MWC 2026 Recap

MWC 2026 was amazing like always. It’s a good time to meet up with the industry, and this was the 20th year in Barcelona. Amazing! I think I attended 18 of these there, just missing the COVID years and the Simplex startup years.

The show started slightly quiet on Monday with some delays in flights getting into Barcelona, but by Tuesday it had fully picked up. Here are some items I observed at the show.

We always meet with our SIM supplier partners, and it was nice to see that SGP.32 had received its certifications now. This will further drive mass adoption. It’s still clear that interop between the different components, namely EIM and eUICCs IPAe, needs interop work between the EUMs. However, we felt that we are still ideally situated with Simplex to be a neutral middleman to test and implement the various players. It’s a jungle out there and we’re helping get roads built.

A few new items that I learned about were in 5G NTN IoT coverage. The players that have launched satellites for IoT are in different stages of the launch. Some players, for example, have 5 satellites currently in LEO and they will pass overhead in the USA twice per day. So the device gets a few opportunities per day to establish a data connection. This works fine for many IoT use cases; it’s just not the continuous coverage that we are used to with cellular or Starlink.

Lastly, one SIM-related item that first emerged this year was post-quantum cryptographic resilient algorithms for SIM cards. It’s still a few years out before we see adoption of it, but it’s good to see that the industry is thinking of the future. The potentially negative impact for the IoT industry is that these algorithms may require more power from the eUICC and therefore again increase the cost of SIM cards. Time will tell how big of an impact this will have.

This is my quick review of MWC this year, and we look forward to the next show!

Jan Lattunen, CCO, Simplex Wireless