MWC23: Ekholm Opens Ericsson’s Exhibition in Barcelona

Ericsson President and CEO, Börje Ekholm, has launched the company’s Mobile World Congress 2023 activities in Barcelona by highlighting the importance of mobile connectivity in driving global digitalization. Addressing attendees, Ekholm reflected on how the transformative impacts of the app economy breakthroughs of the past decade would not have happened without mobile connectivity.

Turning to 5G, Ekholm said the world could expect the technology to drive digitalization and the app economy even further. Describing connectivity as a basic human need and the most democratic and inclusive technology that the world has seen, he has pointed out that there are currently some 8.5 billion subscriptions globally. “There is no more affordable and cost-efficient technology. It connects and empowers everyone,“ he said.

Ekholm was joined by Intel CEO Patrick Gelsinger to talk about how the companies are partnering on Open RAN through the Ericsson-Intel Technology Lab. Ekholm said Ericsson’s Cloud RAN portfolio provides flexible deployment options for customers - a key step towards more open architecture to leverage Cloud and AI for automation. “We have a key asset with a unique global scale and 8.5 billion subscriptions. We, as an industry, need to work together and continue to harmonize network specifications as part of one global set of standards. This will deliver the best performance and enable innovation while maintaining our unique global scale.“ Ekholm added Intel is one of the key players that Ericsson is working with to drive the evolution to industry-scale Open RAN.

Gelsinger highlighted what he called the "five superpowers" that are enabling the “digitization of everything“, including Computing, Infrastructure, AI, and Sensing. “But the most important is Connectivity. Everyone and everything is becoming connected. To make that connectivity truly pervasive, we have to change the network. We have to cloudify and turn to software that networks so that we can truly deliver that scale. As 5G deployments are now happening - and we look forward to Private 5G and 6G - this cloudification is becoming so critical to our future and that requires the deep collaboration of industry players like you and me.“