The European sovereign cloud is next to the yogurts
Mobile Notebook. Day 3
Water connected
On the first day of MWC, at the southern entrance of Fira Gran Via, all attendees could pick up a bottle sponsored by Agbar, which they could refill at the 30 tap water fountains scattered throughout the venue. The aim is to facilitate hydration, promote local consumption, and reduce waste—although some booths insist on offering bottled water. The water company also distributed a few more sophisticated reusable bottles with an NFC chip inside the cap. When you hold your phone near the chip, it displays a map of the nearest water fountains. It would be even better if it counted how many times you refilled it, saving you the tedious task of recording it in your usual health app. Regardless of the bottle model, what many visitors don't know is that these fountains are interconnected and record water consumption, a less visible example of the so-called Internet of Things. In fact, Vodafone took advantage of MWC to boast about the 16 million devices it has active in Spain. Apart from many V16 beacons, more than 1.8 million of these connected objects are precisely water meters.
The mobile phone hasn't killed the TV star (yet).
Yesterday, a colleague unearthed a video in her MWC report from the Local Television Network, showing me visiting the 2006 congress, the first one held in Barcelona, which was still called the 3GSM World Congress. The big news was the 3G networks, and the main curiosity was a system for watching television on a mobile phone, in that case a modified Nokia N95. A lot has changed since then, and now some people only watch on-demand videos online. However, Cellnex believes that linear TV, now in the form of digital terrestrial television (DTT), still has a place on pocket screens; that's why they've presented a new pilot of what's called 5G Broadcast, which is distributed via mobile phone antennas but doesn't use data from the user's monthly plan or require them to register anywhere.
The supermarket of sovereign data
Given the current state of the world, it's natural that one of the major themes of this MWC is data sovereignty. The American and Chinese cloud giants are rushing to build data centers in Europe, promising that our information won't leave the continent, but it's clear to everyone that the red button capable of shutting everything down will still be in Seattle or Shenzhen. While the big players telecoms As European cloud services are proposed to host the data of EU citizens, businesses, and governments, it's worth remembering that a sovereign and secure European cloud exists in an unexpected location: it's called Stackit and is owned by the German firm Schwarz, Lidl's parent company. It was created to serve supermarkets and has ended up hosting third parties as well. Much like Amazon Web Services, although in that case the store was virtual, not physical.
