I'm not sure I can describe the apprehension you feel when you sit down to drive a semi-truck for the first time in your life--and that semi-truck is roughly 2,500 kilometers away. In a demonstration at MWC Barcelona 2019 (formerly called Mobile World Congress), I overcame my anxiety and successfully drove a truck through a modest obstacle course in a parking lot in Götenberg, Sweden, while I sat surrounded by monitors in a conference hall in southern Spain. Thankfully, Einride, the company behind the truck I was driving, took precautions to make sure I didn't set a new world record for "Instigating a Traffic Accident from the Greatest Distance Away." Those precautions included limiting the top speed of the truck, called a T-pod, to five kilometers per hour regardless of how hard I stepped on the gas, and having an Einride employee on site in Götenberg with a kill switch at the ready. With a 4G network, driving a truck from half a continent away would be tricky, to say the least.

I almost missed out on the vanguard of the 5G robot revolution because I don't drink coffee. The near miss occurred on Monday at mobile network trade association GSMA's booth at MWC Barcelona (formerly called Mobile World Congress), where Dal.Komm Coffee was demonstrating a coffee-serving robot. Thankfully for non-coffee drinking weirdos like me, hot chocolate was also available. After placing an order via a smartphone nearby, a robotic arm behind a glass panel juggled cups, operated coffee makers, and gently placed drinks on trays so they could be collected by waiting humans. According to a representative of Dal.Komm, the robot's precise movement was only possible with a 5G network provided by the KT Corporation, the Korean teleco.

MWC19 will be all about 5G: mobile service providers will officially announce commercial deployments; handset manufacturers will showcase 5G smartphones and the rest of the supply chain industry will announce new products and services to support these first network deployments. There will be many concepts and technologies developing in parallel to 5G at MWC19, including AR/VR, rich media, robotics, drones, and several other use cases across many end markets. Most of these will likely be proof of concepts or ideas rather than actual live implementations. The majority of 5G developments focus on mobile broadband now, and the US has a significant lead. Several mobile service providers, including AT&T have discussed that AI will be a critical technology to accelerate 5G deployments.