Vodafone Business @MWC 2019: Connected vineyards, connected cars, 5G and lots more

Iris Meijer

Chief Marketing Officer,
Vodafone Business

The buzz around MWC Barcelona seems to start earlier every year, and with a few weeks to go until 2019’s instalment, we’re gearing up for another exciting show.

Vodafone will be on the ground in Barcelona once more, introducing friends from the industry to our new Vodafone Business brand and showcasing some of the ways we’ve been helping customers use IoT, big data and 5G to revolutionise their businesses.

Connected Vineyards

We’ll be joined by Bodegas Emilio Moro, the family-run Spanish winery – or, as we like to call it: the winery of the future:

Spanning 200 hectares, the Emilio Moro Tempranillo vineyards are among Spain’s finest and require the exacting care and attention necessary to achieve such a reputation.

The winery use our narrowband IoT technology with satellite imagery and climatic sensor stations, allowing the grape farmers to use troves of precise data to manage their crops more effectively.

Specific, geolocated data on solar efficiency, fertilizer demand, disease detection and more give the team at Emilio Moro unprecedented insights into the health and wellbeing of their valuable crops.

This application of narrowband IoT technology and big data analytics has helped the vineyard maximise the quality of its output – and maintain a decades-long dedication to innovating on dearly maintained winemaking traditions.

Connected cars

5G is a super exciting area for us because it’s opening up new possibilities for all our customers. The increase in speed and reliability, as well as the ability to slice the network is enabling us to develop technology in areas that require instant connections with no delay, such as in the automotive sector.

At MWC we’ll be showcasing a virtual pedestrian safety shield prototype with Continental. As our roads get busier and more and more forms of transport share the same space, the likelihood of collisions increase. We’re aiming to reduce this issue and have tested a joint prototype in our 5G Mobility Lab in Germany, through an artificial intelligence application developed by Continental and Vodafone’s “network edge cloud”. We were able to demonstrate the processing of live video streams from connected vehicles in order to classify behaviour of pedestrians and alert a vehicle in quasi real-time.

To find out more about these examples, or see other ways we’ve been working with our customers, visit us in Hall 3 at stand 3D30. 

I’m looking forward to seeing you there.