Jose Maria Alvarez-Pallete, chairman and CEO of Telefonica (pictured), hailed the dawn of a new era triggered by breakthrough technologies that he backed to be impactful enough to alter the course of history.

Speaking in yesterday’s opening keynote, Alvarez-Pallete stated the world was at the door of a “new change of era driven by the intersection of telco, computing, AI and Web3”.

“35 years after the mobile industry was born we have the amazing opportunity to improve people’s lives again. Without telcos, there is no future,” he added.

Here, Alvarez-Pallete was particularly referring to the newly launched GSMA Open Gateway initiative, announced at MWC23 Barcelona, that he said bonds telcos, the industry, big tech and developers to “create the digital future together”.

This new digital era “is going to require a radical evolution and a platform that offers simplicity above the complexity of our businesses,” he said. “GSMA Open Gateway is that platform.”

The initiative aims to enable the sharing and federation of open, standardised APIs to provide interoperable access to operator networks for developers and hyperscalers. As noted by Alvarez-Pallete, the ambition is to establish a common layer to expose network capabilities and “transform the whole ecosystem to benefit all.”

He also specifically pointed to the “remarkable collaboration we are establishing with Microsoft, AWS and Google Cloud”.

Earth Computing
The CEO also used the term Earth Computing to describe the role of telcos as network traffic continues to rise. “Cloud computing has been a step change in technology. But the cloud is not going to be able to cope with all the traffic that Web 3.0 is generating,” he said.

To address the challenge, he added: “This is the time to merge the best of the Earth with the best of the cloud. This is the time for collaboration between telcos, big tech, and industry players.”