Civiq present at MWC 2021
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 mode of in-person and virtual presentations.
From June 28 to July 1st, 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.
In the 4YFN agenda, two ICFO spin-offs where given the spotlight in two different events focused on illustrating what quantum technologies are and what changes they will bring in the near, mid and long term future to industry, governmental institutions and society at large.
At the Connectivity Summit session, Sebastián Etcheverry, researcher at ICFO and CTO of the spin-off LuxQuanta, gave an overview on the basics of quantum communication and quantum cryptography, secure communications, and how this will be implemented to deploy the future European infrastructure EuroQCI. He emphasised the QKD systems and the initiatives that are taking place both at the European level, through the projects CiviQ and QRANGE from the Quantum Flagship, and in Barcelona, through programs such as QuantumCAT, where there is an important movement to launch a pilot test for a quantum communications link between 2 parties separated more than 30km in distance.
In the panel discussion “From Bytes to Qbits: Opportunities of Unprecedented Computing Power”, Carlos Abellan, co-founder and CEO of spin-off Quside, partner of the CiviQ project, joined Sergio Gago, Co-Founder & CEO at Qaptain Quantum, Artur Garcia Saez , Co-Founder & Software Architect at Qilimanjaro Quantum Tech, and Denise Ruffner, VP of Business Development of IONQ, for an enriching and very broad conversation about new quantum technologies.
They covered a wide range of hot topics such asquantum computing (architypes, systems, supremacy, etc), quantum cryptography, and how quantum random generators are technology providers of ultra-secure quantum communications. They also discussed the potential for applications of quantum technologies with new industrial partners and companies, outlining clear and realistic expectations for the future of this field.
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!
