- Wind River – the Aptiv company, not the movie – is here to help carriers find new revenue streams
- V2X and physical AI are two areas that offer promising opportunities for carriers
- MWC attendees who watch a demo at Wind River’s booth can ask its robot for a piece of chocolate
MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS, BARCELONA – Wind River CTO Paul Miller Jr. knows his audience, and at Mobile World Congress 2026 in Barcelona, it’s mobile operators.
But these telcos have just spent the past several years spending billions of dollars to deploy 5G – a technology most of them have little to show for when it comes to new revenue. Sure, they’re delivering faster data to cell phones, but that’s not exactly a fresh revenue stream.
Enter Wind River, which is showing off its Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) solution for sharing sensor data between vehicles. The company is leveraging the Verizon Business connected driving platform for the proof-of-concept demonstration.
Another demo Wind River is conducting at its booth is designed to show physical AI in action. Attendees who watch a video can give permission to have their picture taken; the picture is then sent to the cloud and processed.
Through the magic of AI and Wind River’s know-how, the robot will deliver a chocolate if it determines that yes, you watched the demo.
Sure, there are other great technologies being demonstrated as well. But on the business side of the house, people are looking for ways to make money.
“The reason we’re showing V2X and physical AI at this show is really tied to 5G monetization because at Mobile World Congress, your primary market is the service provider,” Miller told Fierce.
To achieve that revenue, “the real answer from our view is these connected devices. It’s V2X. You can have an automotive OEM business agreement now that you couldn’t have before,” he said.
In addition, “5G enables that private 5G with robotics for manufacturing, driving physical AI. You can have a contract to provide that to a manufacturing company.”
It just so happens that Wind River is qualified to provide these components.
“Wind River is in a unique position because, as you can see, we're powering a lot of those systems that then connect to the 5G network,” he said. “Our competitor can provide them a cloud, but they can't provide them any of these connected systems. If they come talk to Wind River, we're in automobiles, we're in the medical devices, we're in the robots.”
Wind River, AMD ready to disrupt
Showing operators how they can make money from new 5G services isn’t the only thing Wind River has up its sleeve.
The company is collaborating with AMD to deliver what they’re calling the industry’s first commercially available platform that unifies open RAN functions and AI-powered RAN workloads on shared hardware.
“We've had many service providers, which I could name, but won't, really asking us [for] another option besides Intel. Intel is great, but when you have that kind of [dominant vendor], the pricing is high, right? So bringing another competitor into play is going to drive the TCO down for these guys, and the service providers are very interested in getting their TCO to a manageable level,” he said.
“This is the first time we've been able to offer an open RAN platform based on AMD to the market,” he said. “That's pretty disruptive.”