 35 meetings with operators, vendors, ecosystem partners, and industry leaders. The conversations reinforced a growing recognition across the industry: collaborative innovation through open ecosystems is essential to building the next generation of telecom infrastructure.
Continued Commitment from the TIP Board
Throughout the week, the TIP Board reaffirmed its commitment to advancing the industry toward open, disaggregated, autonomous, programmable, and AI-ready networks.
The Board continues to see clear value in the work being driven by TIP’s portfolio of Project Groups, which bring together operators, vendors, integrators, and research institutions to solve some of the most pressing technical and operational challenges facing telecom networks today.
This shared vision—and the collaboration required to achieve it—remains central to TIP’s mission.
A Strong Signal from the Industry
Industry engagement at MWC reflected strong momentum for TIP and its collaborative model.
Executives across the ecosystem expressed increasing interest in participating in the TIP community, recognizing the role it plays in accelerating innovation and delivering deployable solutions. These discussions translated into renewed interest in TIP membership and deeper engagement across several initiatives.
The energy of the week culminated in an oversubscribed TIP Board & Executives Reception, which brought together operators, technology providers, and ecosystem partners during an already busy MWC evening calendar.
The event served as a reminder of the value of the TIP community as a place where industry leaders can come together to collaborate on real-world solutions.
Advancing AI for Telecom Networks
One of the most significant developments announced at MWC was the launch of the TIP Data & AI Foundations Project Group.
Championed by AT&T, AWS, Orange, and Telefónica, with additional participation from TELUS and other community members, this initiative focuses on addressing two critical challenges facing the telecom industry as AI adoption accelerates.
First, the group is exploring how to unlock the value of telecom network data while ensuring that sensitive operator data remains within sovereign boundaries. Second, it aims to accelerate AI application development and training through emerging techniques such as agentic AI frameworks and federated learning.
The importance of this initiative was underscored during the week through industry discussions and demonstrations, including an AWS showcase of federated learning approaches and specialized language models built on telecom network data.
Together, these efforts represent an important step toward making telecom networks not just data-rich, but intelligence-driven.
Building AI-Ready Network Infrastructure
The growing demand for AI workloads is also driving new requirements for network infrastructure.
Originally launched at FYUZ 2025, the Ethernet-Based Networks for AI/ML Infrastructures (ENAI) subgroup within the TIP Open Optical & Packet Transport Project Group continues to gain momentum.
Led by AT&T, KDDI, Edgecore, DriveNets, and IP Infusion, the ENAI initiative focuses on developing resilient inter- and intra-data center transport networks designed to support the rapid growth of AI inferencing workloads.
As AI-driven services scale, these next-generation network architectures will play a critical role in enabling the infrastructure that powers them.
Review our press release here.
Renewed Energy Around Open RAN
Open RAN remained a major topic across MWC, with renewed focus on several areas where TIP is actively working with the ecosystem.
One key discussion centered on the market gap for Open RAN-compliant small cells, particularly for indoor deployments and outdoor densification scenarios. Engagement with partners across the Taiwanese ecosystem, as well as SoLID, Vantage Towers, Shared Access, and JMA, highlighted the importance of accelerating community collaboration around Split 7.2 small cell solutions, supported by TIP’s testing and badging frameworks.
Another important area of momentum is the continued development of SMO, RIC, and rApps platforms, which are critical for enabling advanced automation in both brownfield and Open RAN networks.
During a panel discussion moderated by TIP Executive Director Kristian Toivo, industry leaders from TELUS, Vantage Towers, and Rakuten Symphony explored how the industry is moving beyond traditional Self-Organizing Networks (SON) toward a new ecosystem of AI-driven network automation powered by SMO, RIC, and rApps.
The conversation reflected a clear signal: the industry is ready to operationalize these technologies at scale.
Improving Video Quality of Experience
Another area of focus at MWC was Quality of Experience (QoE) management for short-form video, a topic that continues to gain importance for both content providers and network operators.
The TIP Video QoE Management Project Group, launched at FYUZ 2025, hosted several discussions during the week, including a Birds-of-a-Feather session hosted by Meta and panel discussions featuring TIP CTO Olli Andersson and Renuka Bhalerao from Meta.
These conversations highlighted the growing opportunity for collaboration between Content Application Providers (CAPs) and Connectivity Service Providers (CSPs) to improve end-user experiences.
Meta also shared a real-world example of how collaboration with Dialog Axiata enabled improvements in customer experience through shared QoE metrics and the use of AI-driven anomaly detection and root cause analysis.
Recognizing Deployment-Ready Solutions
TIP continues to recognize vendors that develop solutions meeting the organization’s deployment-readiness quality bar through its badging program.
At MWC 2026, TIP was proud to award new badges to Edgecore and Pegatron, acknowledging their contributions to developing interoperable, high-quality solutions for the telecom ecosystem.
These recognitions reflect the ongoing progress being made across the TIP community in bringing open solutions closer to real-world deployment.
Looking Ahead
The work being done across the TIP community is helping shape the future of telecom networks—unlocking new opportunities for growth as the industry enters the AI era and moves toward 6G.
Learn more about getting involved in our Project Group work by contacting us at membership@telecominfraproject.com.
The community will continue its engagement throughout the year at several upcoming industry events, including:
However, the next major gathering for the TIP ecosystem will be FYUZ 2026, taking place November 3–5 in Seattle.
FYUZ remains TIP’s flagship event and the place where the global community comes together to share progress, collaborate on new ideas, and accelerate the transformation of telecom infrastructure.
We look forward to seeing you there! Pre-register now at fyuz.org/register.
