Mobile World Congress 2026 highlights AI-native networks and a strategic push towards 6G

The 2026 Mobile World Congress revealed a shift towards AI-embedded networks, autonomous radio access nodes, and a China-led value chain, signalling accelerated 6G deployment and strategic industry implications.

The Information and Communications Planning and Evaluation Agency has published a technical review of Mobile World Congress 2026, distilling the Barcelona event into eight technological trajectories and five strategic implications for national telecommunications policy and industry planning. The report, which synthesises keynote themes and exhibition trends from the 2–5 March conference, stresses a shift from mere connectivity towards intelligence embedded across networks, devices and services. According to coverage of the event and award winners at MWC26, industry players from operators to device makers demonstrated practical AI-network integrations that reinforced the report’s conclusions.

At the centre of the report’s findings is the arrival of AI-native networks. The agency highlights deployments of autonomous, agent-driven network controls that place machine intelligence directly into end-to-end infrastructure, enabling networks to adapt and optimise in real time for AI workloads. Industry announcements at the show underlined this direction, with major vendors and consortiums accelerating AI-RAN and AI-native 6G initiatives intended to embed intelligence across hardware, software and orchestration layers.

A second trend flagged is a radical redefinition of the base station. The report describes a progression from Open RAN to software-defined sites and now to AI-enabled radio access nodes that will host both communications and AI processing. Academic proposals for AI-native network slicing, combined with vendor partnerships unveiled at MWC26, point to architectures where intelligent slicing and localised inference co-exist to support latency-sensitive, high-bandwidth AI services at the edge.

Consumer devices were also shown evolving into proactive, agentic endpoints. The agency notes smartphones are beginning to act as anticipatory assistants rather than passive app hosts, driven by on-device models and tighter platform-device-operator ecosystems. Exhibits at the conference reinforced this shift, with device makers and platforms demonstrating personalised, low-latency AI features that blur the lines between handset, cloud and network services.

The review singled out a distinct China-led value chain dubbed “Mobile World AI-China”, where companies have assembled vertically integrated AI stacks from silicon through to cloud and consumer hardware. The GSMA’s awards and vendor briefings at MWC26 highlighted examples of operator–vendor collaborations delivering AI-plus-network operations and new NTN capabilities, underscoring how integrated supply chains can accelerate commercial rollouts beyond domestic markets.

IITP forecasts an accelerated timetable for AI-native 6G commercialisation, noting activity that could bring large-scale demonstrations and early deployments forward from around 2030 into the late 2020s. This assessment aligns with announcements at the show about America’s and other parties’ efforts to build AI-native wireless stacks and industry partnerships aimed at preparing networks for an anticipated surge in AI traffic and sensing-enabled use cases.

From those trends the agency draws five policy and industry imperatives: treat 6G as an active near-term programme rather than a distant objective; reframe competition around operational intelligence rather than raw equipment metrics; develop a domestically coherent AI-infrastructure full-stack and nurturing ecosystem; accelerate 5G Standalone uptake and new monetisation models; and integrate terrestrial and non-terrestrial networks into national AI infrastructure planning. IITP’s director said the MWC theme of “The IQ Era” reinforced the conviction that leadership will go to nations that connect more intelligently, and the agency pledged to work with government to adopt full-stack, network-centric strategies to boost national competitiveness.

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Source: Fuse Wire Services