We’ve been stalking the halls of the Fira, chatting over coffee and attending press conferences for the last two days and the only thing which is missing is an announcement with any substance.

Samsung has made a splash with its launch, but smartphones offer very little to be excited about these days, Ericsson’s press conference was more of a reassuring nudge, Huawei is talking up the cloud, ZTE is hitting the inbox hard with an exceptionally aggressive amount of incremental spam, but there has been little news which could be genuinely described as exciting so far. Even Facebook’s TIP conference was little more than executives sat on stools saying how wonderful the project was.

Perhaps we were expecting too much. With the 3GPP new radio announcement before Christmas there did seem to be a bit of excitement, and there was a flurry of announcements from the US telcos promising 5G by the end of the year. Maybe this minor breakthrough on the road to 5G offered more false hope than anything as there is now little evidence we are any further along than 12 months ago. As you can see from Heavy Reading Analyst Gabriel Brown’s tweet below, the expectations are not exactly sky high.

That is the reality of the industry right now. The 4G cycle is winding down, while the 5G investment cycle is just out of reach. You do have to feel a little bit sorry for marketers in the industry right now as rewording old news or trying to inject excitement into incremental steps must be a frustrating job.

This is not to say there are not interesting discussions going on. 5G deployments are not far away, next generation technologies like AI are gathering steam and edge computing is starting to get the reinvigoration that it needs. We’re also quite excited about having a more in-depth look at some of the biometric technology which is also on show. That said, with the burst of excitement surrounding 3GPP at the end of the year we were perhaps expecting a little bit more.

This MWC might just be twelve months too early for the telco industry to hit the road to recovery. Or maybe massive announcements are going to be permanently replaced by incremental gains throughout the year? In any case, 2019 edition of the event promises to have more of a real-world 5G feel to it, but constantly having to constantly say next year will be big for telco is not something we want to start repeating too often.