Opening thought. This week, the latest Ericsson Mobility Report arrived. The headline estimates are that India’s 5G subscriptions are expected to breach the 1.1 billion mark by the year 2031, which is going to be 81% or thereabouts of the total connection penetration at that time. Contrast this with 430 million 5G subscriptions at the end of 2025, which makes up 35% of the total mobile subscriptions. A lot of this will be 4G users upgrading to better and faster plans—with those chunk of subscriptions, totalling 570 million at the end of 2025, to dip to about 160 million by 2031.
“India’s rapidly growing 5G adoption based on enhanced mobile broadband and 5G FWA is transforming consumer experiences,” notes Nitin Bansal, Managing Director, Ericsson India. And that takes me to a very important point in this conversation (something many tend to miss)—what about the fixed wireless access’ promise as a broadband alternative for homes and businesses. After all, Bharti Airtel and Reliance Jio are pushing this product quite prominently.
Ericsson India underlines that 5G adoption is being accelerated not just by affordable smartphones, and wider network coverage, but also a continued rollout of 5G FWA services. There are global cues to be taken as well, to understand potential trajectory. To that point, the report further notes that 5G FWA connections uptake is strongest in North America, the Nordics, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries and parts of Asia. Speed based tariff for FWA will become more prominent in the months and years ahead (much like it is with fiber broadband). Globally, the report suggests speed-based tariff plans are now offered by 57% of FWA service providers—a number that’s up from 51 percent a year ago.
Previously on Wired Wisdom: 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 deep dive immediately after, but I really want to have a more detailed chat about Apple’s lack of agentic AI conversation. You may say at this point, what AI agents? Exactly. It was designed that way. It was on purpose. Ties in beautifully with something I’d pointed out—Apple’s whole AI pitch barely mentioned “AI” as a term, but focused on the consumer, and how they’d use smarter features and functionality across apps. Nothing overwhelming to navigate, just some new stuff you may like to use from time to time. Quite unlike Google (the contrast stands out, no other reason), which it seems like to flex how many times they mention AI in the I/O keynote every year. Different approaches.
“We absolutely minimise what is sent up to PCC (that’s Private Cloud Compute, crucial to Apple Intelligence structure for privacy). The critical thing about PCC is architecturally, that’s at that point an efficiency measure, because PCC itself by design from the ground up, is going to vaporise any record of that data the moment after it answers your question. This is not stored, and is all in a form where, it’s completely transient,” explained Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering, to a select group of attendees from around the world. In attendance were CEO Tim Cook, CEO-elect John Ternus, and Greg “Joz” Joswiak, who is Senior Vice President for Worldwide Marketing.
A stark contrast, from what has become an industry buzzword. Agentic AI. Basically, AI agents trying to do (sometimes they get stuff done, often they don’t) something on your behalf. Maybe things will be more accurate and precise a decade from now, but agentic AI is at best a promise in the here and now. Irrespective of what the AI companies may try to tell you. Mind you, a lot of the stuff that Apple Intelligence and the new Siri AI will introduce is agentic. Surfacing contextual sharing of location links or photo albums in the midst of a text conversation. Call Context, on networks it’ll be available, pulling in relevant context for that call across apps on the phone. Adding items to reminders or notes from messages or emails. Smart actions. Safari monitoring for price changes or restock of an item you are looking to buy. Fixing Passwords if a leak is detected. Suggestions. Whatever you may call it.
What Federighi said about PCC, is the key difference. Apple’s commitment to privacy, wherein the only uploads to the server-side model is just the data that is needed to answer something, and everything is anonymous. No other AI company goes to this length. Not Google. Not Microsoft. One of them is part of the chain. Apple’s on-server AFM3 Cloud Pro model runs off Google’s servers, is powered by Nvidia’s hardware and is secure.
“PCC is just hermetically sealed computation that your device uses transiently to help answer your request. And even when it’s up there, we can’t even look in on what it’s doing. We have no ability to go looking. We can’t even attach to the debugging terminals. You try to open the case even just a little bit, the thing throws a breaker and everything,” Federighi’s simple explanation underlines a vision that’s already at a contrast to every other AI company out there.
THE LATEST, ON NEURAL DISPATCH
SECOND THOUGHTS: FOLDING A TRAJECTORY
Foldable phones keep generating momentary excitement, before receding into the shadows. Price and utility of the form factor being key reasons that potential buyers have to ponder over. That said, the somewhat niche’s space does have its own remarkable trajectory, something latest numbers by research firm Smart Analytics Global have detailed in their latest global foldable smartphone tracker. There is of course the reality of the global foldable smartphone shipment volume declining at a double-digit rate in Q1 2026. Multiple reasons for that—the stage for foldable early adopters to start replacing their existing foldable has still not been reached, prices are on an upward trajectory due to components being more expensive, and there are still very few mature markets for foldable. China being one.
Speaking of which, worldwide, Chinese phone maker Huawei’s foldable corner by far the maximum shipment share (40%) followed by Samsung (25%) and Honor (19%). Do you note something here? Two phone makers with China as their key market (and those who don’t sell phones in large markets including the US and India) dominate the top three spots. Huawei’s share at 40% now has reduced significantly from the highs of the same quarter in the previous year (54%) then, while Samsung has made that jump from 14% share 12 months prior. SAG attributes the strong momentum largely to aggressive channel promotions for the Fold 7 and Flip 7 series in key markets including South Korea and Japan, the report notes.
With expectations that Apple will launch a foldable iPhone in September this year, hopefully navigating the supply chain constraints to a longer runway with planning and production, could reset the benchmarks for the foldable phone market.
That’s all folks. Stay tuned for next week’s Neural Dispatch and Wired Wisdom. And subscribe, will ya, for there’s tons coming your way. Direct your bouquets and brickbats down below.
