At MWC (Mobile World Congress) Barcelona 2026, the IOWN Global Forum brought its vision for the future of communications infrastructure to life, showing how photonics-based networks, open collaboration, and real-world implementation work together to address the growing demands of the AI era.
Across the week, the Forum’s presence at MWC highlighted a clear message: as AI ambition grows, infrastructure must evolve with it. The conversation is no longer only about faster connectivity. It is about building infrastructure that can deliver the performance, resilience, energy efficiency, and economic value required for a more distributed, data-intensive future.
A centerpiece of the Forum’s MWC presence was its featured session, “Beyond Connectivity: From AI Ambition to Infrastructure Reality,” held on Tuesday, 3 March, 2026, as part of the MWC Partner Programme. The session focused on the intelligent infrastructure needed to support an AI-fueled, compute-intensive world, with discussion centered on speed, sustainability, resiliency, decentralized cloud models, and the importance of global ecosystem alignment as the industry moves from development to deployment. The program brought together leaders from organizations including Accenture, Ciena, Ericsson, Intel, KDDI, Microsoft, Nokia, Northeastern University, NVIDIA, NTT, NTT DOCOMO, Orange, Red Hat, and Sony. For those who were unable to attend in person, recordings of the session are available on demand, offering the opportunity to revisit the discussion and hear directly from industry leaders on the infrastructure priorities shaping the AI era. Watch the session recordings on the Forum’s YouTube channel. That emphasis on collaboration also extended beyond the stage. The IOWN Global Forum and ETSI formalized their relationship through the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding, bringing together ETSI Director-General Jan Ellsberger and the IOWN Global Forum President and Chairperson Dr. Katsuhiko Kawazoe. This agreement reflects the natural progression of years of dialogue and technical exchange across areas such as digital twins, data spaces, physical infrastructure management, security, energy efficiency, and emerging infrastructure topics. The new framework supports more structured collaboration as both organizations work to help accelerate innovation and real-world implementation in telecommunications infrastructure.
On the show floor, the IOWN Global Forum stand offered attendees a tangible view of how this work is advancing. The booth experience profiled a range of use cases the Forum has been advancing in areas such as Broadcast Media, Remote Construction, Financial Services, and Remote GPU for AI, connecting strategic industry challenges with the technical innovation taking place across the member ecosystem. It also helped demonstrate that what the Forum is working on is not just a future vision, but a practical framework for enabling interoperable, economically viable deployments across the full stack. The story came to life through booth conversations, displays, and direct engagement around the implementation work underway across the Forum’s member companies.
The booth also featured a series of short technical briefings throughout the event. These short presentations gave attendees a deeper look at specific advances being driven by member companies, including All-Photonics Network common infrastructure, deterministic network technology, early adoption use cases and proof-of-concept achievements, GPUaaS buildout considerations for service providers, submarine network resiliency, and 800G performance in an APN framework. These briefings added an important technical layer to the overall MWC experience, reinforcing the depth of innovation happening across the ecosystem.
Taken together, the Forum’s MWC Barcelona 2026 presence showed the value of bringing strategy, technology, and ecosystem collaboration together. From high-level dialogue on AI infrastructure and decentralized cloud models, to the formalization of cooperation with ETSI, to concrete booth demonstrations and member-led technical discussions, the IOWN Global Forum demonstrated how industry collaboration can help turn infrastructure ambition into implementation reality.
As global demand grows for lower-latency, more energy-efficient, and more scalable infrastructure, the Forum remains focused on helping the industry move forward, not only by advancing technology concepts but also by supporting the alignment, partnerships, and early adoption efforts needed to bring them into the real world.
