Ericsson, Nokia Chart 6G Path While Google and Meta Deepen Telecom Push at MWC 2025

On the second day of Mobile World Congress 2025, Europe's two dominant telecom infrastructure vendors — Ericsson and Nokia — unveiled competing visions for the road to 6G, while Silicon Valley giants Google and Meta made unmistakable moves to expand their footprint across the global connectivity ecosystem.

Ericsson announced a formal collaboration with measurement and test specialist Keysight Technologies to advance "pre-6G standardization," with a stated goal of realizing commercial 6G networks by 2030. Freddie Södergren, Head of Technology and Strategy at Ericsson's Networks business, said the partnership represents "valuable steps forward" on the 6G journey. Separately, Ericsson has been working with KDDI and T-Mobile on AI-RAN deployments, with Ericsson's AI-powered base station solutions already enabling improved energy efficiency and user experience in commercial networks, according to analysts at Opensignal present at the show.

Nokia came into MWC 2025 with a three-pillar strategy: AI-RAN, 5G standalone (SA), and defense-grade network solutions. Nokia CEO Pekka Lundmark shared the stage with operator leaders from T-Mobile USA, Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison, and SoftBank to demonstrate AI-RAN collaboration in live network environments. In a significant ecosystem move, Nokia joined forces with AMD, Cisco, and India's Jio Platforms to announce the Open Telecom AI Platform — an LLM-agnostic, open API-based infrastructure designed to support agentic AI, large language models (LLMs), and domain-specific small language models (SLMs) for end-to-end network management. Nokia also closed its acquisition of optical networking firm Infinera ahead of MWC, strengthening its position in the network infrastructure segment where growth is expected to be driven primarily by cloud companies rather than traditional telecom operators, the company noted.

On the hyperscaler front, Google accelerated its ecosystem strategy by embedding its Gemini AI assistant across multiple MWC partner platforms, including collaborations with HONOR and Qualcomm to deliver a first-of-its-kind GUI-based AI agent capable of real-time scheduling, contextual decision-making, and task automation on mobile devices. Meta, meanwhile, co-announced a new joint funding initiative with the Internet Society aimed at expanding internet access globally — a move that reinforces the social media giant's long-term interest in connectivity infrastructure as a strategic lever.

"Infrastructure vendors like Ericsson are now embedding AI at the base station level for energy efficiency, while hyperscalers like Google and Meta are expanding their influence over what happens on top of the network," one analyst on the MWC floor noted. "The traditional boundary between telecom vendor and tech platform is disappearing."

With the GSMA projecting an additional $127 billion in enterprise market growth from 5G SA by 2030, the race to prove AI monetization across both hardware and software layers is now fully underway — and the next 12 months will be decisive.