iTWire - MWC 2018's 'defining trends' predicted: AI, IoT, 5G, C-RAN and Massive MIMO

With MWC always at the beginning of the year, albeit in late February, there's always a stack of telco and related news to come, and with 5G clearly the top of the totem pole when it comes to obvious topics. But there's a few other big topics, such as AI and IoT that have been building steam, building capability and sophistication this year, dovetailing as they do with the incredible potential that 5G connectivity and its ultra low latency offers. It also wouldn't be a telco show without C-RAN and Massive MIMO, along with everything else that will be showcased, including various 5G smartphone prototypes on top of all the vendors claiming their 5G solution is the one, so what do five companies, unsurprisingly offering various aspects of the promised trends, think about these and other developments will impact the telecoms industry at MWC and beyond? Doron Youngerwood is the AI product manager at Amdocs, and he says that "Over the last year or so, we have witnessed a surge in the adoption of AI platforms to drive customer engagement and enable service providers to deal with the high volumes of inbound requests. "Machine learning and automation have become essential due to the speed, scale, or complexity of the customer data that needs to be processed.