Quantum Technology

Every year, MWC brings together leading companies and trailblazers to share the latest topics relevant to the future of the mobile and tech ecosystems. After almost two years of a previously unimaginable worldwide pause on conferences and meetings, the Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2021 returned to Barcelona for an atypical event, formatted in a hybrid format of in-person and virtual presentations.

From June 28 to July 1^st, GSMA, the organizer of the world’s largest mobile conference, put together a thorough and attractive agenda of presentations, talks, exhibitions and tech shows, spanning many different technological areas of the mobile and telecom industry as well as showing what is new to the market, giving the spotlight to companies such as Google, Samsung, TCL to unveil new products during the 4-day event. An estimated 20,000 people from 117 countries attended the event in person while, in parallel, about 100,000 connected online to watch the different sessions and speakers.

Of all the sessions that run in parallel, the most important main track sessions include NexTech keynote talks, hosted and moderated by GSMA CEO John Hoffman. These 20-minute presentations aim to show to a selected public of top investors and industry representatives the new innovative and disruptive technologies that stand to change the future of the mobile ecosystem and have a major impact on society.

As the representative of the European Quantum Flagship, Prof. Tommaso Calarco, Director of the Institute for Quantum Control of the Peter Grünberg Institute at Forschungszentrum Jülich and Chair of the Quantum Community Network (QCN), was invited as a keynote speaker of this NexTech session. In a back-to-back presentation with Prof. Frank Koppens, Group Leader of Quantum Nano-Optoelectronics at ICFO and leader of the Photonics and Optoelectronics work package of the Graphene Flagship, they each gave an overview of the two ambitious billion Euros 10-year flagships dedicated to quantum and graphene technologies.

Delving into the world of quantum, Tommaso Calarco presented the Quantum Flagship by showing the mission and goals of the program, the different research pillars the flagship is focusing its efforts on, as well as the achievements it has accomplished to date. He emphasized the impetus that the European Union is applying to back all quantum programs around the region, especially in the future EuroQCI, and underscored the EU’s motivated initiatives to position Europe as a front-runner in the worldwide race in quantum technologies.

Tommaso Calarco during his talk about the Quantum Flagship at the NexTech Keynote session on June 30th, 2021

MWC2021 demonstrated the feasibility of hybrid events of very large dimensions. From the positive response seen from the audience, both in-person and online, this has generated confident expectations in all the organizing bodies of the event, in particular GSMA, that MWC 2022 will undoubtedly take place at the beginning of 2022 and will return to be the best and largest mobile conference to be held worldwide. So stay tuned until next year!