For nearly four decades, the mobile industry has chased one grand objective: putting a connected device in almost every hand. According to GSMA's "The Mobile Economy 2026" report, that milestone is close to being reached, with mobile services now covering about 5.8 billion unique subscribers, or roughly 70% of the world's population. With the smartphone now ubiquitous in many markets, the harder problem is no longer how to reach people, but what the network becomes after the human market is largely saturated.
That shift was visible at Mobile World Congress Shanghai, where the floor was dominated less by handsets than by autonomous vehicles, drones, satellite systems, and industrial robots. At the show, AgiBot presented a broad humanoid lineup and a rental model that lets customers lease machines rather than buy them outright, while also promoting a robot-as-a-service platform in multiple countries. The company has also worked with China Telecom, reflecting a broader industry push to treat connectivity as infrastructure for machines rather than just a consumer service.
China has become the clearest test case for that transition. GSMA data says the country accounts for more than 40% of the world's 5G connections and has already rolled out 5G Advanced in more than 330 cities. The same report projects China will exceed 1.7 billion 5G connections by 2030 and says mobile services could add $2.1 trillion to the economy by then. In that environment, robots can be sold as networked services, with intelligence delivered over the carrier layer instead of being fully contained in the machine itself.
The same pattern is emerging in the United States, though through different applications. SpaceX's Starlink is extending phone coverage into dead zones through a partnership with T-Mobile, while Amazon's planned purchase of Globalstar underscores how valuable satellite connectivity has become. Waymo, meanwhile, is already operating at commercial scale, with roughly 500,000 paid robotaxi trips a week across 10 U.S. cities, showing how vehicles have become communications systems as much as transportation tools.
For carriers, the opportunity is that machines create a new class of customer after consumer phone growth has plateaued. GSMA's global report says mobile technologies and services generated $7.6 trillion for the world economy in 2025 and could rise to $11.3 trillion by 2030, driven by 5G, AI, and IoT. The number of connected devices is still climbing, with IoT connections expected to reach 38 billion by 2030, even as the handset market matures. That means value is shifting to the layers above the network: automated delivery fleets, inspection robots, and other services that depend on fast, reliable machine-to-machine communication.
The consumer relevance is still limited, and much of the business remains experimental. Many of the robots on display are headed for factories, warehouses, and hazardous sites rather than homes, and the economics of renting and networking them are still being worked out. But the direction is clear: after spending decades perfecting person-to-person communication, the mobile industry is now building for a world where machines talk to each other first.
Disclaimer: This article may have been created with AI assistance and reviewed by our editorial team. It is provided for general informational purposes only. Readers should verify information independently before relying on this content.
