As Barcelona prepares to serve up both tapas and terabytes, the Mobile World Congress (MWC) is once again turning this sun-drenched city into the global capital of 5G connectivity. This year’s conference focus—“The IQ Era”—is set to hone in on 5G advances, AI integration, and mobile innovation. And NETSCOUT will be an important part of the conversation!

NETSCOUT will demonstrate how carrier-grade observability and NETSCOUT Smart Data enable AI-driven operations, real-time service assurance, and closed-loop automation across complex 5G, cloud, and edge environments.

During the March 2–7 conference, we will share how our complete observability solutions are key to artificial intelligence (AI) data–driven innovation in today’s highly dynamic telecommunications ecosystems. If you are attending, be sure to visit the NETSCOUT booth in Hall 2 at stand 2B82.

Observability Is Essential for AI-Driven 5G Innovation

AI innovation holds tremendous promise for communications service providers (CSPs), who are looking for promising monetization opportunities. While AI is opening doors to new revenue-generating possibilities, network complexity is increasing, making the job of AI for IT operations (AIOps) harder. In the face of this complexity, the need for end-to-end observability is apparent.

This advanced level of observability provides real-time visibility across physical, virtual, and cloud-native network domains, enabling CSPs to feed AI and AIOps platforms with high-fidelity, contextual data. NETSCOUT Smart Data transforms packet-level telemetry into enriched, metadata-driven intelligence optimized for AI analytics, automation workflows, and service assurance use cases.

How Smart Data Improves Customer Experience and Reduces Churn

As a result, CSPs can more effectively measure key applications with key performance indicators (KPIs) that predict churn. Once armed with concrete insights into problems such as packet loss, jitter, latency, retransmissions, session failures, and application response times across 5G and IP services, it becomes possible to address issues proactively. This in turn reduces trouble ticket times, which directly impact customer satisfaction. When service is improved, net promoter scores (NPS) are increased and customer churn is reduced, which is always good for business.

Optimizing Network Capacity and Controlling Costs

Advanced observability from NETSCOUT empowers CSPs to more effectively control costs by optimizing network capacity. This enables the “Goldilocks” effect—meaning resources are neither oversized nor undersized, but instead are “right-sized.” Right-sizing network resources reduces both opex and capex by aligning compute, transport, and spectrum utilization with real traffic demand. By getting to the root cause of problems more quickly, CSPs are able resolve them expeditiously, which is key to protecting the bottom line.

Enabling Closed-Loop AI Automation

Fulfilling the promise of AI automation requires intelligence. That intelligence is made possible by NETSCOUT Smart Data, which can be used to facilitate closed-loop automation. Closed-loop automation uses Smart Data as a feedback signal to detect anomalies, trigger remediation workflows, validate outcomes, and continuously optimize network behavior.

By harnessing AI/machine learning (ML), NETSCOUT solutions can be instrumental in achieving failure prediction, thus ensuring more reliable service and a better customer experience. Use cases include predictive maintenance, anomaly detection, capacity forecasting, and automated fault isolation.

Strengthening Security and Network Resilience

As new services are rolled out on the path to further monetization, NETSCOUT observability is key to building in 5G network resilience and security for faster response. By measuring critical KPIs before, during, and after upgrades, CSPs can dramatically enhance safety and security. Smart Data also supports threat detection, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) mitigation, and zero-trust security monitoring across 5G service architectures.

The Undeniable Carrier Advantage of Observability

When AI data–driven innovation is paired with complete network observability, CSPs are well-positioned to automate network complexity, fortify security, and improve customer experience. The advantage of this advanced observability is that CSPs can:

• Win the retention battle by improving reliability, thus reducing churn
• Optimize network capacity, enabling costs to be controlled
• Achieve automation objectives by leveraging advanced network intelligence
• Facilitate new service rollouts more safely and securely
• Reduce risks by seeing everything and missing nothing on the network

Business outcomes include lowered mean time to restore (MTTR), reduced opex, improved service-level agreement (SLA) compliance, faster service launches, and higher subscriber satisfaction.

Bring Your Appetite and Your Business Priorities

If you’re coming to Barcelona, don’t forget to try the tapas! And if you’re coming to MWC, be sure to visit the NETSCOUT booth. We’d like to discuss your 2026 business priorities and share how NETSCOUT innovations can deliver the observability you need to attain your goals and grow your business. See you in Barcelona!

Visit NETSCOUT at MWC 2026 in Barcelona to learn how Smart Data and AI-ready observability can transform 5G operations, AIOps, and service assurance.

Book a meeting with NETSCOUT at Mobile World Congress 2026