Networks will continue transporting packets across fiber, spectrum, and routers. The strategic shift concerns where value accumulates in the stack. AI workloads generate traffic across telecom infrastructure, yet the economic meter of the AI economy sits in the compute systems that produce tokens. The question for operators is whether they remain the transport layer for that traffic or participate in the infrastructure that generates tokens.

MWC 2026 is over, and the hype hangover begins. Back to reality, there is one metric the telecom industry should look at right now: how much money we are actually making from AI. Not how much AI we deploy internally, not how many partnerships we announce, but real revenue generated by operators. This has been the industry’s problem for decades as Telcos build the infrastructure, enable the ecosystem, carry the traffic, and then watch someone else capture the value.In 2025, the global AI economy generated roughly $1.5 trillion. At best, telecom operators captured about $300 million in direct AI revenue. Even if the definition is stretched to include connectivity and other indirect services, the most optimistic estimates reach around $4 billion. The sense of déjà vu is hard to ignore.Telcos have already invested well over $300 million in AI and are deploying it across networks and operations, yet we capture only about 0.02% of the AI economy. The opportunity is massive. But if telecom does not fix how value is captured, AI will repeat the same story we already lived through with cloud, apps, and streaming.

AI expands the attack surface faster than anyone can adapt. Deepfakes undermine identity, autonomous agents execute attacks at machine speed, and AI systems introduce entirely new vulnerabilities across prompts, models, and data pipelines. In this environment, the central problem becomes trust. Who is communicating? Where is the system located? Is the interaction authentic? Telecom needs to decide what role they play in this architecture. An industry cannot stand for twenty different things; It needs a clear identity in the digital economy.The strongest companies own one word. AWS equals cloud, Cisco equals networking, NVIDIA equals AI acceleration, Volvo equals safety, Disney equals magic, and Red Bull equals energy. In an AI economy where reality and synthetic content become indistinguishable, the missing infrastructure layer is trust. Telecom networks already operate key components that enable them: SIM-bound identity, device authentication, network location verification, and resilient connectivity, all under regulatory oversight. If hyperscalers dominate compute and models, operators can anchor the verification layer of the intelligence grid. Telco must become synonymous with trust.

Au cœur du Mobile World Congress 2026, les projecteurs se tourneront indéniablement vers Nordic Semiconductor. L’entreprise s’apprête à révéler une extension d’envergure de son portefeuille dédié à l’IoT cellulaire, ambitionnant ainsi de renforcer sa place parmi les acteurs mondiaux du secteur. Ce virage stratégique s’incarne notamment dans le lancement de deux nouvelles séries de produits, sans oublier des évolutions majeures pour la gamme nRF91 Series. Tout cela s’inscrit dans une trajectoire résolument tournée vers la future compatibilité avec la technologie 5G eRedCap.

À l’ère de la 5G et de l’intelligence artificielle, la qualité du réseau mobile à l’intérieur des bâtiments devient un enjeu stratégique. Validation indépendante, modèle multi-opérateurs et nouvelles attentes transforment déjà l’économie immobilière.

The Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa) has published updated rules for voice, SMS, and data bundles in the country, including requirements that networks roll over specific unused bundles. Called the End-User and Subscriber Service Charter Amendment Regulations, 2025, they will take effect on 23 January 2027 — 12 months after their publication.

Most vendors disclosed operational workloads instead of agent counts. Ericsson reports over 100 million AI inferences every day across 11 million cells serving more than 2 billion subscribers. Microsoft described a telecom deployment in which around 60% of NOC activities are supported by AI systems that execute roughly 10,500 operational tasks each month. AT&T disclosed internal systems generating about 27 billion tokens per day across enterprise and operational platforms.Large numbers of autonomous processes interacting with network infrastructure introduce practical engineering constraints. Agents querying telemetry, triggering remediation actions, or adjusting configurations must coordinate through shared data and policy controls. Without orchestration, two agents can attempt incompatible actions on the same network element. Without rate control, thousands of agents can overwhelm operational APIs.

Good news for South Africans: unused mobile data, voice minutes, and SMS bundles will no longer expire automatically. This follows recent amendments to telecommunications regulations published by the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa).The changes were gazetted on January 23, 2026 under the Electronic Communications Act and form part of the revised End-User and Subscriber Service Charter Regulations.The amendments require mobile network operators to roll over unused data, voice and SMS bundles instead of allowing them to expire at the end of their validity period.Once this is implemented, the regulations will apply across the mobile industry. It is important to note that these regulations are legally binding on all operators.

Partant du fait que la majorité des Français consomme moins d'une vingtaine de gigas par mois (un chiffre confirmé par le dernier observatoire de l'ARCEP), que personne ne consomme chaque mois exactement le même volume de data mobile, qu'il reste bien souvent des gigas en fin de mois et que les consommateurs sont de plus en plus sensibles aux enjeux sociétaux et environnementaux, l'opérateur a eu l'idée de créer Source Mobile, un forfait unique à 10 euros par mois avec lequel on pourrait tout à la fois agir vers plus de sobriété numérique, et faire un geste solidaire pour les associations qui nous tiennent à coeur.

Voilà plusieurs années que les opérateurs mobiles jouent la surenchère en proposant toujours plus de data dans leurs offres mobiles. Un modèle que l'Ademe (l'Agence de la transition écologique) remet en cause, pointant du doigt les conséquences environnementales de telles pratiques commerciales. Un projet de loi est en cours d'élaboration, et cela pourrait bouleverser le marché…

When I joined Google, one element immediately stood out. The company's purpose, forged in 1998, organizing the world’s information, still acts as the lens for almost every product decision. Search, Gmail, Maps, Android, and Cloud all fit that same narrative. Internally, the mission functions as a decision framework. Product teams regularly ask whether a project contributes to organizing and making information universally accessible and useful. That clarity reduces friction across engineering, product, and leadership.

Barcelona produces announcements. Every year, the industry arrives with big roadmaps, bold slogans, and another wave of technology promises. MWC 2026 was no different. AI native networks, satellites merging with mobile infrastructure, early 6G visions, APIs, autonomous operations, and enough partnerships to fill a thousand press releases.But as booths close and the noise fades, a clearer picture appears. Some narratives quietly collapsed, others gained unexpected momentum, and a few brutal realities surfaced about where telecom really stands. Strip away the hype, and MWC 2026 revealed something more interesting: an industry experimenting with its future while still struggling to answer the same old question of where the next real revenue engine will come from.

The next competitive frontier is not who owns GPUs, but rather who controls unique learning datasets. AI systems differentiate based on what they are trained on. Not generic web text or public code repositories. Unique, structured, proprietary data that encodes how the real world behaves. Telecom operators sit in the path of global physical interaction. Mobility transitions, RF propagation under density, synchronization constraints, latency under congestion, and device behavior in motion. These are physical world signals. If standardized and converted into machine-learnable representations, telecom can serve as the corpus from which next-generation physical and software agents learn. That is the opportunity. And right now, that layer is missing.

In the early 2000s, Linux altered the balance of power in computing. It dismantled the tight vertical integration model that vendors like Sun and IBM relied on and replaced it with a shared software foundation that ran on almost any hardware. The operating system stopped being a proprietary control point and became a common infrastructure. Value moved up the stack. Ecosystems expanded. The industry shifted from closed systems to programmable platforms.Two decades later, a similar attempt is unfolding in telecom. A Western coalition led by the Linux Foundation, seeded by US FutureG funding and joined by NVIDIA, DeepSig, Ericsson, and Nokia, is pushing to create a “Linux of RAN” through the OCUDU initiative. The target is the CU and DU layer, the programmable heart of the radio network. If this effort gains real deployment, it could reshape a 35 to 40 billion dollar RAN market, open the baseband layer to new entrants, and accelerate a structural split in 6G between Western and Chinese ecosystems.

Les cartes SIM intégrées sont généralement le choix le plus courant pour les applications M2M, car elles sont scellées sous vide et peuvent être soudées directement sur la carte de l'appareil. Cela augmente la fiabilité en termes de réduction des dysfonctionnements dus aux chocs, à la corrosion et à d'autres facteurs environnementaux. Par ailleurs, le cycle de vie d'une carte SIM intégrée est généralement de 10 ans, soit plus que celui d'un format standard. Cela signifie que vous n'aurez généralement pas besoin de remplacer votre carte SIM pendant toute la durée de vie de votre appareil. En outre, les cartes SIM spécifiques dotées de la spécification technique GSMA fournissent un mécanisme standard pour la mise à disposition et la gestion à distance des connexions M2M. Cela permet la mise à disposition de la carte SIM en direct, ce qui signifie que vous pouvez la mettre à disposition à distance pour vous connecter à un opérateur initial, puis changer ensuite l'abonnement d'un opérateur à l'autre. En général, avec les facteurs 2FF - 4FF, les cartes SIM sont bloquées chez le fournisseur de connectivité d'où elles proviennent.

L'eSIM est une carte SIM virtuelle qui vous permet de vous connecter à internet, partout dans le monde, sans avoir à utiliser une carte SIM physique. Les eSIM sont l'avenir de la connectivité mobile et sont activables à distance via l'envoi d'un QRcode.

Telecom often adopted the technology early, but money still landed elsewhere. SMS shows what happens when the service is native, end-to-end. The first SMS was sent in 1992. Interoperability accelerated around 1999 to 2000. By 2012, global SMS revenue was above 110 billion dollars per year, and global volumes were in the trillions of messages annually. In several markets, SMS margins exceeded 80 percent because delivery cost per message was near zero and billing was built in.Now compare that with the next waves.i-mode came before app stores. NTT DoCoMo launched i-mode in 1999 with carrier billing, curated content, and a third-party ecosystem. At its peak, it had roughly 40 to 50 million subscribers in Japan and generated meaningful revenue from content.

Why 300 kilometers above Earth is becoming the new battleground for telecom, defense, and direct to device connectivity.

MWC is always intense. Meetings back-to-back. Hall 3 runs into Hall 2. Private dinners stretch past midnight. Everyone talks about AI, 6G, platforms, and ecosystems. But the most interesting signal every year is not in the keynote stage, but in the startup zone.With more than 600 startup exhibitors at 4YFN alone, you cannot see them all. You are forced to choose, and that choice matters. Startups show where technology is actually moving, where venture capital is placing asymmetric bets, and where incumbents may get disrupted or accelerated.

Bienvenue chez BROADBAND AFRICA, le partenaire incontournable des entreprises africaines pour construire ensemble les réponses idoines aux besoins en Télécommunications. Que ce soit en termes de connectivité, de mobilité, de sécurité, BROADBAND AFRICA vous conseille dans vos choix stratégiques.  Idéalement implantés au Cameroun et au Bénin, notre expertise est au cœur des régions d'Afrique centrale (CEEAC) et d'Afrique de l’Ouest. Nous proposons de vous accompagner à choisir, ensemble, des solutions adaptées pour protéger vos données, vos infrastructures et vos opérations face aux menaces numériques croissantes. Grâce à la maîtrise des technologies avancées voir avant-gardistes combinée à une approche personnalisée, nous garantissons de vous aider à mettre en place des systèmes sécurisés, fiables et performants.