Usually, Telecom and wireless RAN are the main topics for the MWC-Las Vegas show, but at this year’s show, what caught our eye was indoor cellular, satellite, and data center networking. It was surprising that telecom heavyweights like Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung, and Cisco did not attend. But we love going to shows like this, where the crowds aren’t shoulder-to-shoulder and the content is interesting (it means we get to talk to almost everyone).
Indoor Cellular. DAS, Small Cells, and packet core systems companies oriented toward enterprise systems were well-represented at the show, and we’d say that their significant participation was the show’s highlight. We met with representatives of JMA Wireless, Commscope (the unit planned for sale to Amphenol), mosoLabs, Druid Software, and Pente. Additionally, a newish DAS company to the scene rebranded itself as Wilson Connectivity, and an established DAS player, ADRF, was also present at the show. We left the show confident that DAS has a stronghold in the indoor cellular market, with small cells ticking away at a growing number of opportunities for enterprise-oriented cellular systems.
Satellite. We met with several representatives of a new trade association called Mobile Satellite Services Association (MSSA), which was established in early 2024 with founding members including Viasat, omnispace, Ligado Networks, TerreStar Solutions, and Yahsat. Our takeaway was that members of this association have the opportunity to offer up to 100 MHz of L-band (1-2 GHz) and S-band (2-4 GHz) spectrum that they currently control across the world. We wouldn’t be surprised to see members of this consortium attempt to pursue a LEO strategy using this valuable spectrum, as few other LEO players have such valuable spectrum. If these companies were to pursue LEO, they’d have something that SpaceX’s Starlink services do not own low and mid-band spectrum.
Data Center Networking. In this section, we focus on SuperMicro and Arrcus.
- SuperMicro. We were surprised at SuperMicro’s prominence at the show, given that only a small fraction of its revenues comes from communications gear. Still, the company had a very well-placed booth (right near the main entrance) and logically used its exposure to the AI computing market as an attention grabber. The company displayed its expansive storage and computing product line and spoke for the whole industry in the absence of other computing companies.
- Arrcus. We met up with Arrcus, a promising startup pursuing unique opportunities in networking software and advanced data center architectures.
- We met with Arrcus’ CTO/Founder and discussed its progress since the previous MWC show in Barcelona. In only eight short months, the company announced VMWare Telco Cloud platform support, a relationship with Softbank for MEC infrastructure, 5G Networking support for NVIDIA’s BlueField-3 DPUs, CoreSite’s use of Arrcus’s FlexMCN networking system, enhancements to its multi-cloud networking with Red Hat, and a $30M investment round with new investor, NVIDIA. In addition, from September 2024 to March 2025, the company is participating in events around the world, including at Lanner Edge Summit (Santa Clara, CA), Global CVC Startup Showcase (Tokyo, Japan), NDIVIDA AI Summit (Washington, DC), NYS Wired (New York, NY), NVIDIA AI Summit India (Mumbai, India), Aramco Entrepreneurship Summit (Riyadh, Saudia Arabia), FYUZ (Dublin, Ireland) and the upcoming major MWC show (Barcelona, Spain). We’re pretty surprised at the company’s international presence, and we see that its hard work is resulting in some impressive customer and partner relationships.
- We were particularly interested in learning about the company’s experiences in the Japanese market, where exciting new telecom MEC networking architectures are being deployed, which would position the company well if these take off worldwide. We chose to discuss this customer relationship because it illustrates how Arrcus’ software can be used to support a distributed telecommunications architecture that supports lower-latency communications that fuses well with applications such as AI Inference applications that are just emerging.
- Additionally, we discussed the significance of Arrcus’ emerging relationship with NVIDIA, which not only positioned the company as a partner using supporting NVIDIA Bluefield-3 DPU, but also netted Arrcus a new investment in its July 2024 venture funding.