It was great catching up with Ericsson last week in San Francisco at the inaugural Mobile World Congress Americas conference. Ericsson is doing incredible work to advance innovation by partnering with operators globally around IoT and 5G deployments, ranging from testing new radio technology, like advanced MIMO, to new core 5G systems for providing network slicing, to applications like Autonomous vehicles. Ericsson's radio access network was also featured at Sprint's booth where the first 2.5 GHz Massive MIMO field tests were conducted using Sprint's spectrum and Ericsson's radios reaching peak speeds of more than 300 Mbps using a single 20 MHz channel! A great new use case for 5G was intelligent video streaming with Verizon for security and smart city applications, with streams coming to a central, video optimized repository in the core of the 5G network. This 5G overlay to an existing 4G network will provide benefits across multiple applications at the edge of the network from video cameras to drones to industrial control endpoints.

VoLTE is expected to be the most prevalent voice technology in the future. It is also estimated that more than 90 percent of all mobile subscribers will comprise of broadband subscribers by 2023, according to a Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu India LLP report. OTT platforms are witnessing an explosion in original content due to increase in consumption and viewership, the report says, adding that they will gradually become a preferred medium over television, with the consumers of vernacular content likely to become over 2.5 times that of English language content by 2021, it said. The publication highlights the fact that'Machine Learning' will intensify among medium and large-sized enterprises. Compared to 2017, the number of implementations and pilot projects using machine learning technology is likely to double in 2018 and then doubling again in 2020.

It was great catching up with Ericsson last week in San Francisco at the inaugural Mobile World Congress Americas conference. Ericsson is doing incredible work to advance innovation by partnering with operators globally around IoT and 5G deployments, ranging from testing new radio technology, like advanced MIMO, to new core 5G systems for providing network slicing, to applications like Autonomous vehicles. Ericsson's radio access network was also featured at Sprint's booth where the first 2.5 GHz Massive MIMO field tests were conducted using Sprint's spectrum and Ericsson's radios reaching peak speeds of more than 300 Mbps using a single 20 MHz channel! A great new use case for 5G was intelligent video streaming with Verizon for security and smart city applications, with streams coming to a central, video optimized repository in the core of the 5G network. This 5G overlay to an existing 4G network will provide benefits across multiple applications at the edge of the network from video cameras to drones to industrial control endpoints.

Over the course of the last weeks and months you couldn't escape news and stories about messaging platforms going after B2C use cases à la "order me some food", "book me a hotel room" or "I need a ride downtown in 30 minutes". Pioneered and taken to huge success in Asia by platforms like Weixin/WeChat, LINE and Kakao, especially Facebook with its two behemoth platforms Messenger and WhatsApp is taking decisive actions to bring businesses and consumers together on their platforms. Kik is even faster, having just launched such a botstore for brands. In their launch line-up are 18 well-known brands such as Sephora, H&M or The Weather Channel. And with these moves, communications platforms will tap into significant revenue streams in the form of rev shares and commissions for being the facilitator between businesses and consumers in everyday Transactions.