Forrester published its MWC 2026 analysis last week with a title that tells you everything: “From 5G Hype to AI Hope.” If you’re a channel partner who spent the last five years hearing carriers promise that 5G would transform enterprise connectivity, this is the moment they quietly admitted it hasn’t played out the way the slide decks said it would.

The most telling line from the Forrester analysis: “The industry’s push to frame 5G-Advanced as a stepping stone to 6G implicitly acknowledges that many 5G use cases remain underrealized, complex to deploy, or difficult to monetize.” That’s not a hot take. That’s Forrester saying the obvious thing that carriers have been avoiding.

I’m writing this from the vendor side because the channel implications are significant and the usual MWC coverage misses them entirely.

What Actually Happened at MWC

The Fira in Barcelona was, by all accounts, a showcase of AI. Nokia, Ericsson, Samsung, Qualcomm, and NVIDIA demonstrated AI driving traffic optimization, spectrum efficiency, energy usage, and fault remediation in near real time. Ericsson’s MWC blog explicitly said the message was to “stop selling bandwidth, start selling outcomes.”

That’s a meaningful repositioning. For carriers, bandwidth has been the product for two decades. Sell more speed. Sell more coverage. Sell the next G. The problem is that bandwidth has become commoditized. Customers can get adequate connectivity from half a dozen carriers. Price competition compressed margins. The “sell more bandwidth” model stopped working, and MWC 2026 was the event where the industry stopped pretending otherwise.

The pivot is toward what Forrester calls “AI for telco” and “AI by telco.” The first means using AI to operate networks more efficiently (autonomous optimization, predictive maintenance, automated capacity planning). The second means selling AI-powered services (GPU as a service, edge compute, trusted AI infrastructure). Both represent a fundamental shift from selling connectivity to selling intelligence.

Why the Channel Should Care

Here’s the part nobody’s connecting for channel partners.

When carriers pivot from bandwidth to AI-powered services, the partner program model has to change too. Today’s carrier partner programs are built around selling circuits and subscriptions. Commission structures reward connection sales. SPIFFs target new logos for connectivity products. The entire channel machinery is optimized for bandwidth.

If carriers are serious about selling AI infrastructure, edge compute, and intelligent network services, they’ll need partners who can sell those things. And those partners look very different from traditional telecom agents.

They look more like the IT consulting firms and cybersecurity advisors who currently live in a different part of the channel. Companies that understand workload placement, data sovereignty, AI model deployment, and edge architecture. Companies like the ones Cloudflare and Palo Alto are already training through their partner programs.

Microsoft showed this trajectory at MWC when they presented their telecom agentic store framework. They’re offering to replace the carrier customer interaction layer with AI agents. That’s not a connectivity product. That’s an AI platform play deployed through carrier infrastructure. The partners who sell it need to understand both.

The 5G Reckoning

Forrester’s analysis of 6G was the sharpest part of the MWC coverage. They noted that the industry is “shifting the narrative forward too quickly” from 5G to 6G, which “risks undermining confidence in the current generation.” Their expectation: basic 6G networks deploy around 2030, reaching an “underdelivered state” by 2035.

For the channel, this means 5G-specific sales motions are losing their urgency. The enterprise customers who were waiting for 5G to deliver on its promises are either already deployed (and unimpressed) or have moved on to evaluating AI and cloud infrastructure investments instead.

The partners who built their practices around 5G enterprise solutions are in a tough spot. The technology works. The use cases in manufacturing, logistics, and campus environments are real. But monetizing them requires deep network intelligence that most partners don’t have. And the carriers haven’t invested enough in training their partners on 5G enterprise solutions to close that gap.

This is a pattern I’ve seen before. A carrier launches a new technology with big promises, builds a SPIFF to get partners to sell it, watches the SPIFF expire without meaningful adoption, and then moves on to the next thing. 5G enterprise didn’t fail because of the technology. It failed because the go-to-market strategy treated it like another circuit sale when it required consultative selling that the channel wasn’t equipped to do.

Device AI vs. Network AI

One MWC dynamic that Forrester captured well: device manufacturers are pushing on-device AI to reduce reliance on the network. Qualcomm’s CEO Cristiano Amon said at MWC that “when your watch can run a 2-billion parameter model locally,” the network becomes “a secondary tether rather than a primary life-support system.”

That’s a direct threat to carrier monetization. If AI workloads move to the device edge, carriers lose the argument that enterprises need premium network services for AI. The carrier response is to embed AI into the network infrastructure itself, making the network intelligent rather than just fast.

For channel partners, this creates a bifurcation. Some customers will want device-centric AI (smaller, distributed, independent of network quality). Others will want network-centric AI (centralized, high-compute, dependent on carrier infrastructure). Partners need to understand both models to advise customers effectively. Right now, most carrier partner programs only talk about the second one.

What Comes Next

The MWC signals point toward carrier programs evolving in ways that will change who the top partners are. Revenue volume from circuit sales will matter less. Technical capability around AI services will matter more. The carriers who redesign their programs to reflect this shift, the way Palo Alto did with NextWave, will attract the partners they need. The ones who keep running the same SPIFF playbook will lose those partners to vendors who invest in their capabilities.

Forrester’s framing of “5G hype to AI hope” is accurate, but I’d add a channel-specific observation: the hope only materializes if carriers treat AI as a capability that requires new partner investment, not as another product to slot into the existing sales motion. 5G failed the channel because carriers treated it like a circuit. AI will fail the channel the same way unless someone learns from that mistake.

Based on what I saw at MWC, some carriers are learning. Most aren’t. The channel will sort them accordingly.