RCR (London) was on holiday, and wasn’t invited anyway – maybe because of all the musical chairs at RCR Towers recently. So maybe there’s a reason to write-off Ericsson’s pre-MWC shindig in London last week altogether, and not to give it a second thought. Except enough good people said enough good things about it in passing, and the Swedish firm showed its hand and pointed the way in a flurry of press notes (nine, at least) about its future-looking MWC activities. And so, without responding to the questions RCR would have asked, we are left with Ericsson’s press-approved utterances about the road ahead. And what should we conclude? 

That Ericsson is putting the final touches on stuff this industry has talked about for years: network automation, going to Level 4 (with sundry AI at Swisscom, others); and network slicing, now verifiable for service contracts (speed-tested with Ookla). The firm is embedding agentic and generative AI into its hardware, software, antennas. This stuff will arrive for the tail-end of 5G (SA/A), and work like a dream by the time 6G actually shows up (post-2030). Or so the story goes. Ericsson has other news, as well – also covered here. But the gist is pretty clear. 

Ericsson’s narrative, like everyone’s, reaches some kind of climax once a year in Spain. It is reflective of and contributory to the industry’s annual sugar-rush tales of frustration and triumph – which tend to spark for a while in the Barcelona sun, only to fizzle out in the rain on the tarmac at Heathrow. Reality bites, always. But this time – 2026, deep in a generational tech cycle, as articulated here by Ericsson – it feels like a proper cliffhanger: maturing 5G tech, accelerating AI tech, and an industry that desperately needs a break.