Open minded. This week, the latest Ericsson Mobility Report came out. The main estimate is that India’s 5G subscription is expected to cross the 1.1 billion mark by the year 2031, which will account for or around 81% of the total connection penetration at that time. Compare this to 430 million 5G subscriptions by the end of 2025, which is 35% of total mobile subscriptions. Many of these 4G users will be upgrading to better and faster plans – with that share of subscriptions, totaling 570 million at the end of 2025, falling to about 160 million by 2031.
Nitin Bansal, Managing Director, Ericsson India, says, “Rapidly growing 5G adoption in India based on advanced mobile broadband and 5G FWA is transforming consumer experiences.” And this leads me to a very important point in this conversation (something that many people forget) – what about the promise of fixed wireless access as a broadband option for homes and businesses. After all, Bharti Airtel and Reliance Jio are pushing this product quite prominently.
Ericsson India emphasizes that 5G adoption is being accelerated not only by affordable smartphones and wide network coverage, but also by the continued rollout of 5G FWA services. Global signals will also have to be taken to understand the possible trajectory. To that point, the report further states that 5G FWA connections are strongest in North America, the Nordics, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, and parts of Asia. Speed based tariffs for FWA will become more prominent in the coming months and years (much like it is with fiber broadband). Globally, the report shows that speed-based tariff plans are now offered by 57% of FWA service providers – this number is up from 51 percent a year ago.
Previously on Wired Wisdom: The 6G milestone, your Apple devices, and playing F1 25: 2026 Season Pack
Editor’s Margin: Less is More
Takes me back to this year’s WWDC keynote and the technical depth of its immediate aftermath, but I really want to have a more detailed conversation about Apple’s lack of agentic AI conversation. At this point you might say, which AI agents? Absolutely. It was designed this way. it was designed. This matches beautifully with something I pointed out – Apple’s entire AI pitch barely mentions the word “AI”, but focuses on the consumer, and how they will use better features and functionality in various apps. There’s nothing overwhelming to navigate, just a few new things you might like to use from time to time. In stark contrast to Google (the contrast is obvious, for no other reason), which seems to be the number one mention of AI in the I/O keynote every year. Different viewpoints.
“We completely minify the data sent to the PCC (it’s private cloud compute, which is critical to the Apple Intelligence architecture for privacy). The important thing about the PCC is architecturally, it’s an efficiency measure at that point, because the PCC itself, by design from the ground up, will evaporate any record of that data immediately after it answers your question. It’s not stored, and it’s all in a form where, it’s completely ephemeral. “, said Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering. Select a group of attendees from around the world. In attendance were CEO Tim Cook, newly elected CEO John Ternes and Greg “Joz” Jozwiak, senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing.
Quite the opposite to what has become the talk of the industry. Agent A.I. Basically, AI agents are trying to get something done on your behalf (sometimes they get the job done, often not). Maybe things will be more accurate and precise a decade from now, but agentic AI is a promise in the here and now. No matter what AI companies try to tell you. Keep in mind, a lot of the things offered by Apple Intelligence and the new Siri AI are agentic. Contextual sharing of location links or photo albums pops up in the middle of a text conversation. The call context, it will be available on the network, will pull relevant context for that call across all the apps on the phone. Adding items to reminders or notes from messages or emails. Smart actions. Safari monitoring for price changes or restocks of the item you are looking to purchase. Recovering passwords if any leakage is found. Suggestion. Whatever you call it.
The main difference is what Federighi said about PCC. Apple’s commitment to privacy, in which only the data needed to respond to something is uploaded to the server-side model, and everything is anonymized. No other AI company goes to this extent. Not Google. Not Microsoft. Part of a series of them. Apple’s on-server AFM3 Cloud Pro model runs on Google’s servers, is powered by Nvidia’s hardware and is secure.
“The PCC is just hermetically sealed computation that your device uses momentarily to help respond to your request. And even when it’s there, we can’t even see what it’s doing. We have no ability to see. We can’t even connect to debugging terminals. You try to open the case just a little bit, the thing throws a breaker and everything,” Federighi’s simple explanation gives a vision. Which underlines what is already unlike every other AI company out there.
Latest, on Neural Dispatch
Second idea: diverting a trajectory
Folding phones continue to generate momentary excitement before fading into the shadows. Price and usability of the form factor are the major factors that potential buyers need to consider. That said, the somewhat niche space has had its own remarkable trajectory, with some of the latest data from research firm Smart Analytics Global detailed in their latest global foldable smartphone tracker. Undoubtedly, the reality is that global foldable smartphone shipment volumes will decline by double-digit rates in the first quarter of 2026. There are several reasons for this – the stage for early adopters of foldables to start replacing their existing foldables has not yet been reached, prices are trending upward as components become more expensive, and there are still very few mature markets for foldables. China is one.
Speaking of which, worldwide, Chinese phone maker Huawei’s foldable corner has by far the highest shipment share (40%), followed by Samsung (25%) and Honor (19%). Did you notice anything here? Two phone makers whose key market is China (and which don’t sell phones in major markets including the US and India) dominate the top three spots. Huawei’s share now stands at 40%, down significantly from its peak in the same quarter last year (54%), while Samsung has jumped from a 14% share 12 months ago. The report said SAG attributes this strong momentum primarily to aggressive channel promotions for the Fold 7 and Flip 7 series in key markets including South Korea and Japan.
With Apple expected to launch a foldable iPhone in September this year, the benchmark could be reset for the foldable phone market, hopefully eliminating supply chain bottlenecks with planning and production.
that’s all folks. Stay tuned for next week’s Neural Dispatch and Wired Wisdom. And subscribe, yes, because there are a lot of people coming your way. Direct your vases and bricks downwards.
