The prospects for this year’s MWC Barcelona event taking place now look exceedingly grim, with Spanish newspaper El Pais reporting that mobile operators Deutsche Telekom, Orange and BT, along with Nokia, have now withdrawn from the show.

As the report notes, Nokia’s withdrawal, following that of Ericsson, leaves Huawei as the only major telecommunications network firm, in a congress in which 5G was to be one of the main themes.

The report, citing “operator sources”, says that the meeting originally planned for Friday at which the organisers would decide whether or not to proceed with the event, has been brought forward to 2pm today.

Those same sources told the newspaper that the meeting will be staged by videoconference by the GSMA Council, with a statement issued after the meeting. The GSMA Council consists of 26 representatives of the main telecommunications operators such as Telefónica, Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone, Orange, AT&T, Verizon, América Móvil, China Mobile China Telecom and China Unicom