Session one is all about innovation. It's about where DSP should best direct their innovation efforts and how we can accelerate this work. And furthermore, how can telcos ensure they focus on the evolving digital services requirements rather than just chasing the latest technology advances? There's an awful lot to discuss, so to enable us to swiftly get our guests onto stage and do some set adjustment, we're going to be showing you of these two days, some brief video highlights from our online DSP summit series. As we get our guests on stage, we don't just cover the important topics once a year. We cover them all year round with our schedule of debates and interview. So here's our first video on the green network as we invite our guests onto stage. We're back in just a sec.

In the same way that we talk about bandwidth expansion and growing usage and things like that, we have to also talk about and keep energy efficiency productivity. The green network has to stay in that same dialogue and just become part of the table stakes of telecom

And we also see innovations on understanding the traffic for example, so you can process the traffic, whether that's meta data or use the data or that we can also argue to have a better understanding and avoid that unnecessary traffic is actually carried too far.

I think one very important point by moving functions onto cloud is, and especially in the context of energy, is defining an intelligent database. I think one cannot overemphasize the importance of having an intelligent data lake towards defining more empirically based informed decisions on how, how we reduce our energy consumption.

We've run POCs at Doomo where we've seen a drastic improvement and savings in power consumption just by changing the kind of CPUs that we use for delivering the factory core. It's

If we are able to establish a circular economy, we are able to deliver products for our customers with a lower carbon impact circular design, then ultimately that will also have a positive impact for our customers From an ROI perspective as well,

I fully agree on this strive towards zero bit zero watts. I think it's quite fundamental and in my mind to do that. It's also good to close the loop between what a network can enable and what is the real true need of the customers of the order applications.

Well you catch up with all of our videos, interviews and discussions from the Green Network Summit over on telecom tv. Now, before we start our session, we are going to introduce our poll because a popular feature of the summit is the audience poll. So we have created a series of very simple polls for you each one question with three choices and the choice is up to you. I'm going to look at the first question for this session and this session is we are asking the question, what is the best source of innovation for service providers? So we're giving you three choices there. Is it internal? Is it vendor partners or is it industry association? So please go ahead and vote on the telecom TV website. You'll find all the polls in the DSP leaders section on the agenda page and we are going to take a look at the current state of voting at the end of this session, right, that's not done. Once again, we have invited co-hosts and I'm delighted to say that our first co-host is Yago Tenorio, who is fellow and director of network architecture at Vodafone Group and also the chairman of Tip Telecom Info Project. Yago, thanks so much for coming back. It's been two years since you were last with us on stage. It's good to have you back.

Correct and thank you for having me. So I think I need to sort out my title. It's too long, so sorry

About that. Oh, there were longer titles in this business. Don't you worry. Just talk to Phil behind the scenes there. He poses hair out. Some of these job titles, they never fit on the screen, right? Thank you very much. Now let us go and introduce our guests first of all and then Yago is going to give our first DSP leaders address. But first let's meet all our panelists who are joining us for this session. I'm going to ask them all to briefly introduce themselves starting on the far left of the stage with Mark. Mark.

Hi, Mark Gilmour, CTO at Connectivity. Yeah, really glad to be here and looking forward to the discussions.

Okay, so Susan James. I'm VP of innovation on wireless connectivity with American Tower and my first time, so I'm very pleased to be here.

Hi everybody, my name's Dennis Hoffman and I run the telecommunications systems business at Dell Technologies, also a newbie to this forum. Nice to see you all.

Hi everyone, I'm Chivas Nambiar. I run the telco business at AWS also first time and a newbie and excited to be part of this forum.

My name is Gabriela Mann, I'm the managing director of research and network strategy at BT Group where I've been there now a year. I'm very excited to be here.

Great. Hi everyone, it's Sandy BHA from VA Media two business leading on strategy innovation 5G it and it's great to be back from last year.

Thanks. It is great to see all of you, some returners and some new faces and it's always a pleasure to mix it up and get some new faces and opinions on our session. So thank you very much indeed. Right in that case Yago, I'm going to ask you if you'd like to make your way to lectern to deliver our first DSP leaders address.

And well thank you for having me. My pleasure to be opening this panel. I think the topic is spot on because we have to talk about innovating on the network. The truth is we are almost halfway through the 5G decade and the question on what is the killer app for 5G or in other words, how are we going to make money or 5G is still mostly outstanding or at least I don't have an answer. Maybe I'll find the answer today I would really appreciate, but there are I think some hints. So maybe I have parts of the answer so at least I'll give you my view and then maybe as an input for topics that we can discuss today, I would love to hear your viewpoint on this. I can think of five things and let me just put them in order from starting with the most distant kind of future to the most current.

Of course AI and we'll talk about this in these days, but not necessarily only AI for network but more the network for ai. There are many different perspectives on this, but of course there is one that says that the computing that AI will need may actually require the DSPs to play a role and that's very interesting. Now that's probably going to happen in the next two, three years. So this is still probably at some point in the second half of the decade. Another thing that may happen in the next two, three years, I would say two things that are relevant. One is satellite, particularly direct to sell satellite. So broadband is clear and it's happening when it comes to service that you can provide directly to unmodified phones that may be very disruptive and a breakthrough innovation and it may actually open new ways to monetize strategy. Think of applications that you may want to deliver that counts on the service and the connectivity being ubiquitous like 24 7, wherever you go you never be unconnected. Opens a new world of possibilities and I think it's going to be possible also within the next two years. Now with APIs we're going to talk about them as well. Very important way to monetize and open new ways to make money out of the 5G network and also happening probably closer than two years from now, maybe in the next one or two.

Now you expect me to talk about open brand, who you? Yeah. Okay, so I will. My thing number four is of course open ran. When is it going to happen? In our case, going to happen in the next year. Why? Because we're running an RFQ, which is also the reason why I can't really talk about it. So all I can say is going well. So we said that we would launch an RFQ and I think we've been very vocal about our ambition to end this decade with 30% of Europe in open run. So we'll see if that happens as an outcome of a spinning six. And I can't really comment or give you more details, but we May 1st consider if we're talking about monetizing 5G, why do we talk about open run? Well, open run creates optionality. Optionality creates competition. Competition creates innovation and innovation, reduce cost and with a reduced cost then you can roll out 5G to more places more quickly and that is important.

Now I know the debate is still going on in the industry as to whether or how open run is actually reducing the cost and there are many different viewpoints and that is good and is a great debate. So let me give you maybe one study taken from the RFQ and I'll omi some details. But one of the things we are procuring is of course radio units. Radio units are like the PAs that are at the end of the base station that transmit the signal that gets on your phone. But they are also the devices that take up the most energy. They are really hungry so they take a significant part of the CapEx of the radio, but they take a disproportionate majority of the opex in the form of energy consumption. In our case with this R fq no secret, we are procuring 32 different radios.

Why 32? Why that many? Well, because we have different markets, markets with slightly different spectrums. In some of them we have ranch sharing and some of them we don't have ranch sharing. So at the end we ended up with 32 different models and we have a specification for the 32. We send it to all the vendors. We see the responses. It's very interesting when you look at all the radios that are compliant to our specification and you figure out the power consumption, right? So you take the 32 rows, you build one column per vendor and you see what this kind of equates to in terms of opex for energy. Who would you say is the winner? Who has the best radios from that perspective? If you add up all the energy that you're going to be consuming no one because for the 32 rows there is always a vendor that has a few first and a few not so good radios.

So there is always the first position and the second position is always in a different column. Does that matter? Well in theory with open run you can just go for all first and combine them and just build the best stack. Okay, in theory, do you know you want to guess in terms of opex for energy, so energy consumption, what's the difference? So if you build the ideal stack, like the champion of all the stacks with the best radios ever, the energy consumption for the life of the equipment. So let's say 10 years in the entirety of our footprint in Europe. So a lot of base stations is 1 billion euros better than the next best one you followed. So open run versus the old world is 1 billion euro better in energy consumption throughout the life of the equipment. Now you may say yeah, but that's unrealistic because you're not going to be able to just mix and match like the ideal set.

Yeah, true. But if you go for something feasible that is maybe two or three suppliers max and then four or five models max, which is why I can integrate myself, then instead of 1 billion, you end up with 800 million. Okay, so next time you think of why open run is reducing the cost, remember this now open run, yeah, within the next year, but I said in order of most current. So my last topic for today is something that is happening today this morning and it has to do with mobile private networks, which has been already I think a very current thing and a very, I think current way of monetizing 5G so far. But there is a need for democratizing that and there is a need for reducing the cost and make it universally available. And I was here when I was here last time two years ago. I missed last year because I was getting married, which is a nice way to remember my anniversary by the way.

I remember I was waving a two G network on a raspberry bay, you remember that? And I said, well the challenge is how long it'll take us to build a 5G network in a raspberry Pi. So today I'm waving this one. So this is a 5G network in a raspberry Pi and is launching commercially today, this morning. Now how is that? So after we presented this kind of experiment with the two G network, we took a prototype of a 5G network on a raspberry buy to mobile world Congress. It was super successful, super successful. So we've had demand from all the enterprise customers for Vodafone contacted us. They wanted to set up trials and proof of concepts, et cetera, but it was a prototype. So the company doing this Lyme could not satisfy that demand.

We took it again to this mobile or congress and the difference is today this is becoming commercially available. So Lime is launching it commercially. You can go to their website and check and you'll find the link and then the link will take you to crowd supply. So it's a crowdsourcing campaign and this model is a developer edition, which means that you buy, you can change the components, you can maybe opt for a bigger memory or configure it differently if you remember the spec. This is a software defined radio base station, which means that it can transmit any network, any PMN id. You can use it in any network with any spectrum and you can actually make it a 5G based station or if you don't like that, you can make it a 4G or a 3G or a two G one. It's all software and it can transmit in any band. So very excited to be launching that today for Lyme and I think it is part of the future. Our ambition is to have this eventually at the cost of a wifi router. So you'll have a 5G core and a 5G pay station, your own mobile private network for what the wifi router may cost you. This is not exactly at that price because it's the developer edition, but hey, you can order from today. So go online and please your orders. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much. Hug As expected you bring out the big surprises, very nice of you to organize the release day to coincide with day one of Ds P lead as well. Absolutely fabulous. No money change hands there whatsoever. Amazing. Thanks very much. Lots of food for thought there ya. Lots of food for thought in what you were saying. I'd like to bring in our panelists now because we all listening to you there for five minutes or so. Are there any comments, anybody want to quiz yago on some of the issues that he's just raised now? Any takers for a question to yago? Anyone at all? Anyone at

All? I'll just add, no, I think it's great to see the developments you've done on the private networks, something we've been actively pursuing as well. So definitely think that's a key use case to drive that monetization on 5G and 5G standalone and making it compact and plug and play. So we developed a suitcase size private network, launched it commercially and as you said, seeing the demand for customers, they can deploy it quickly in a matter of minutes and start to drive that adoption. So definitely agree that's a key initiative to continue to pursue.

Thank you. I think that's very kind of you. And there is one point that we may want to discuss later on today, which is innovation from the DSP independently to compete and differentiate against other DSPs or innovation as an industry and is not an obvious question and the answer is not obvious. In our case, we developed this and we took it to Mobile World Congress as a Vodafone branded, as a Vodafone kind of development today this is launched as a DSP agnostic network. So you can go online, you can buy as many as you want and it will work on your network or on yours. On yours. That's a deliberate move, but it is also a very interesting topic as to whether it makes sense to innovate and differentiate or when it makes sense to do it to compete with other operators and when it makes sense to do it as an industry for the better of this industry and to make it more profitable for everybody. In our case this time around we chose the second. So

It's a question we've been asking forums like this for quite some time, isn't it about where we innovate, how we innovate, and hopefully we'll bring out some of these issues as we go through our discussion now, unless there's any more direct questions, should we move along? Because we got a lot to cover. I'd like to bring in this point about we do see a lot of innovation within turco. We've seen it, that video at the start, we were talking about innovation for years and years and years. A lot of it has been incremental and a lot of it recently has been focused more I guess on cost reduction for the core business. What I'd like to ask is how do we now innovate for growth? We've been talking about services, this is what DSP leaders is all about. How do we innovate to drive and deliver these new services and why has this been so difficult? Why has it been such a challenge for so long? Let's bring in someone guests straight away. And Gabriela, I'd like to start with you if I can, because we talked earlier about this and you talked about this sort of innovation gap. Would you like to maybe articulate that? Yeah,

So first of all, I would like to start by saying that I believe that from a technology point of view, I think we don't necessarily have an innovation gap. I think the gap is shown by the fact that we're the only sector in the last 10 years with a negative TSR minus 10%, the only sector of all sectors globally with a negative total shareholder return. So it shows that really the issue is not necessarily in the technology of how we build the networks. The issue is in growth. And I think for me it starts, I push a lot in my organization to help understand that the role of the network has changed. We go from a world where the technology that we innovated, that we standardized actually delivered the outcome. So video messaging voice, but it's no longer there. The technologies that we're innovating today do not deliver the outcome.

They deliver the art of a possible of an outcome. And this is why we failed with 5G and we will fail miserably with six G. Not because of lack of innovation around openness or technology, but because the business models have changed, the network is delivering an outcome, is part of the piece of a puzzle to deliver for an outcome. It's B2B B two, B two x where connectivity is just one piece of that. And I think it is the innovation of the ecosystem, monetization of the ecosystem that is going to enable us to grow. But we don't have that culture. Telcos also don't have a culture product development. We think we do. I challenge my own organization, say no, what we call product managers are not really product managers, they're tariff managers, bundle managers. We don't really develop products in the sense of really developing a true product.

So I think that the innovation gap has to do with how do we as an industry get together and engage. We need to make sure that for six G, we're doing research and development with the enterprises, with the ecosystem, not sit in our own chamber and talk about this phenomenal technologies that we're building, putting in our networks that we love but nobody else understands. So this is for me that big gap that we have as an industry and that we really need to call out and take action. How do we involve? And it's all about B2B, B two, B two x and they need to understand what we're doing. I

Think it is the reality though, right? There is a ton of innovation. If you think about us as an industry that's kept everybody connected and dealt with the growth of data for so many years, there is tremendous innovation that's gone. But to your point, we haven't been able to sell the value of what we're creating and translating that to consumer and enterprise experiences. And that gap is challenging for us as a business, as a telco business. We're always thinking about how do we get you that next amount of larger trends of data, next amount of better plans for your ecosystems. So the innovation that we need, business case, yes, but also a little bit of experimentation. Our model needs to shift from saying, yeah, we are very good at deploying billions of dollars of capital and we do really well at it to saying where are the smaller and smaller experiments you run to find the right things that your consumers say, I will go buy this from A DSP from a telco and I am happy with the experiences I get out of it and then scale. And we haven't been very good at that experiment and then scale model. So that's a big part of innovation we need to spend time on.

I would probably add as well coming from this perspective where I said in the BB area thinking, yeah, the focus over the last two decades has been a lot on core network innovation moving from two G, 3G, 4G or the fixed networks. And obviously we talked about the diversification of the supply chain as well. And that's all really thinking about some of the standards, developing the patents. But then when I'm thinking from the business perspective really a step change and a different mindset as well. So you've got to get a lot closer to the customer. So in the B2B world, thinking about what are some of the customer pain points and problems and then developing a plan or a strategy around how you might solve those, is that improving health and safety? Is that driving better sustainability? Is that improving product product efficiency and managing better control of assets and then working back from that is often the key thing to do, which is what I found works. And then it's really as you said, how do you start to trial and test capabilities, products and solutions in the market fail fast and then scale. And often the challenge I've seen is it's the balance because you're going to be creating new products and solutions and of course you've got to trade and scale your existing core connectivity business as well. So it's managing that balance of investments as well. New versus existing.

More comments. Yeah, I was going to add there, I did some quick research a number of months ago. If you look at the percentage of revenues that most of the MNOs are getting from enterprise today, it's gone down significantly over the last 10 years or longer. And I think that is the area that has really been starved for funding. When you look at how the network's evolved, they really have been built for consumers to get the cost down for consumers and the innovation of the organizations around business have sort of been starved the network, how they would build them for businesses as being starved. So I think that absolutely it is the area that there is the untapped revenues, but when you look at it from a business perspective, connectivity doesn't deliver them anything. It is not a solution to a business problem. And that's where I think you start to see things changing in the industry where you start to see more MNOs working with systems integrators, working with a bigger ecosystem of companies where it will be an IBM or an Accenture or someone that is building an end-to-end solution for a problem that will require 5G connectivity for moving robots around factories or whatever.

And that will require more than just outside in connectivity. It will require a private 5G network, it could be a managed wifi network. So I think that there is a large opportunity there and I think businesses so confused about what they don't understand how to articulate that in a way that a lot of MNOs and companies understand. So I think there's almost a communication issue between the two right now. So I do see that there's a big opportunity for innovation in that area and I think we're just starting to come to that now because of course your 5G rollout is going to go across your macro network before it starts to focus on densification. And I think we're just starting to get to that point now. So I do think that there is a lot of hope right now on how we will get there, but I think it's going to be more of an industry collaboration across broader industries than maybe we've had in the past.

Interesting. We've heard so far there seems to be a broad consensus of identifying issues or the issue here.

I think the original question about the innovation for cost reduction, innovation for growth, I think we need both. We've been more focused on reducing cost and with obvious reasons I think you mentioned, but it cannot be only that. So I fully agree. We also need to innovate for services and then there is the point that we briefly touched on before as to in which cases we do that together and in which ones we're competing. And we do that to differentiate against each other. Part of I think the slowdown is that as an industry we've been learning how to do that and I think nowadays I think we are not bad at it. So I think we know and we can collaborate and then we can compete. And that's not common in every industry and it's not common and it's something specific to DSP. So I think we should leverage that.

It strikes me that as somewhat of an industry outsider, don't beat yourselves up too much as an industry or let's not beat ourselves up too much about difficulty innovating by and large, as industry is populated with large companies, mostly very large companies, some of which are national assets and it's well chronicled that almost all large companies struggle with innovation and rarely because of technology or the understanding of technology or even sometimes the understanding of needs, it's often because of the structure of the company. The companies get built as ecosystems around what they've made their money doing. And those ecosystems are incredibly difficult internal ecosystems, they're incredibly difficult to break when you try to do something new. In the end, there are really two models that most companies use. One is to acquire innovation and yet this industry, to the point you made about TSR and total shareholder returns, this industry is not flowing with money to go do a bunch of innovation, a bunch of acquisitions for the express purpose of innovation.

It's been more consolidation and geographic territory and things, but it's a very difficult problem. And I think most of the panelists have touched on the ways that you solve it, focus on end users that you're targeting focus on outcome. But it's not at all unique certainly to this industry that a group of large companies that have been wildly successful doing something incredibly important, then trying to do something a bit different, find barriers to doing so and it it's just a very heavy lift. It's hard work, but it's eminently doable. And I think you've got a great agenda of topics to cover that are along the lines of both cost innovation and revenue growth, innovation. And I'm glad Yago, you're the first person to say ai, so I'm not the first person to say it today. It certainly won't be the last, but the frenzy around that is an inflection point that this industry cannot let themselves be over the top on ai.

One question because you mentioned a really good point. So maybe from a different perspective and also as an outsider coming into the industry acknowledging that the whole industry globally is not healthy. To what extent is this a regional problem? Because most of us here, we represent Europe and we live on this reality. So when you look at the innovation on the network, is it the European kind of problem? Is there a gap between Europe and the us you think? And Asia, you have a good perspective on that. So why do you think

Yeah, it's a matter of degree, the whole industry, if the entire industry is minus 10 TSR, and I wouldn't doubt that. I think if you just do a five year stock price chart of most operators and most of the suppliers who depend entirely on the operators, they look very similar. And it doesn't matter if you're in the United States or Australia or here in Europe, Europe is uniquely challenged, right? Europe, it's well chronicled, I've learned it, some of it from you, but just this environment is particularly tough. It's like eight gas stations at a corner trying to sell a data plan to a family and all of that at the same time as

It's like all at the same time is being forced to invest with every geopolitical forces. I mean it's a tough setup. If we don't find revenue growth, I think it's going to be tough to out to cost out our way out of this. That's going to be key.

It's a great, great adage. But yeah, I don't think, I mean there are a couple of outliers. T-Mobile US is an outlier, but a very unique situation at the moment. Not necessarily on innovation but on stock price and TSR, but really unique situation number three, carrier highest ARPU market. And they have a whole bunch of sprint spectrum. So it's just a different situation. But by and large I think it's global. Thanks guys.

Gabriel. And while I do think it's global, of course there are small variance to I would say that you have a couple of, if you look in Asia, Southeast Asia particular, they're not doing great, but a little bit better. You would see the Nordics and Scandinavia. Some markets are doing slightly better when it comes to innovation, not necessarily TSR, but innovation, sorry. I think something to learn, sorry, from those markets is the government's role in facilitating innovation that coherent policies as enabling innovation. Industrial strategies are going to be critical. So how do you incentivize the enterprises upskilling of people, digitalization of the public sector, et cetera, et cetera. So I think that is something that we also should talk more about and that's why I say we need to tap on the ecosystem, the enabler of the connectivity. This fantastic connectivity that we're building goes beyond a valley beyond and governments need to be involved in that critical understanding connectivity is that critical enable for societal growth, but that requires policies, coherent policies.

In. Yeah, I was also going to say, so it feels like as an industry we have this sense of desperation that leads us to do things like glom on to the next big hype cycle and then get not very good at it for two years and then drop it for the next big hype hype cycle. So I haven't heard the term industry 4.0 in about a year, right? 5G when it started up, that was a big part of the conversation. And if you go back and look at how many industries we've actually gone out and really touched to build something unique, something custom as operators, as partners for operators, it's very little. And so it is not that the opportunity doesn't exist, but we just have lost patience with the model of product development, product management and building better things over time. And that takes a lot of time. We just want the quick results. So we're like, okay, industry 4.0 is done, now we're going to go over to the gen AI hype cycle and in two years what's going to change? We have to get into the model of building things small, building things for specific unique customers and then try to scale it up. And I don't see the patience for it sometimes in the

Industry. Well, as you said, they're all cycles, they're all cyclical eventually even ai, it's going to be cyclical. Mark, do you want to come in just one of your, okay, yeah, this has been an interesting discussion and dialogue so far. And I've been listening in my career, I started off building fiber networks, spent a long time building mobile networks and now I've kind of come back to building fiber networks. And it is interesting to see mentioning about the consumer versus enterprise mix. These last five years I've spent more time working with enterprise in the B2B space. And the thing that is particularly noticeable is that it is a much more varied market. So when it comes to the consumer play, if we're talking cellular and things like that, it's essentially one product, isn't it? Varying degrees within it, but it's essentially one product minutes used to be minutes, then text, then data now.

Whereas in the enterprise space, you've got umpteen different verticals and then sub-verticals within that. And you've got to get close to the customer in order to understand their pain point because with the greatest will in the world. And Yago, you started off talking about the fantastic innovation that's going on with open RAN for example, but open RAN is innovating in the network, isn't it? To reduce costs. It has an outward benefit, but it's what we are good at. But when it comes to then how do we innovate on the network, which has been a bit of a precursor for the discussions here, that's much more challenging because you have to look individually, well almost it feels like individually into the verticals and you have to take a bet on which verticals to get go after. And if you want to do that in any sort of scale. And this I think then leads on, you made another point about the lime raspberry pi, the 5G thing, that's not a Vodafone r and d piece is it? It's a collaboration effort that's come about and that really is where innovation is going to come within our traditionally telco r and d, longer R and D cycles, those sorts of things.

Even that has been taken out of our domain to a greater or lesser extent. Am I going to jump onto another question here?

I'm getting excited. I'm getting excited because you're leading very nicely onto another area. I'd. I'll pause to Coban. Yeah, we'll develop it. It's a nice segue because I was going to ask what are the factors that are driving innovation? To what extent also is innovation now seen as business requirements? And I also wanted to try and find out how this is separate from r and d work and what impact does innovation going forward have on more traditional r and d activities of telcos, especially the big telcos, they've got their telco labs and facilities. How is this all changing? I wonder, and you are mentioning the RD there, mark just spurred that on. Any thoughts about how the need for innovation and the different factors that are driving it are changing what we do?

Yeah, I think just building on what you were saying, maybe there is a transition that innovation in the network is actually just not only an enabler but is starting there and then it's becoming a platform for innovate on the network. So to your point, it's true open brand is not going to per se bring monetization or application or make a difference for the customer so that the customer doesn't care necessarily care if it's being served by open brand or single brand. It'll be the same. However, without optionality and without competition and a he ecosystem, there'll be no network to innovate on. So it is an enabler from that perspective. Now, the point you made online, and I fully agree, there is this point of innovation as an industry and taking us and moving us forward as an industry together. There is also the point on starting the innovation from within. And in this case you innovate because you make the network accessible, affordable, but also programmable and then you pass it on to developers for them they can develop applications on top of this box and in the smartphone.

Consult the notes. Sure. There's no test. How do we do it? Did I really hear an alarm there? I'm not sure if I heard either. I tell you what we're going to see if that pops up again just in case because it wasn't consistent alarm because it was only a brief one. We are going to assume that wasn't a fire alarm I think is a fair assumption. Unless someone from the telecom TV team can walk outside and go and find stuff and get clarification just in case. And if you don't return in about two minutes, then we'll know we have a problem. I think it was an endorsement of Ya's point.

Is there special effects? Yes. It reminds me when you're watching Formula one and there is a yellow flag and then there is no yellow flag. Yes,

Yes. So what was it? What was it? Yes, what happens? So we will continue unless we're here otherwise, but we are checking, don't worry, your safety is paramount to us. How does this affect r and d? Because we historically been doing a lot of r and d work in order to develop new technologies to claim ownership of them, get the patents, take 'em into the standardization process, make sure they become standards, make sure that we are a player in the next generation of technology and so on and so forth and on it goes. And it's been going that way for ages, but now we're talking about we're innovating and not just technology but services. Are these two separate components of a telco? Is this two separate missions or are they one And that's someone who's not a, I'm really interested to find out any thoughts. Yeah,

I have to share my view. Well, virgin media too, they are separate but aligned. So of course it is really important to drive that network innovation aligned to those standards and obviously the best practice of doing that, right? Working with the network partners, driving those industry forums, but then also is really critical. Now we're at that juncture. How do you realize that investment on that network innovation? And so to do that effectively the business innovation is a different approach. Often it's a different mindset. And so what we've been thinking about is how do you develop those new products and services? And to Gabrielle's point, is that just in the same way of continuing to develop products yourself or do you need to partner? Do you need to find different approaches? Because telcos will have skills and experiences, but it may not be always best placed.

So one example of that is the work that Virgin Media two has been doing and we just announced the last month with Accenture where we've combined our skills providing 5G private network capability, so our core connectivity as the enabler and then working, collaborating with Accenture who will engage with our industry customers, working on a range of industry verticals to create industry solutions using computer vision AI and help our customers with a range of products. And then bringing that together to offer an end-to-end service and solution. And I think that's really unique in terms of how do we help our customers on a wide range of industries and acknowledging that it's not something that we're always going to create ourselves. So really leveraging partnerships and partners that are operating globally as well.

Yeah. So my view on research is this, it depends on the objective and we often talk about r and d as one, but you can do research without the D, which leads to not much. You need the R, the D, you need the commercialization and you need the scale. And I would like to challenge some of the things that we talk about when it comes to network innovation. I'm all for innovation, for keeping reducing cost, we have to do that. But I also think that we get so stuck into diversifying the supply chain, especially from a national perspective. Many of us are involved with government how important it's, and I always tell them we wouldn't have to incentivize diversity in the supply chain. If this was a healthy sector, we would have lots of vendors. So I think and just look at the vendors that we have, they're struggling big time.

So I'm actually concerned that even if we try to innovate more, well this is so research intense, they quit the technology that it requires massive scale. Now I would like to move over to the telco though. As BT group, we do a lot of research. We have over 5,000 patents, but we don't do a lot with those to be candid. So also a shift that's also culture. We're most comfortable even as telcos on the things we know, which is infrastructure. And one of the things that I keep saying in my organization is we have to shift and we are in the middle of that transformation to shift slightly away from doing what everybody else is doing comfortably researching infrastructure to actually research platforms, orchestration software, building the ecosystem and co-innovate with our customers to Susan's point. And I think that is the type of then the research can be valuable for telco that can lead to a deep, but to have patents in RAN doesn't help me to group. I don't think it helps just about any telco, but to have patents when it comes to certain services that probably can lead to the D and the commercialization.

Thanks so much come to, but just before we come to Susan, I'd just like to inform everyone and reassure everyone that we have had the official confirmation that was a false fire alarm. So false fire alarm. So everyone get back in the room, get sat down please. We will continue, Susan.

Okay, so I agree with co-creation. I think it's really great, but I think we often over assume that our customers are technology companies and the vast majority of them, and I think when I looked at both we're members of both WBA and we're members of the ongoing alliance for private networks. When you look at the surveys that come out from those companies, they say they're closer to taking a decision, but they're more confused than they were last year. And that's like, should I be choosing wifi six E or seven? Should I be choosing private networks? At the end of the day, they don't really care. They want someone to tell them this is the right thing for your network and they may need both. And then they need both of those things to work together. So I think often in companies you tend to work in silos.

This is the part that's working with wifi, this is the part that's working with private 5G and even within the systems integrators, they're trying to sell private 5G instead of trying to solve a particular business issue. So I think there's lots of challenges there. Yes, it would be great to work with industries, but that's not their job to create for us. So I think that's one of the things that we need to do better. And I really like the point you touched on before, maybe that's part of the role that we need government to support with in helping industries navigate the number of technologies and companies that they need to be able to get to a decision point so that we can automate the logistics industry and actually reduce the challenges that we have with getting goods around the country, automate the justice departments, the national health, all of these sorts of things. There are so many industries that are dying for help get transformed and improve efficiency, deliver better services. But we seem to get stuck ironically in the communication of the technology from where we are today to what they need.

Mark, I would summarize that it's that outcome based, isn't it? They're interested in the outcome, they're not interested in really the journey. I mean actually I do it myself when I'm working with vendors or suppliers or things and I'm immersed in the technology, but actually I want an outcome on, and back to the question about the r and d versus innovation. For me the innovation is just much broader. It's a much broader topic. You touched on it in terms of it's not just that research and development piece, which is kind of the discovery phase of incubation, sorry, of innovation. You've then got the incubation and then you've got the acceleration, the scale piece of that that comes along. And for me that comes out of the lab and into those conversations with ecosystem partners across. And I even think that as an industry, we're actually losing the ground on that infrastructure r and d as well. That's been taken out of the operators hands for sure. It's been in the vendor community for a while and it's now and in universities I think I live down on the south coast and the University of Southampton has a very strong fiber optical division. They spun out a company a few years ago that was snapped up by Microsoft for hollow core fiber.

Even that side of things I think we don't play in so much. So I think it does come back to that wider topic of innovation being much broader than just the technology. But actually you start moving into business models, you start moving into ways of working, you start moving into commercial models and different approaches

And you have to be able to accept, I think you guys have all touched on this in various ways, starting out small and sticking with it. And big companies are not good at starting small and sticking with it, right? They seek scale quickly because they are scaled enterprises and for a long time you'll say this isn't moving the needle, when are we going to get there? But there needs to be a tolerance for that at organizationally, start small, stick to it, engage a different set of people, focus on the outcome. And at our company we set up this entire division that focuses on industry as what is for us a relatively small effort relative to everything else. Organized it as a business unit reporting to the vice chairman under the belief that if we didn't do that, the company would inadvertently try to kill it because it's different. And I think that is some of the things that have to be done in order to bifurcate innovation in the network versus on. But for innovation on the network, that's the thing that's going to take I think some different org structures and a tolerance for starting small, picking a spot, sticking to it, and then delivering the outcome.

It is fascinating though as a industry, we have had a set of these companies who are very good at this. If you think about it from the lens of the unique customer we've always served, which is a consumer, all of the r and d, all of the innovation has been driven around getting that consumer experience to have more data at less cost. That's where all of our time and effort have gone. And so getting that shift from that set of customers to the enterprise customer, I saw that graph that we put up there that said that's where everybody wants to focus. I think it is a fool's errand if we don't make sure that that is where the r and d and the innovation is going. So you asked the question, is it a different thing? It is a different thing and our orgs are not really set up to chase that set of opportunities at this point.

Let's just pause for a second because I do want to bring in some feedback we've received and we have some online feedback here and we have, I think it's a question, a question or a statement in from the audience. Lemme just read this out for you. It's just come in, is the problem enterprise engagement that business users don't understand how service providers work and interact rather than not understanding the technology, which they maybe don't need to. Maybe the innovation needs to be in customer engagement. So there's an observation there. What do we think of that comment?

I think it goes in line with what Mark was saying before that, and I don't think, we do not have that mindset. So we genuinely think that the technology insights is not something that the customer need to necessarily understand. It's more what it means for them. Now, of course, customer engagement can always get better and yes, when we need innovation on the network is touching all aspects. So I would not exclude that one particularly, but I do think that DSPs understand that we are here to make the life of our customers easier and to help them make the right choices for them. I don't think that is necessarily the problem. Maybe you have a different view, but I think I heard you saying that before.

Yeah, no, I agree with agree that that ultimately we do want that. But I find the question interesting because I've worked in some big telcos and in some smaller ones as well, and I must admit at times I've struggled to understand how to navigate through some of the big players that I've been involved with. So how our customers can navigate that would be an interesting, when you first read the question, I was about to take umbridge with it because I was about to say that's a typical question from a telco about they're not understanding us. But actually when you got to the remainder of the question, I thought actually no, that's not what they're saying because yeah, it's not going to work if we take the approach that the customer has to understand how we work. Sorry, because that has not been my experience when I've spoken to these different, and I've started going to in different sort of events and conferences to try and hear what's coming out of those that are not telco related and you get a very different message.

Good. It's interesting when you go to a telco's website and it actually is organized exactly how a telco is organized and then you say, do you want an SD one? If you're an enterprise, do you know whether you want an SD one or not? So I think that is one thing that we certainly could do a much better job of is saying, am I a small, medium or large enterprise? What do I care? I have a connectivity problem, I want my customers to be able to connect. Start with that. Let's start with the problem that our customers are trying to solve.

I just want to say about this customer, I think that is spot on and I can tell say from own experience and I mean Susan lives in Sweden. I also, the previous telco was with, I remember we built these 5G reference networks already, 20 17, 20 17 in every market. I put a reference network not to learn about 5G because I felt I had lots of people already doing it was to create a partnership programs. We invited device manufacturers, a few of the ones that were there, but we worked with Qualcomm, but above all, in every market we looked at the industry. So in Norway it was oil and fish farming. So we engaged with that ecosystem to try to bring them, make them understand the art of the possible. In Sweden it was mining, automotive and gaming. That's where the industries and family was, forestry, et cetera, et cetera.

And we created, it didn't take more than six months. We had over a hundred partners in every country. And if you look today those markets, we invited government as well to address a net neutrality discussion driven by the enterprises. And I mean if you look today, I think that while it's not necessarily material that Telco has in that region, the best enterprise growth, almost double digit coming from these use cases, but it was years of building up. It was from that engagement explaining the art of the possible and make them understand the outcomes. Nobody wakes up wanting to buy a 5G slice when we announced we're launching 5G standalone. Like okay, it's really that outcome. So I think that is spot on and that's the type of innovation that we need to do much more.

Great. Thanks very much. I had like to move on if you can, because time is pressing as well as DSP. We also are well aware of the TechCo strategy and this requirement to come on more software technology focused telcos. For those telcos who want to go the TechCo route or decided that's for them, how does that impact their innovation efforts? Do they need to own the technology to become a TechCo? Do they have to create more of their ownership? Basically, how will it change? Will it be a different innovation route to those telcos who do not want to go the TECO route? Yako, maybe I can start with you because we have heard from Vodafone on TECO for a while now. Does it make any difference to innovation?

I think well it does. It's an enabler. I think you can't afford not just acquiring new skills, understanding the way software works and developing your own software for all the right kind of places and functions, but it is not necessarily related to a move

Related to ownership, to your point, so that you produce technology that you own and you try to differentiate because at the end, I don't think particularly when we look at the landscape in Europe, I don't think any of us is big enough to be able to afford that and just go and develop a technology and then compete with it in isolation. We're not that big. So I think the point that we mentioned before about collaboration, cooperation and moving everybody as an industry still applies, but nevertheless, in today's world, and if we talk about innovation on the network and we talk about applications and if we talk about customer, I don't think you can afford not developing some software skills and coding and et cetera.

Okay. But also the question is what do you want to be a tech co at as a TechCo? Do you want to be in the core network technologies? Because in a lot of our cases, the operators, we participate in standards conversations, we participate in a little bit of the research, but then the ISVs, the NEPs, they typically drive a lot of the actual r and d and innovation that's happening. So what is the undifferentiated heavy lifting you hand off to those folks? And then what is the thing to Yao's point, which use cases, which specific customers, what tech do you want to go invest in? And then build technology organizations around that because the depth of knowledge is what gives you differentiation in the marketplace. I've seen maybe a couple of operators tell us in Canada as an example where they say, this is a particular domain we want to go spend time in. We want to build products around it differentiated. That's more of what I think we need to see in this industry where we are focused on that part of the TechCo, not the infrastructure part of the TechCo.

I agree. I think it's about creating intellectual property and I think that helps differentiate in that and having a stake in the game. I think that's what kind of moves you along. I agree with yago though though it's particularly difficult to have the sort of scale to be to do full on introduce a new technology that's purely coming out of one operator or one source. I don't think that is achievable for

It would be great if you could, but I just don't think it's achievable in that. But I do think the creation of intellectual property is a key component

And also how much of the innovation direction is parallels culture and cultural change within our organizations. As we look to rethink where innovation needs to be directed, do we simultaneously have to look at our culture and organization to map the two together or are they separate?

Isn't it shorthand technical for a change in where the opportunity is or the source of competitive advantage? If so, it would be all of these things. Yeah, I mean because I think it's just, you guys can correct me, but I've always taken it to be just really a shorthand for instead of everything being about communications, infrastructure, technology, we're going to try to elevate and be more of a platform for digital services. And if that's the objective, I would say the answer to your question is it must involve the entire business. This isn't in all of these things. In my experience, all massive change efforts are people process and technology problems and as technologists, we over anchor on the technology and as vendors myself specifically, I've seen us as product vendors try to sell our technology as the silver bullet, which is completely not the right thing to do because all you end up with is very disenfranchised customers because it is a people and process problem every bit as much as a tech

Problem. It's not usually the tech that we fail on. It's either the people or the process.

A simple example is the r and d process. If we look at the release cycle for cellular, we're used to much longer in the RD process. We're used to much longer innovation cycles, if we call it that, what we've been talking about today, short, sharp, the examples there in Scandinavia, very good examples and I can see, I would imagine that there was some overlap in the technology and in the approach, but actually for each of those industries there was a bespoke nature and so that's a much shorter cycle. Now if you've got people and a culture that is used to, I've got three years to think about this and then I've got three years to put it into some sort of thing and then I've got three years to go and argue it out until it becomes a standard and in that meantime actually bring it forward two years, then that's a different mindset,

But it's not just different mindset. The ability to adopt and take on that innovation is a different pace. I mean you can't roll out and change to a network. I mean when you look at the networks, they're changing every single day, but you can't be changing all of the network all of the time. So by inherently infrastructure innovation cycles are much longer. On top of that, you can have much fast innovation cycles and I think that's where the challenge is had you decouple the two parts of the organization that have different innovation clock speeds. That is the

Challenge. I think that's a really good point and I think a significant part of maybe the problem statement that we have in front of us today come from the lack of understanding of these cycles that you mentioned. And as the telco industry gets mixed with others because of this aggregation and other reasons, there is a fundamental lack of understanding of the length of the cycle in a telco. So when you invest in a telco, either you're the DSP or you're a vendor, it doesn't matter. The return is far from mediate, so it takes years until you see a return of your investment. While the applications that go on top the same as consumer electronics and the same as in general, maybe the IT business and other stuff, it has a completely different cycle. Now those two walls are colliding and in that class there is a fundamental friction and lack of understanding

And it's a case of currently if they're colliding, how do you kind of turn them so that they're working towards the same objective even at different paces? It is not necessarily that the infrastructure piece has to match on that, but sure. But in terms of the culture question, if your mindset is purely on this is the iteration piece and you haven't adopted or you haven't got the capability to bring in that alternative or that comparative mindset, then it falls apart and then it really is a clash

And that's why that part of the organization ends up being disbanded and moved on because someone lost the culture war or the internal war power struggle and like, well, you're too small, we can't afford to have this conflict. You're out of here.

A simple example of this is, I mean just a very simple quick example conversation that I find we have a lot because of who we are and what we do is just the implication of Moore's law. We get these V ran and open ran rollout schedules that are, we're going to put in our lab for about a year, we need about a hundred units, then we're going to field trial it for another year. We need like 1500 units and then in year three to eight, we're going to roll out, pick your number, tens of thousands of sites. Well, in that time we're likely going to go through three generations of silicon. And yet everything from the finance depreciations schedules and the mentality around that fight, that idea of you're not going to depreciate this in three years and rip it out. Well, if you're not, then in two generations you're going to be operating a network that's twice as power hungry with the same amount of cost and half the performance as somebody that just built the network with the latest technology. So just those, as Yago said, as they collide, these things have to get rationalized and they force changes on both sides, right? Changes certainly on the vendor side of what we understand and how we have to deliver and how long we have to support, but also on the operator side, good comment. Thanks Dennis. Gabriela.

Yeah, just on the point where there was touched by TechCo in what, and I think that one of the challenges that we have, which is also an advantage of course, is that on from an infrastructure point of view, it's all about standardization and it's all about scale and cost. It's all about CapEx, but not necessarily there. Do we differentiate? Because let's also be honest, whenever we innovate and we put something in a standard, everybody, all the telcos will have it eventually. And today we differentiate a lot through this best network, which is not necessarily what the customers value any longer because it doesn't show in customer experience. So I think yes, we to evolve in what we call probably maybe more of a circle layer, but there as well, it's all about scale there as well. So I think it's not as easy to say it's a cultural as a skillset, but it's also where do you have the right to play and to identify that as telcos, where will we really differentiate for those outcomes that Susan talked about?

Thanks Gabriela. We're almost out of time. We've got about five minutes or so left of this discussion. So I'd like to wrap it up by leading into that poll question we asked at the beginning. I'd like to ask you what your thoughts on the best sources of innovation for service providers for DSPs? Is it internal? Is it external? Is it industry associations, alliances? What are the pros and cons and are we seeing any emerging trends? Now we did pick up on some of this throughout the discussion at various points, but I'd just like to see if there's any other thoughts about having talked for about an hour now where we see the best route and the best strategy for innovation. Sandeep, can I start with you?

Yeah, yeah, no, happy to provide my view as well. So I think definitely it's a bit of a portfolio place. There's always going to be four or five routes to innovation and I mentioned the SI partnership. Often you've got to think about the route of choosing the right route depending on your commercial or go-to market model. So if you want to develop a capability that's going to serve range of customers globally, an operator alliance might work best. If you want to expose your APIs and prevent APIs, sprawl, as I mentioned, if you want to target particular industry verticals and need specialist skills, then an SI will work well there as well. And then the other angle which we think has been more fruitful as well is leveraging corporate venture capital as well. So telephonic and using wra, the investment arm, where can you make strategic investments in early stage startups? And one example is higher, which is a fraud prevention platform. We plugged into the network and that will prevent spam calls, but not only does that help virgin leader O2, of course it can be deployed globally and as that equity and that organization grows, you can benefit both commercially and see that scale as well. So it's really picking the right channel depending on the approach you want to take as well,

Right? So it depends on the approach you want to take. There's different options. Any other thoughts from anybody? And before we look at what the audience thinks,

I would like to say something that I don't think that it's not or that isn't the best choice and that is to adopt the mindset of not developed here or not born here. I think if we take that approach then forget it. I think that's just taking your idea, taking the idea into the ground or there's a complete the antithesis of what the innovation suit come from. I agree. I think it is a portfolio piece. I think it is secret option number four, which is you pick as they come and you keep your eyes open for

All of where ideas come from. Those ideations come from. Thanks Mark. I mean the reality is we're working on more complex things and connectivity is just a big part of it. So that innovation comes from rooms like this where a bunch of us with different experiences come together and we start to talk about what is the art of the possible, what does an automotive company really need in the next five years and who here are the five people who can sit down and think about it, have the depth and the background to say I think we have to go place bets in these particular areas. Part of it is investment and venture capital. Part of it is just having the engineering resources because you've decided that that is an area of focus for you. And I find that the ability to make those bets is sometimes precluded because people come back and say, I don't have a culture internally, I don't have the engineering teams.

It's not true. If you look at most product companies that have built over time, we talk about this at a WSA lot, right? A lot of our engineering resources, our talent actually came from the telcos and you do have the talent in all these operators. The question is how do you stop getting in their way when they want to work on innovative things and try to bring them back always to the cycle of three years and five years of financial engineering that you're doing In most opcos, we've got to think a little bit differently and not just kind of hamper the teams that we have.

Maybe that's the key really. I think innovation can come from anywhere, but it needs to have a place to be nurtured and that is something that you need to industrialize and accept the fact that 90% of what you put through that innovation pipe is going to be crap and it's never going to make it to market. But you need to understand the process of innovation. You need to understand how you can industrialize that and you need to have an external view of the market that you're operating in. I think one of the big challenges for a lot of the OEM community is that we're all heads down. You're focused on the next r and d cycle of getting this stuff out of the pipe and you have very few people that actually have the luxury of looking at the broader market and saying what is actually going on in the world? Where do we see the next thing happening and how do you get that knowledge more broadly into the company where someone all of a sudden has a light bulb, maybe I can solve that problem by doing this, this and this and putting the three things together that we have in different parts into, we pull those people together and send them to do some brainstorming. Those are the sorts of things you have to work actively on innovation. It's not something that just mysteriously happens.

Yeah. Second that and place a vote for the secret number four, the mix in the end. If you could tell us three things, what does the customer want or need, how is that problem solved or not solved particularly well today and what does technology make possible? You can come up with an answer relatively quickly and you can't get all of that from internal and you can't get all of that from external. It's a mix.

We have one minute to go before we end the show. We are going to unfortunately save our in-room. Questions for the networking break? We've got a very long networking break, so any questions you've got for our guests, including Argo's launch, obviously I'm sure we are to address them during the break, but we want to kind of wrap this up by taking a look at the audience poll. We set at the beginning of this show and we were very cruel because we said you can only choose one and there was no option four, so there is no option four on this. So we asked our audience members what they thought and that's the results so far. So 16% say internal is the best source, 25% say industry associations and the vast majority, 59% say vendor partners. Now it was a bit cruel because they couldn't choose more than one and we didn't have an option to say all of the above, but if they had to pick one vendor partners, so hooray for our vendor partners. Hey, what a relief. It

There you go. Absolutely right. Well, the polls will still be open. We're going to keep 'em open for the duration of this event. That though is the end of session one. We will be back at 1115 for session two with Ray, which is all about enabling the autonomous network with ai. In the meantime, we have a networking break, refreshments outside quality coffee over there on the side there, absolute top quality. Don't forget the pinball and the tournament and for our online audience, don't go away because we are about to start our extra shot program. It's a really good one. Charlotte's over there. She's going to be talking all things innovation with her guests, so stay with us. Don't miss that For now though, please round of applause for our guests. Thank you.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

Welcome back to the Proceedings. It's time now for our second session of this year's DSP Leaders Well forum. The session that we've got upcoming is enabling the autonomous network with ai. Now, last year's AI native session kicked off our extensive coverage of AI applications within the telecoms network. Investment is well underway across multiple AI use cases, but as demand on the network increases, where should telcos be focusing their efforts and resources to accelerate the value of AI and what additional challenges will they face in their journey towards the fully autonomous network? We've got a fantastic panel lined up for you today to discuss these topics, but we're going to kick off this session with a progress report conversation. Now. We're going to be having a number of these progress report chats during the course of these two days. Many of them with the session co-hosts from last year to get us up to speed on what's been happening in the past 12 months. I'm delighted to say that joining us right now to give us a progress report on Telco AR is Ahmed Hafe, VP of Technology Strategy from Deutsche Telecom. Ahmed, if you'd like to join me on stage,

Great to see you. Thank you. So Ahmed, welcome back to the DSP Leaders World Forum stage.

I need to put the mic back because they were taking a picture. They told me

Place. I'm really delighted to be here. So I really have an appreciation for this event. So it's very cozy. The faces are very familiar and it feels very comfortable to be amongst you.

Okay, excellent. Now you were here last year of course as the co-host for this session that last year was titled Creating a Framework for the AI Native Telco and that was an incredibly popular session and really well received at the time and afterwards as well on demand. Now they say that a week is a long time in politics and the same can be said for the AI sector. And as a result, since you were here last, a great deal has happened in terms of AI and telecom. What for you have been the key trends in the telecom sector during the past few in the last year with regards to ai?

Right, so that has been a number of developments. I will, with the byproducts of what happened. I mean generative AI have took us all with surprise. Last year was the hype, I would say it was on the peak of the hype. Now it's actually going down a little bit. So getting more to realities and expectations and right expectations. But what happened is that this hype created a huge momentum not only for generative AI but for AI itself. So for any traditional ai, predictive ai. So you see companies now have a lot of focus on ai. So suddenly AI become a thing. I mean we've been working on AI for many years, so this momentum helped us significantly. So actually the accelerated things that are even not really generative ai. The other thing that happened also that we started going into a generative ai, getting our hands dirty with it if it's correct to say, to understand what are its strengths and weaknesses, and we started to realize that maybe the expectations were inflated a little bit, at least at this stage of development.

And there are things that it can fit in and things that we have to be cautious on. To give you a precise example, we are very comfortable to use predictive AI today in closed loop automation, but it's not the same when it comes to generative ai. We cannot see the precision and accuracy coming out generative AI that would actually give us this confidence of having closed loop automation yet. And I'm saying yet because developments are happening as we speak, but there are many things that we thought could be very challenging became, it's not that challenging things are developing. So we give you some examples. Computers improving. I mean we discussed compute last time and there has been a bit of, I think I was showing a slide where 500 more times of demand on compute. I think you have seen the surgeon compute. Unfortunately, I did realize myself that I should buy shares in Nvidia, but that was too late.

But in any case, this is happening and it's still a problem. So the other part was actually we expected also the foundation models would get improved and they got significantly improved. But also we see now small language models and other models and other techniques even for training and fine tuning that would enhance the whole story of the needs of a compute and how we actually employ the technology. So yeah, things have been to a large extent clarified, but we figured out other problems. So as you go you develop the knowledge and of course we had the AI act meanwhile, which was an important step. I mean I think Europe, one of the leading areas is regulations, so it's good. It's good to say that we are leading in some aspects in Europe, but these were essentially the most important changes that we have seen last year.

Okay, so is it possible for the telecom sector, I mean we heard just a little bit earlier in the panel about innovation that sometimes the pace of things doesn't keep up with expectations. Can the telecom sector keep pace with AI developments? Is that in any way possible?

It's a good question, but let me maybe take a step back and talk about technology development in general. Then I come to ai, there is a term now called digital dexterity, which is actually describing the gap between the huge transformation in technology and the level of absorption we can absorb and actually it's happening everywhere. So yes, the pace of technology is much faster than what we can absorb and what we can take and what we can implement. But this will continue to be the case. Maybe this curves goes down a little bit because if there are no adoption, there will be no further innovation, so it'll slow down. But nevertheless, coming to ai, the point is with AI depends on the role you want to play. If you want to play as an AI provider, then you want to create models for industries, do things like that, train models and take that, then you would have to keep up with that pace.

Then the challenge is much higher. If you decide, no, I will actually use that. These technologies for the use cases I would employ in my network or for my customers or my customer service, BSS and so on, your level of pace would change because you would rely on partnering and you would rely maybe on buy more than make. So this would balance. So I think we should consider, I mean of course every operator is different, but you can consider a mix between the make versus buy in order to make sure that you can sustain the pace because we are in the heart of the changes happening there, but as we go, things will actually stabilize more and more and then you can take decisions or make much easier. But today maybe it's a little bit immature unless you go into you have huge business, you see an outlook of the great opportunities business wise and you decide that you want to hunt for that, then it'll be a different game.

We also heard earlier on in that innovation session about the importance of collaboration and I guess this is an area where it's absolutely paramount. What kind of pressure does the pace of development and the requirements around AI put on companies like Deutsche Telecom when everybody else in the telecom sector?

Okay, so let me take let's say four layers of, so to structure a little bit the answer because it's a very big challenge. If you take the data layer on top of it, the infrastructure, then we have the foundational models. I will focus a little bit on gen AI for now and then the tools and the AI platforms. If I start from data, we are already facing a big challenge that even though we are working with standards, the packet gateways generate data for every supplier in a different manner. Every packet gateway or every function in the network core ran, you name it, have roughly about 10 different types of files of streams that are generated per function. I mean how many functions we have in the networks and how many replications of functions we have. And the very challenging part is that the data models are different.

Even the definition of the attribute value pairs are different. And then if you want to take a use case, take anomaly detection, you say, okay, we can do anomaly detection, basic use case easy can easily be done by generative AI or predictive ai. And then you start, you do it in one operator and you are group, you have 11 operators and you want to roll that out. You would figure out if there are different supplies, you have to go again and again and repeat big part of this chain again, it's not easily copyable. So if we want to go to scale, we need certain level of commonality, at least on the data layer. We need to make sure that we have this data definitions properly done. And it's something that of course suppliers can help a lot there because we can align on at least common baseline.

Then you go to infrastructure and then looking at infrastructure, you have public clouds of course, and hyperscalers and also the on-prem part, and I believe we'll need a hybrid of that and hybrid of that and where you put the data and then how you access the data. Then portability of data and then the cost of moving data. So this is also hindering this kind of cooperation and openness. So this is something that needs to be solved. You go layer above on the foundational models and you find out either you have open source when you have some freedom, but it's not as strong as the proprietary ones. But if you look at the proprietary ones, they're not portable, so you have to use them on a specific platform. You can't take them on-prem, very, very minor exceptions, but mostly you're stuck with them where they are and then you need to deal with them.

But what about confidential information? What solution can I do to deal with confidential information that I don't want to put in public cloud, for example? So this is another issue to be resolved. If we go to the tools layer, and this is a very interesting one because I mean suppliers are here, and I talk also to many suppliers about AI and every supply come with a very nice use case, fantastic use case, but comes with the tools and everything down to, not to the infrastructure but including the models. And I come say, oh, this is a solution we have, but I cannot have 100 set of different tools for every use case. If I have some tools for sun and another set of tools for energy efficiency, I mean this has to be one. I mean they cannot be fragmented and this is another challenge. So we need some kind of interoperability and an understanding that you can plug into an API platform, sorry, an AI platform, and you can still work with different use cases and implement your software. Okay,

Very quickly, because we're going to move on to the panel, but a quick word on skills. What have you seen in terms of the developments around skills requirements in the past year?

Right, we have been running huge upskilling programs, but the point that I think, I don't know if we're all missing but probably we're missing there is the skills on the what. So learning new things, learning how to deal with ai, how to manage ai, but there is a skill on the how do you approach it? The part because we often miss the spot because people also have some resistance to change. People are used to do things, our employees are used to do things in certain manner. You want to tell them that this will change. And eventually in order for us to read the value of ai, we should not be using AI for very, very narrow views. So today we have a process. The process consists of 10 steps. You take step three, four and six, and then you put ai. But we need to rethink the entire process by ai. This requires that we think in a different way. So this is a behavioral element. It's not about scaling on the what, it's scaling on the how. So you think from a different perspective and this is something that we need to work more on.

Okay, excellent. So Ahmed, it's great that you're going to be staying with us for the panel and for the panel you are going to be sitting. Yes,

So thanks very much for joining us, giving us an update for what you've seen in the past here. So a round of applause please for Ahmed. Thank you very much. So while we transition from the interview to the panel, we're going to play our next highlights video during which our panel speakers are going to join us here on stage. This highlights video appropriately is from our AI native telco summit with some footage also from our December event telcos and the AI event.

Now, we in tele for example, have more than a hundred use cases with AI that we use across the life cycle of the network and across our operations from the beginning of the process of assurance to the end. For example, even before the process begins or even before you monitor the network, we use it to do predictive maintenance. For example, as we are getting all this data and trying to predict faults before they even happen,

We're starting to develop a business case for centralized ran Cloudified brand. If we were to put some benefits in that, we would gain through the application AI and machine learning from that platform, we're going to have to do a really good job on characterizing the cost benefit analysis

In that at software bank we are investing massively to do generative ai. So we are building our own data center optimize for ai, and also we are bringing more resources to develop our own A RM. I can tell the details so far, but we are making much investment to optimize and also to utilize our data more efficiently for telecommunication business.

The point is can I talk with my network? Can I send gene AI and tell him for instance, at this moment, which are the number of cells that they're saturated in Barcelona and around the ferra? So which is the behavior of the network, what I need to do trying to improve it. And we are using gene AI technology trying to manage the network in this way.

The way we view artificial intelligence for us is as a continuum of the predictive artificial intelligence we've been doing the last years and the generative, which is coming, which is really bringing a lot of UX capability and gives us the chance to even go to the next level.

Okay, great. It's time to get stuck into our panel enabling the autonomous network with ai. As guy mentioned earlier, each session has its own poll. One question, three answer choices. You can just pick one here is the question that we've got for this session. When will AI enable telco networks to be truly zero touch without any human intervention? So please go ahead and vote on the telecom t TV website. You'll find all of the polls in the DSP leaders world forum section on the agenda page, and we'll take a look at how the voting has gone at the end of this session. So at this point I want to introduce our co-host for this session. Delighted to be joined here by Amal Fad K. He is the EVP and group Chief Technology officer at the Tylenol Group. Amal, you've been to DSP leaders before. Thanks very much for returning as a co-host. Great to see you here.

Thank you, Ray. Thank you for having me. Hello everybody. Yes, I'm back wearing a different T-shirt, but yes, I am really looking forward to this panel. Let's meet the panelists first.

Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah, you're going to give your opening address in just a couple of minutes, but first let's find out who is on our panel. So if we can start at the far end and get our panelists to introduce themselves.

Thank you. Hello everybody. This is my first time here, so thank you for having me. I'm Juan Manuel Carro. I'm director of autonomous network at Telefonica Group.

Hello, great to be here. I'm Nick Willets. I'm the CEO of the TM Forum.

Hi. Hello everyone. Nice to be here my first time. So I'm pose in Vodafone and I head the digital and zero touch operations.

Hello, this is du. I'm chief lead officer for the Rakuten Mobile and this is first time for me and delighted, excited for this panel.

Okay, great. Thank you very much everybody for joining us. So Amal, without further ado, if you'd like to make your way up to our lectin for your DSP leaders address. Thank you very much.

Thank you Ray. So as I was saying, I asked Ray during the break if I can talk about something interesting. The topic I had with mine was general elections in the US general elections in the uk and then if you had time general elections in India. But Ray sort of vetoed me and said, no, no, we have a much more interesting topic of ai. So I'm going to talk about that today sir. But first of all, great to see all of you. As Ahmed said in the beginning of our panel today, AI continues to drive a huge amount of news in the media. In fact, if there is one technology that I see a lot more over and over again every week, every day, that's ai. And it's obvious why that is because all of the analysts are sort of unequivocal in their view of the trillions of dollars of benefits that AI is supposed to sort of offer us.

But at the same time, we also have to be mindful of the fact that a lot of that is also hype. And I was looking at the previous panel and you had this interesting poll Ray where we sort of were distinguishing between where innovation comes from and majority of that innovation was coming from our vendor partners. And I must also say that a lot of this hype has also been generated by our vendor partners and actually when I was one of those vendor partners, we call it business development. And I think we need to just also be conscious of that a little bit because obviously a lot more investment has gone into building the compute infrastructure and building the hardware layers and the LLMs on top and the cloud platforms that support all of that. So it's natural that there'll be a lot of interest that all of those things get used.

Otherwise we are going to have a much bigger problem on return, on investment on all of that billions of dollars of investments that's happening. So it's worth keeping that in mind as we look at this problem and how we actually benefit from AI has a lot to do with how we actually work with the ecosystem. So at Telenor, the way we sort of looked at it was we looked at our entire span of operations in all of our markets and we came to the conclusion that there's a huge amount of use cases that a telco could look at, but in order for us to sort of attack all of that immediately would not be feasible. And so when you look at where the biggest benefit is about 80% of the benefit that we see in Telenor comes in four areas, customer service, marketing, sales network and autonomous network and operations, which is a topic of the panel today.

And then product development, IT development, software development. So these are the four areas that Telenor is planning to sort of address. And we have already started, we have about 250 use cases that we as Telenor have already started to pilot. Again, going back to the comment you made at the beginning, I would say 95% of them are AI and 5% of them are gen ai. But we of course call all of it gen AI because we want to support the hype that's happening. I would also say that within network itself, I don't think we have really gone into the depth yet of exactly which areas would benefit the most. There are obviously four areas and we will talk about it in our panel. There is the whole design and building of the networks. Then there is of course a provisioning of the network and then how do you assure those networks?

And then finally, how do you sort of capacity plan and optimize those networks. So each of those big areas requires us to sort really concretely look at how AI can truly give us a benefit. But then we also came up with a program inside Telenor because it could be network, but it could be customer service and regardless of which area we focus into for us to really benefit and not get caught up in the hype, there are five dimensions that often get overlooked because we get obsessed on delivering use cases. But there are these five other things that I'm quite passionate about and we are driving that in Telenor. First is the people dimension. There is still a huge knowledge gap inside the industry on people actually getting trained on ai. At Telenor we have 12,000 people and I would, 70 10% of them are actually AI aware today.

So there's no point us building thousands of use cases if none of our Telenor employees can actually use it. So that would be something to just deep dive on in the panel. The second big important dimension is the ecosystem partnerships, Telenor and all other large colleagues of mine in the telco audience today, I would have a question which I ask myself every day, how would you do an RFP on ai? I struggle to understand how you would actually do a commercial negotiation because it's a completely different ecosystem play. You really need to build an ecosystem with five or six constituents to build a solution. And that's a very different mindset. So ecosystem is another area to look at. Third important dimension is responsible ai. You mentioned the AI act. When it starts coming in, it'll be good because it's going to get us discipline, it'll be bad because they're going to come up with a stick and we'll need to have that kind of tools to sort of show that we are compliant to that.

So responsible AI is about being bold but being thoughtful at the same time. And I think that would be another area to just tease into the panel. And then the final two things are, one is really around building that data, that underlying data to avoid the whole garbage and garbage out capability that might happen with ai. So that underlying data platform, we are very passionate in Telenor, unless you get that right, a lot of the benefits you want in the network space is simply not going to come. And then the final point is the thought leadership piece. I go back to what I said at the beginning as telcos and as this community, we need to start to celebrate some of the successes. Yes, there's a lot of hype, yes, gen AI is still immature and not as accurate as we would like it to be and deterministic AI is actually much better. But let's show some thought leadership even on that. I think if we can get these five dimensions working well, then the use cases start to benefit in the areas that we believe there will be a lot of benefit. So that's all I wanted to just set the scene for you Ray. And of course the two of us are now going to look at the panel to give us a little bit more wisdom. Thank you all for listening.

I'm all thank you very much. So obviously we can come to the elections during the lunchtime. Yes, I'm sure plenty of opinions on that as well. But I'd like to start off by giving our panelists the opportunity just to pick up on anything that you mentioned in your opening speech. Has anybody, Ahmed, you've got a question

I like very much the points that you raised. I'll just maybe take one of them, otherwise we will consume all the stuff. So it's the point on where is the network, is AI more valuable or would have more impact? So what we did in Deutsche Telecom, we looked into lifecycle of network. So from plan design, build runs or operate cross-functional and security. And we also discussed with a lot of partners and we figured out that number one by far is the operational part and next to that is the planning and security. So even though security as such, security will become a huge topic and I think we discussed that today. The other part, there are other parts like for example, design, which we felt that it's only an assistant because luckily the level of intelligence needed in design is not yet, AI is not there yet. Happily that we still have some jobs for some time. So design is still not a contended area, but this is how we've seen it. If this

Answer, yeah, no, no, that makes total sense. And operation is the most obvious because it's the most suited for ai. There's a huge amount of tele data we get from our networks and AI is very well built in order to sort of process that very quickly and give us insights to be proactive and predictive. So totally agree with you.

Yep. Adding to that, to what Hamed said, I just like to add my experience when we started rollout telecom in Japan, Rakuten Mobile. So we started in 2019 and we know that we are the first in the industry applying the solutions in the cloud native functions and virtualized functions. So definitely we need to go with the ai. We are a greenfield operator, we don't have the data, but we start capturing the data from the day when itself and from the probes from the milliseconds to the aggregated minutes. So that's how we started. I mean we follow that. AI is our DNA, Rakuten mobile is one of the group companies in the Rakuten ecosystem. So we have the ecosystem data, 70 plus groups are there in the Rakuten mobile including e-commerce, FinTech. And what I'm trying to say is we have a lot of subscriber data it.

So adding to that, we have data which we started day one with capturing it on the top. We built our AI models as talking about planning because that's main thing because we went in the domestic roaming initially. So we know where the is happening, where the data, where the users are. And we have done according to that our operations and building the air models on the top. Definitely AI plays a crucial role at this kind of era. What I can see that because of the data is more viable today. That's what we have used and that's how we have built our network. The span of three years, we have rolled out more than three 50 K cells across Pan Japan covering around 99.2% of population, which is a massive achievement for us.

So I'm sure that the collection of data, obviously records and mobile started in a different place. You are starting at a point where you've already got an awful lot of data to deal. We've

Got about 180 years worth of data. We are in a slightly different place, but yes, I agree with you in terms of fragmentation and how we create a consolidation would be key.

Just wanted to build on the use case point that Ahed and Amal both made and it's pretty consistent with what we see. We've surveyed in the TM forum over 20 different operators and where they're focusing their automation efforts, pretty consistent picture. The question I think we need to keep asking ourselves is not to let this just become a cost reduction exercise. We see a lot of the emphasis on solving the challenges of retirement Cliff solving the around 30% of opex that goes into network operations, cost rightful targets, important things to do. We're all concerned about free cashflow, but at the same time there's not enough conversation in our view on the customer experience impact. And to do that, actually looking at individual use cases or use case areas, kind of rat holes you in an area, it may be the right place to start an experimentation, but if you're thinking about how our customers experience us, quite often a network fault requires multiple different teams to get engaged from frontline support all the way through to a deep specialist.

And there's ways to leverage AI in those use cases to problem solve across and join up what would typically be an email chain internally, these kind of faults. There's also a link to the hot topic at the moment, which is network monetization, which is that in order to stand up some of the open gateway kamara use cases, the TM forum is very close to we need to automate elements of the network. So I think when we're talking about use cases, we always have to bear in mind what's the business driver. If it's just cost reduction, it's going to push us down a path. We'll probably be pretty happy with the results, but you can't cut your way to growth,

Hence the large number of use cases that you were able to identify. So chatting to Ahmed before there, we were looking back at the past year, a lot has changed, but I just want to get a sense from the panel now. Are we more or less confused about the role that AI will play in telecom compared with a year ago? Because the hype circle might be on the way down, but it's still enormous. So Juan Mal, if we can start with you, are things clearer for you now than they were a year ago in terms of the role of ai?

Yeah, I think here would be on the optimistic side, no, I think we are less confused, although maybe tomorrow something appears and we confuse us again. But I would say we started a few years ago with ai, with the traditional ai, with the predictive things, trying to understand that, applying them to use cases, looking that it really works, it can really help. We set up strategy and we were working with that and I think a year and a half ago chat, TPT came and gen ai, all these kind of things. And then I think that was a bit of a confusion. I think everybody that was to save the world, we could do everything with that or not or whatever. And it took us some time to figure out that covid is an amazing thing, have a lot of possibilities, but it's not going to replace the traditional air for a lot of use cases.

It is another world. And now I think we have had the time, or at least in Telefonica to settle up this hype to really understand that technology with talking with all the vendors and all the market and put that where it really adds more value and setting again the strategy. And I think we now, at least in Telefonica, I think we are now in the execution mode. We have settled this up again, I think this goes as fast at least Myer was super surprised of JG, BT and leading the AI in Telefonica in the networks for four one. And even me, when I saw that and I started playing with that, I said, this is really amazing. I wasn't expecting this right now. So maybe tomorrow it's another thing and we get a bit confused. But I would say right now we understand better traditional AI and AI and still a lot of challenges to do that now and to execute. And we'll talk about the product here, but I would say I'm more confident we know where we're sitting and what we'll have to do. Not easy to do it.

Okay, Manish, we'll come to you and then Mabel, but Manish, how do you feel compared to a year ago?

Taking that I think my view is as an industry, I mean if you just look a little bit back in the rear view, right? I mean we've talked so much about the OTD cycle coming and eating the lunch, we've had the cloud cycle which came and went and the telcos in many ways struggled to catch up with these cycles. In certain cases, one could say even monetization opportunities were missed here. Now we again find ourselves at a very interesting crossroad where the tech is moving and the tech's not going to slow down because the demand is enormous and it's not dependent just on the telco verticals. So let me also say this, there are other industry verticals that are already making huge demands on AI and just as a vendor, as a supplier, I can tell you to lay our hands on the GPUs today is a challenge, right?

Just the demand is outpacing supply. It's a very rare situation you get to see in the industry. So we are at this juncture, the question now becomes is what do the telcos do? I tend to break this down into three big buckets. Number one, AI in the network. How are you going to use AI in the network and are there opportunities to create differentiated networks? And we had this discussion earlier around innovation where you go innovate, et cetera. And this is an area where the service providers at telcos should think, are there areas where they can create differentiated networks? We have had the networks where we're differentiated on coverage and capacity and what differentiation can you create. So AI in the network. Second thing is what I would call is AI on the network where what can you enable with AI as a set of technologies on your network, including things that Nick touched on, even if you go in the realm of billing care, customer care, et cetera, where generative AI starts to play a very key role.

And then the third bucket, which I think is the most obvious one, at least here and now is what we call as AI factories. And we've seen that in certain markets where the telcos and for that matter governments are also taking note of this because at the end of the day, what's an AI factory? Its data in intelligence out. And the question is, can any society, can any country wait to outsource that intelligence and what do you need to do to create that intelligence? And I'm not talking telco right now, I'm saying broadly across the ecosystems and there is a demand for AI capabilities to be developed in many sovereign markets. So we are also seeing in certain areas, especially I would say partly in Europe, partly in Asia Pacific, where we are seeing some of the telcos who are already moving to create these AI factories. And so if I sum all of this up, I think there are opportunities in the network, on the network and even from a monetization perspective. And now I don't think there is one cookie cutter approach for every telco. Each one needs to think through, work on their strategies and see where do they want to play, do they want to monetize, do they want to work on the opex customer care, et cetera, et cetera.

Yeah, it's nice to carve it up like that and to get a perspective. Mabel a Vodafone, is there a clearer picture or does it seem even more overwhelming than a year ago about the

I agree with the co-panelists. So it's clearer now. I'll touch on what Nick said. It is super essential and I often we're very, very focused on what is the outcome that you want to achieve with that. So it needs to be AI and engine. AI is yet another technology, great technologies, but we need to look at the outcome. For us, customer simplicity are the two ones that are closer to us. We're looking at growth, it's not as close, but we are exploring some use cases on that as well. So it is clearer. It is clearer the technology as well as the opportunities and the risk it brings, right? So we see a lot of the partners that went really, really big on this, the risk on cost because the cpu. So we really believe that it's clearly both the opportunities and the things that we need to watch out as an industry to get it right. So definitely think it's clear air and we use that as one of the many other technologies that we can do because for autonomous networks is AI is gen ai, but also a lot of the autonomous technologies like RPAs, VPMs and so on and so forth.

Lemme add a few more points and mention the same, but in my opinion, basically there is no confusion. We know how we have to use Jena and stuff, but the point is where exactly it's going to be used. That's the main picture. What I can see that. So we are all coming from the data science background. We have GPUs already secured in our network. We are running petabytes of data every day. So the point, what we're trying to figure it out is some of the models which we run, maybe the forecasting models, the prediction models or anomalies which are constructed to telecom sector, which are not available in LLMs. So I have to do my own intent learning there, meaning I have to invest my time, my resources over there to train the model in the LLM as well. So it's a trade off what exactly you want to do with the general, there is a lot of hype pressure on data scientists.

Basically everybody wants to use AI stuff. But some of these things like sentiment analysis, like NLP things and conation models, which image processing things, those are readily available, which we can take directly from the generic prospect. But the contents which are related only telecom sector side where you have own defined formulas, own defined KPIs, which are not available in the lms, that's where you have to invest your trade off. Whether I have to go with the G AI or I have to go with the traditional AI going with my deep learning techniques. So it's not the resource cost, it's the time efforts which you need to spend across. So that's what we're still looking into that we are still the standard has to evolve into more into that how we can use gene open brand is one of the segment which actually evolving towards that.

Some of the cases like so is standard defined if you go to that spec. So it's been different already. So those are all, we can directly go with the lms, but how we implement in the network, because dynamics is keep changing the rfs, keep changing the subscriber profiles, keep changing. That cannot be done to the L lm. And one more challenge, what I can see is the governance, the security, how much amount of data I have to send to if I go with third party LLMs or you have to use any cloud source LLMs. So that comes into the security about the compliance prospect, every organization, the governance side. So these are all the things which we need to be closely watched. And then definitely we can use Gene and I don't think so there is a confusion but the point is how to use is a question.

Yeah. And Amal, you kind of hit the ground running at Telenor, didn't you? Joined towards the end of last year, right? When that wave was?

I think I agree with everything the panel has said. I would add one thing, we as a telco group are very good at building something and then launching it and then keeping it stable. This is not going to be stable.

Is going to change every week, every month. So how do you then use, as Madu said, the models that we know will not be mature, that will change over time. And that would be the big challenge for us. It's not the clarity, we have clarity, but I think the issue is going to be how do you launch a AI based service to what money said and start building a factory and then the underlying foundation changes because it's obsolete and now I have a new model and a new infrastructure, how do I create that delaying that is a big challenge.

And can I jump in on that because I think your question was are we more or less confused? I think a panel and a room of technology experts, I'm not sure we were ever super confused. We were sort of questioning where it could go. I think where there is confusion is at the top of the house and we see a massive difference right now between CEOs and boards who get the potential of AI and are removing all the roadblocks internally and are seeing top line and bottom line impact from AI who are unfortunately in the minority and a majority who are still a bit skeptical. And as we start to go, and I think you're absolutely right Ray, we're just tipping over the top of the hype curve. That'd be how we'd position it. It's a hell of a hype curve, but it's going to be a hell of a downward run on the ski slope.

Those boards may just get bored and move on to the next thing and miss the profound nature of what we're talking about. So when you're talking about governance, those groups need to be bought in. And to what Amal just said of this is a moving template, we are not used to governing business in this way. It was said in the previous panel, by the time you've deployed a technology and telcos move forward two or three generations. So unless we bring the top of the house on that journey and understand the fundamental operating model impact, I think we'll struggle no matter how clear we are at a technology level.

Yeah, no that's a great point. And I guess the thing that needs to be done is that you need to get on and show some concrete steps to the higher level the people at the top of the stack. So we talked last year about being AI native, but the industry is a long way from being that. So maybe we can look now and have a quick chat about what are some of the concrete first steps in relation to automating network operations. What are the things that can be proven and shown to be working? So Nick, if we can come to you first, I know you've got a couple of examples, but I think everybody's going to have something to say here.

So I think first of all, it's come up I think in the panel already sets and understanding, particularly when we talk about the network could be a challenge. You've often got individuals who spent their whole career, so you're talking 20 or 30 years in the network space. And when we make this a cost centric argument, we see a lot of resistance from those teams of what are you telling me? My 20 or 30 years of expertise can now be automated. So you sort of start the conversation on the wrong footing in many cases. But we do see fantastic progress where you can actually bring the team on that journey. And we're starting to see a pattern of the companies who've started that journey earlier. So this isn't actually really about what you've done in the last 12 months reacting to gen ai. We think the roots of it, and I think several of the companies on the stage have experienced this started in open and good data governance programs that started probably five or six years ago.

So the business was getting used to the privacy, security, regulatory implications of opening that up, be able to train the models with the right data, the right data being available. We also see a trend between that top of the house support and practical impact. And you're right that you need to actually bring that into real examples, show the goods. The challenge can be that can be a bit of a vicious cycle. So if you look industry-wide as we have the privilege of doing, you can see very meaningful impacts. We've got new services and standards being used to stand up, new services, 90% created by Gen AI based on microservices, network scenarios and other scenarios. So this is real, this is happening, this is having an impact where we just see there's fast differences in the readiness of the business to get there. Okay.

And well from the Telefonica perspective, are there any real first notable steps that the company has taken to show internally and to show externally as well?

Yeah, yeah, for sure. I think I say we have been working with it for a long time and there are practical, we use AI in the network today and for last years and it works. I think we are far from in AI native I think in the industry and telephonic and as it says now we have a structural program to go there and it will take years and I am happy. I'm keen to see the poll if it's 2030 or never. That's a funny one. But I think we have a program structuring eight projects. One is about use cases but the other are about fundamentals on data skills. We was working tooling, n oss, whatever. So there's a lot to change drastically to become AI company, even the network itself now we have to go to ization of the network clarification, we have still the two G there and that's not going to be governed by ai, probably never, I dunno.

So that's a huge transformation. The base is slow. You have to build from bottom on half. Setting the basis well to be able to progress towards that autonomous network and AI native operation and a sneak set. I think there's a resistance to change the way you work. But I would say we know how to do that and AI is quite new. But automation, I been in tele franca for 20 years, 23 and it started doing automation but rule-based whatever it was. But we have been doing that for a lot of time and you have to involve the people that know and show to them. He talk about the hype before. If we think AI is going to be like this Terminator or Skynet that is going to govern the network and nobody else is going to touch, that's not the way. So we are thinking more in AI for example, assistance to the people making the job easier, helping them to be more productive, to focus on things that we need really, I don't know.

I think we have to set up this message clear and transform. But on the other hand, while we are transforming, and this is going to take a huge transformation with Telefonica, we are 110,000 employees, a hundred year company this year, last month. So I have to say it takes a while. On the other hand you can use it. Yeah, we're using that across all the whole cycle as dt, we did the same, we call the whole life cycle and then put the domains radio and we did this metrics and we try to understand well do we use that? We have a project for each one and we are aiming to reach level for the team for end of next year. So that's a lot to say for project for some processes. So we are using that in planning, so to forecast traffic, that kind of things.

We all are using that and it works very well. We are now piloting digital twins and things more complex that will take more time in operations. As you said, we are using predictive maintenance, we use that Germany in some operations. It works for certain scenarios and it predicts things. Anoma detection, we are now launching a huge observability project across the group and normally detection is very useful and as he said, once you have the data, it works, the algorithm works, there's no data and it's not rocket science or something, we have to wait five years and it's getting results right now. We use it for energy efficiency for example. It's powering features boost by ai. We have deployed across the networks and one that we are most are, or at least me excited is customer experience really. So we have created that. That's something we have done internally, AI models to be able to understand the experience of our customers.

So based on all the network KPIs, we have trained models for mobile broadband for wifi customer experience indexes. Now we used to launch a poll a thousand customers and say are you satisfied or not? And with a thousand thing we tried to understand the quality of the demographic of a country and we couldn't do more and you said no, then you ask why and then you dunno what. So now we have trained these models with all these answers and we are able to predict if a customer would answer satisfied, neutral or dissatisfied based on and not only what this cluster of customers would answer, but why? Because the model is explainable. And so we can really manage the network based on that. And that's ai and that's a machine learning and that's a trained model and that works. And that's been working for five years in our networks in our DNA. And so I would say yes, we have a huge things coming. It is super difficult. We talk probably about data, there are a lot of challenges, skills, but we've been working on AI all of us for the last five years and there are AI real cases working in the network. So we don't have to be frightened of this super hype. It's a valuable tool and tool that we have. Another tools, this probably more powerful, but it's not something of the future, it's here.

And Mabel, from vodafone's perspective, is this something you've taken on a piece by piece basis or maybe even try out in a particular market first?

Yeah, so going back to the initial question, I think it is super important and some of the panelists touch on that, that AI is a change. So it's a transformation. So it's all about the technology really, really important, but also the people and the processes. So I think it's super, super essential that at the first step you really consider those three circles because otherwise it's very difficult that you'll achieve an outcome. So that will be one of the things that we will advise. And then the other thing is that when we started the journey, similar to what you guys have said is you look at the data and you look at versus what is the quick wins in operations, in the assurance side of things, we done quite a lot of the stuff and yes, we usually pick a market, sometimes we pick a large market because there is more of it and then you see the results bigger.

Sometimes a smaller market give us more the flexibility and the agility. So depending on the use case, we use a market to start with and then the challenge comes into the scale across the markets. So I think this is a challenge that we see. So start small is what we will say and then see how you can scale. Sometimes we don't believe that certain areas can be scaled across all the markets because it might not make business sense. Some automation or AI is very particularly for certain markets because it's a challenge for that. Others are very much a scale. So we look at the opportunity on the scale and how much is a completely redo and reuse side of things. So yeah, I will say focus on the quick wins but also keep an eye on the scale and keeping up to date as I'm always saying. Right? Because the reality is that, and we've seen it from learnings, you put it one of the tool sets change and then the whole thing gets destroyed. So it's not something

So it's not a technology that you live there and it say okay, it goes on its own. It has to live in the lifecycle of everything. So as you scale is that maintainance and that run that needs to be very much a scale. And the last thing I will say is that usually when operators like us look at the outcomes you want to reach the outcome for customers, simplicity, the bigger and sometimes we dismiss the innovative part of the new technologies. They need to come automated by design. So yes, focus on the four Gs and the three Gs and the two Gs, but all the new ones, they have beautiful technology embedded, some that we can put on. But let's start bringing that through the lifecycle already automated. And I always joke like then my team doesn't exist because digital is embedded with everyone. And that's the ambition that we also want to have is that focus on that as well.

Thing. I agree with all what's said and use cases, but also go back to AL'S point when in your speech you mentioned that the use case perspective is one perspective, but let's come from another perspective. There are three steps that we can take one on data. And what happens is that with predictive ai, we did not have that demand on data because it was very specific. So if you get one piece right, you can do ai, but with generative AI it becomes very different because we need to look into data consistently from data catalog to the ontology of data and relationships. So as Nick was saying, to connect the dots and have a root cause analysis that cross domain, then you need completely different level of data, cleanness and data preparedness. So data, we have to work on data if we want to be serious about ai.

The second part is the combination of the skills and the tools. Also, we recognize that also your point, Nick is absolutely correct. If I have people who have 20, 30 years of experience in networks, I'm not expecting them to become data scientists. And I'm also expecting them to go to a data scientist to do anything on ai. We need a mix. We need them to give them tools to empower them to, with no code, low code, manage ai, create a new AI application. So you need the right tools to have that. Then you can empower the organization underneath, then you have everybody working on it. And then with that, finally the whole organization becomes centralized and decentralized. You centralize a governance, but you decentralize the implementation. And then I always say that AI as a marathon is not a sprint. So this is something that we will continue to work on until we retire. It'll not stop.

Okay. Manish, I want to come to you and get what you are hearing from your customers. And then Amal, I know you've got a couple. Yeah,

I think a lot of the points the panelists have already, and I kind of really agree with them. I'll say just one additional thing. I think one of the things that's very clear with AI is the number of use cases. And I think it's easier to imagine a new use case every day. You can just imagine more use cases than you can think of. So the question really becomes is how do you pick and find what's the right use case or use cases to attack? And one of the simple two by two matrix that I typically use in the discussions is, Hey, look at your CapEx optic spend, sort it out, where is your biggest spend happening? And then look at another axis of your data layer, exactly the point where is your data readiness. And between those two, you're going to identify the sweet spots of use cases you can get initiated. Getting initiated is absolutely essential. And I can't agree more with the panelists around people and process. I think the technology again is the easier was said earlier as well. It's the people in the process and upskilling that Amal touched on. That's the challenge. That's a real challenge. So getting initiated I think is important. It's a few set of use cases.

Okay. And Amal, I know that you've been working on a number of particular step points at lenor. If you can tell us a little bit about those and

Yeah, I mean I think I'm just trying to reflect on what the panel has been saying. There are a few use cases that we see that tick most of the boxes the panel mentioned in terms of are they really going to give us a benefit? Are they pervasive enough that everybody would get interested in them, would it actually matter to the board and so on. And so one area that we have now started to look at quite earnestly is energy consumption in the networks because we believe that is actually ticking a lot of different boxes from sustainability, from customer experience, from cost and just from overall being good citizens in the industry. And it's actually something that, again, AI can help us a lot. I mean we now are partnering with a lot of our vendor partners in terms of asking them to become more intelligent in their AI solutions.

So we can sort of selectively turn off networks where we feel that demand isn't there or the usage isn't there, but at the same time be ready to dynamically turn them on to full capacity if needed. And that is already showing us almost 10% saving in power, which if you can imagine TE loss, total power bill, that is something that the board suddenly wakes up and says we must do AI to Nick's point. So I think we need that kind of galvanizing use cases. Other big area for us, which is a massive pain point is obviously in the Nordics we build a lot of fiber, we build a lot of fixed wireless access, we build a lot of 5G. And as all of us in the room know that is a very, very intensive task and is prone to a lot of errors and callbacks and repeat visits.

Again, huge amount of data that we have. We haven't just used it intelligently enough and now we are starting to look at that and say can we equip our engineers who are actually doing this with all of that repository real time with AI enabled assistant that can sort of avoid any missed appointments or repeat appointments or any kind of revisits that just keep adding costs And that has a customer experience benefit because often the customers are going to call and say when am I going to get connected? And it'll be a wonderful thing to sort of go back to them and say you already are. And we've sort of used AI to do that. So I think we need to think beyond the sort of standard use cases of which there are many, many and be very selective in what we go for because that's where I think the industry will see the most value.

Okay. I'm conscious of time here and there's a number of talking points we still want to get to. So I'm going to come to the audience in a minute and see if there's any burning questions for the panel. But I just want to touch at this point on the topic of the kind of infrastructure support that the network operators need as they consider how to automate their network operations. There's a lot of talk about what can be done, what can be processed in the cloud, and of course there's a data issue there, security issue there. So is there a big infrastructure consideration here apart from the fact that it's really hard to get hold of certain G? So Manish, if we can start with you, and this is really in the news right now, isn't it, about who might be buying what GPUs and then using them for something else.

Okay. I think infrastructure implications, there are plenty we can address and tackle this topic on multiple dimensions. Let me just take a few. Number one is the silicon ecosystem. You've got to look at the silicon ecosystem, the GP ecosystem, what's happening and I think the good news is there's a lot of innovation that's already happening in there and we are going to see diversification on the silicon ecosystem itself. What I mean is there're going to be more GPUs coming in from different players and that's good news. So we will have diversification in the supply chain. Number two just a little bit, I'll get in the weeds. There are also infrastructure challenges around getting networking because it's not about just the GPU, you've got to get the storage and the networking so you can feed the GPUs effectively. And so there's more work to be done to get the networking piece.

And so there is again, good news, there's more work already being initiated in the industry to even get to ethernet based solutions, get 800 gig ethernet et cetera, which is all very critical to again create these open ecosystems, open platforms and create scale diversity choice on the infrastructure side. That's one second way you can just slice and dice the infrastructure aspects is around power and cooling. You've got to look at when you're talking about these systems, these platforms are power hungry, GPUs are power hungry. And so both from a power and then cooling especially. And the implication again there is in many cases we have to start thinking about direct liquid cooling standardization of that needs to happen in the industry. And so there's work that's getting initiated around that. And then I'll stop at this last one which is the third one is where are you going to place this infrastructure as a telco and power cooling puts the constraints.

So you have your national and regional data centers, you have your edge locations and where is the right one? And I think where we are right now, you're going to see a lot more of if you're going more GPU heavy, you're almost in many cases limited at least the scale systems I'm talking about inside your data centers on the edge you can have certain lower form factor accelerators, especially on the edge locations. So you can have that because you're going to be constrained by power and cooling air capabilities that you have available. So are, I mean it's a complex puzzle piece that you have to work your way through and then identify what's the right infrastructure, where do I place and then is the ecosystem open enough in terms of the needs? Okay,

Just one build on what man said, you've got to also look at that outside in as well as inside out. So quite often these conversations end up being where are my workloads going to be? How much are I doing myself versus in cloud we believe AI is also going to change what enterprise customers need in terms of creating demand for edge. So you've also got to think about what does that do to my infrastructure planning where I may need to locate compute close to customer premises And that creates all of the implications Manishh just talked about. So all too often in the industry we're thinking about our network, our needs, there's actually an opportunity here as well to think and plan and that may offset some of the inevitable costs we're talking about.

So adding to the points mentioned by the banish. So we have our own cloud platform rock having their own cloud platform. So we capture every telematic logs fitting from the system coming from the base station to the subscriber AP N gateway as well. So now when you do the scale and scale out, there are few things which we need to look into that that's what we normally do that that's how our A model does that. So before getting into that, standards are also evolving towards that. NAF is one of the network functions. Basically what subscriber is doing, what kind of application and when you tie up with this brick solution ran digital controller where you can deploy your modules on the top, which you can play on the ran side. So overall when you try to marry these two functions via own app functions, so you will see that where I have to the scale out what application, what cell or what cluster at what time the traffic is getting consumed, that's where we are playing our energy consumptions.

That's where we're optimizing our resources. So of course definitely when we talking about when you go with the AI models, definitely the consumption of the power is more expensive. If you see the statistics like 60% of the energy consumption happening in the RAN and the remaining 30 to 40 is coming on the cloud, your basically CS data centers. So the RAN in the trend 60%, hardly 15 to 20% is being used. The remaining are 40 to 50% are only for the coverage. So there you have to play. That's where you have to play very smartly, not only with the automation, that's where your AM ML models will come into picture. That's where you Rick control is giving your platform over there you can deploy your AI models, understand what's happening in the core, what applications being used, and then try to deploy on the ran segment.

That's how we have to do stitch by stitch. So now implementing this AI model is one kind of set, but deploying is one more set. So the biggest challenge what we see today is how to test my AI models. I'm not looking to my fund score, I'm not looking to my gradient or precision records when I deploy any model into the network, any change in parameter leads to so many diversions. So to do that we need to have a digital twin kind of application where you can test your model and where you can simulate your model. So we don't have such tools we have to implement ourself. So that is something which we're developing, those kind of things. So any operator or any vendor talking about ai, they should have their own test tool, not as a traditional test tool. When you put the model, you have to simulate the actual traffic in the actual consistency.

So that's something which we have to develop inhouse tool. And the second thing is how you take it into the production. So when you go to production, we'll see a lot of issues in the network. So you should have CICD pipelines over there. So when you give a patch, it has to be implemented exclusively aggressively. We cannot go with the pr, you cannot make the sell down for a couple of hours, a couple of minutes. A lot of traffic will be distorted countries like in Japan, every minute is countable. If you see the outage close to two to three minutes, we have to send our apologies to MIC. So these are very restricted complaints out there. So these kind of things needs to be implemented in the network when you're going to them production. So this is a lot of ecosystems involved over there. So it's not resources, but how you use your resources effectively when you put your AI modules, having leveraging these kind of platforms, definitely we have successful solutions in the network.

Okay, Amol, I want to come to you for a quick comment here, but I just want to say I'm going to go to the floor for a question straight after this. I can see one over there. But Amal, in terms of the infrastructure, because

I would say that on the infrastructure side we also have to now be cognizant of the fact that we have to start aggregating the infrastructure and find ways by which we can run multiple applications on the same infrastructure. Going back to man's point, these infrastructures are very power hungry and I have now sat in a lot of conversations or many years where radio requires its own custom. Silicon AI requires its own GPU. The processing that we do in the core really needs an intel architecture. But I'm really definitely not going to be able to invest in three different sets of infrastructures going forward. And especially because the packet processing and the latency that we need is now getting to the point where a lot of the chip sets are able to do some of the things we wanted to do. So we as an industry should also need to push now quite strongly on how can we get a same set of compute infrastructure to deliver multiple applications, whether it's ai, whether it's ran, whether it's other things as opposed to building vertically integrated stacks for each of those applications, which then add power and energy and so on.

But yeah, that's a call out to the industry and then we should go to the audience.

Yeah, so I did see, yeah, I can see your hand up over there. If you can say who you are, where you're from and your question for the panel please.

Hello Francis Haysom from Appledore Research. A lot of the discussion I've heard about AI and autonomy, I put it in the sort of picture of being, we are looking to mechanize the processes that we do at the moment. We want to make a better knock process or we want to make a better planning process. One of the things, another example in AI is that when you look at things like visual recognition, for example, the major leap forward in visual recognition using AI processes was when we stopped trying to tell AI how to do a process. And we allowed it to discover how you identify a cat in a picture or a person in a picture. And I wonder whether the challenge that we have as an industry is that we are looking for a sort of perfect AI replacing something that we already do rather than AI giving us a solution which maybe does something in a completely different way than a person does. And the question to the panel is how much are you as part of your AI initiative looking at not just how perfect AI could be, how perfect data could be, but actually the reality of human decision making in your organization and where AI is already better at it by doing things differently. How much are we measuring the human intelligence as it were in human decision making in our organizations?

Give a start and then I leave the others. So I like very much the, because when we started looking into use cases, the quick wins, the quick wins have this notion of looking into steps on the way. So exactly what you said is that we will look on existing processes. We're not trying to change the process of just automating part of the process. And that's I would say stage one in ai. We're still in that stage one, the tactical stage where we're trying to get our hands dirty, understand more, get into the problems, but the second stage which we ought to do is actually to rethink the entire process end to end. And that is a third change. So the third stage would be that we let AI decide how to not maybe implement a process but have a diffusion, not a process, something different, which we don't know what would it be, but we are still in the phase one. So there's still two phases to come and I acknowledge what you said,

But my question is, are you measuring the effectiveness of this human decision making in your organization? Because that seems to be a key thing. Without that knowledge of how effective we are in decisions in planning, in capacity management, I

Think that is reflected in the results of every year. So we can see that as it go. But of course some decisions would only appear over time. There is not such a mechanism easily to actually quantify and measure the decisions. If we can also do that with politicians and politics, that would be fantastic, but it's not yet there. But we are at least trying to measure the AI side of things.

I can give a clear example which and again is not, I think we probably are all working through it. So we have seen that automation, it's good because humans make errors. We all make errors. Anybody who has touched the network made an error, I did as well. So we do measure and we have use cases to bring that error down and our engineers acknowledge that one of the use cases is what we call have the second pair of eyes with an AI agent. So instead of having a lot of really subject matter experts, we all have those subject matter experts, but AI or the gen AI can be that subject matter expert that can drive to the right decision. So we are starting to see that on the change area where when there are not that many human errors, but when they are, they're pretty noisy and it's an area that they might not bring simplicity or cost reduction, but it's an area that we're starting to realize that we as humans should leverage from technology when they have a better driven position. So that's one area that we are exploring at Vodafone where we're using them as the ones helping us to not make errors.

I think it's a great question. I think you can map how ready from a management layer down the organization is as to whether they're asking that question. People are very comfortable in call centers for some reason, just we just think call center people are not valuable or something. But very comfortable to say gen AI will do a much better job call summary of sentiment analysis than a human being. Just I think it has the time it can do more accurately as we get closer and closer and closer to the belly of the beast in terms of network operations, there is more resistance in terms of that. But it tends to start I think as both the other panelists have said in terms of saying, okay, we can see now that more of the time the AI is on parity or making a slightly better decision. And we see for say, field force operations understanding that not all of your field force are experts and everything. So it will deploy depending on the use case and the AI will typically get that better than a human who even knows that field force quite well. So I'd say is embedded in the logic where the politics creeps in is where actually the workforce doesn't really want it to happen. And so it's quite a good metric actually to say if you're not asking that question, maybe you're not really moving towards being AI native.

Okay, thank you. Now I'm getting the red flashing light to say we're running out of time, but I do want a very quick comment from you Amal, before we end on the security implications and about whether the industry really understands the security implications of the greater use of various AI tools. This is something that's the, that you have to spend a lot of time thinking about.

We do spend a lot of time thinking about this and we all are sort of avoiding the nightmare scenario where something comes in the press about something about our customers in a model that something else red. So for me it is about being thoughtful about the choices we make in terms of the architecture. We build the hardware, we buy the models, we train, and ultimately goes back to what I said before. There are two forces here. There is a force that is going to say if you're not fast enough, you're going to miss the innovation and there's a force that's going to say if you're too fast, you're going to mess up. So I think you need to sort of find a balance here to build that secure infrastructure is a must, but at the same time, if you spend two years building a secure infrastructure, you're going to miss the innovation. So I think there is a trade off that we'll have to do, but it's the choices we make and building a combination of LLMs hardware and software with the use cases on top that what's going on in your organization would be the only way to solve it.

Right. Okay. Thanks so much, Amal. We do have to end there. And before we move on, we are going to take a quick look at the poll results. The poll we had at the beginning of the session and the question we asked was, when will AI enable telco networks to truly zero touch without any human intervention? Never has got a pretty big, I thought never might be quicker. So 37% are saying never 42% after 2030 and 21% by 2030. So that's quite a task. Let's take that as an action point. Our vendors

So fantastic. Thank you much for voting. The polls are not closed so you can continue to vote in these polls. But that brings us to the end of session two. We're going to be back on stage this afternoon at 2:00 PM UK time. That's 1400 hours for session three, which is creating cloud native software engineering teams. In the meantime for us here in the room, we have a leisurely lunch break, which is going to be served in the foyer. And don't forget the pinball and the charity tournament we've got going on over there for our online audience. Don't go away. We're about to start our extra shot program. Charlotte's going to be picking up on the AI themes with her guests, so don't miss that. Stay with us. But for now, let's say thank you to our panelists here. Great.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

Right. I see all coming in. Thank you very much. Well, the first session of this afternoon is focused on creating cloud native software engineering teams. We know that cloud native has now become established as a way of creating, deploying and managing software. We're seeing it in a lot of industries. We're seeing it in telecoms now. Yet there's still this uncertainty within the telco industry about why and how to adopt cloud native and the practical considerations for a telco looking to become a cloud native telco with a cloud native software engineering team. So we're going to talk about all these things in our panel session that's coming up in about five or 10 minutes time. Now, there are a number of cloud native initiatives within the industry and beyond the industry, many of which I'm pleased to say I've got a telco focus to them. But one of them I want to talk about now and to give us an update on this, I'd like to invite Anita Dohler to the stage. Anita is the CEO of the NGMN Alliance. Anita, please come on up.

So Anita, good to see you back at DSP leaders. You've been supporting us for a number of years now. It's great. Now last September, the NGMN published a cloud native manifesto. It's a white paper that provided a telco viewpoint of cloud native, but what was the rationale for the report? Because you've been advocating three pillars and then the cloud native manifesto comes out. Why was it needed?

Very good question, and first of all, thanks for having me. It's always very nice professional event with a lot of fun as well. So why did we publish the cloud native manifesto? So as an operator driven alliance, we focus on how to master the route to disaggregation. We are operating disaggregated networks, but also network automation part of it. Sustainability is another big pillar and then the next steps after 5G, six G. So network evolution, and I think if you go back a bit to think about why the industry embarked on the route to disaggregation, it was first of all, so several factors contributed, but one factor was is that we wanted to achieve a healthy ecosystem, so we wanted to enrich the ecosystem to facilitate innovation and also for being able to react more agile to customer demands. I think Yahu this morning summarized it extremely well that innovation is facilitated by openness, choice and competition.

But the other part is of course also to by driving a healthy ecosystem to go away from vertical monoliths and that of course demands interoperability, openness, and compatibility and operators obviously are in different phases in that route, but what operators already realized was that actually it is not really interoperable what at the moment is deployed, so tested, delivered, tested and deployed in the industry and that some of the operators who already embarked on that route actually spend an awful amount of efforts and also budget to achieve running systems. And if we want to go for network automation, then it's also even more important that for instance, we achieve a cloud nativeness and therefore our board of directors decided was actually a decision of the board of directors to publish this operator view on what actually cloud nativeness should look like. We established the seven principles and now we are working on the next steps because of course it's not just about publishing manifesto. I think there is a lot of work needed in the industry and it also demands all partners to work together to achieve such a status.

Well the publication which is well worth downloading and reading if anyone hasn't done so yet sets out a number of prioritized calls for action because let's face it, we are still as an industry, quite a long way from deploying cloud native workloads at scale and really embracing cloud native. Do you think that telcos now see the way ahead? Do they agree on these action points? Has the last 12 months brought us together in terms of what we need to do or do you find that as a result perhaps of creating this manifesto that we still lack a coherent approach?

Well, I think it depends on what we defined as a coherent approach. Operators of course have a choice how to embark that route and what we see is that they are not all doing the same. Of course, some already embarked on the route to cloud nativeness, others are still not really believing in it. That's also of course happening because of the problems and the issues we are seeing in the industry. And I think we all know that the route to desegregation anyway is also delayed. So now we think it'll happen probably in 25. So there are different approaches. Some operators reacting by reacting on the reality of the situation. They went with different vendors for different cloud network domains. So to kind of overcome the problem a bit because of course someone also tries to be pragmatic if you want to achieve something. But all in all, I believe, and that's also what we are discussing in NGMN amongst the operators, but of course also by involving vendors and research institutes, there is a strong consensus that we need to do something to really achieve a cloud nativeness. And that's something which we are currently also exploring with regards to how can we cooperate with other organizations to not reinvent the wheel. And I think it also needs to be meaningful to the industry because no one wants to boil the ocean, so the target and the steps to achieve that target need to be realistic.

You spoke earlier about desegregation. You've also got the Odin project as an ongoing project of the NGMN focus on disaggregated networks. Did you find that as a result of your work on the manifesto that there is a synergy between cloud native and disaggregation?

Disaggregation not necessarily needs to be based on cloud native, therefore we have this under the umbrella of mastering the route to disaggregation, but in reality they're not necessarily directly interlinked. So when it comes to how to operate as aggregated networks, it's also about how to achieve a complete change of the processes the organization. What does it mean to embark the different models either by using system integrators or some operators went to the root of the vendor plays an important role in integrating the systems. Other operators decided to do this in-house and that's something we are also working on in the future. It'll also continue in the next months to analyze what actually are the advantages, disadvantages, and what is needed to enable the different models. And of course it's also about best practice sharing. So alliances like NGMN are also a good place to exchange in a pre-competitive environment best practices.

Great. Well Anita, we look forward to seeing the next steps hopefully very soon. You are staying here because you're going to join us on the panel, but for now everyone thank you very much to Anita. Thank you. So time for another short video whilst we rearrange the furniture on the stage and caller power panelists for this next session and surprisingly the video is highlights from our cloud native Telco summit. So let's roll a video and rearrange the stage.

In the beginning we said let's move everything into the cloud so we become cloud native and I think that's where many people make the mistake. You by default don't become cloud native just because you move it into the cloud

Going cloud and cloud native requires the right skill sets, so you really need to make up your mind how do you get access to these skills? What can you do in upskilling with your own guys? What do you need to get from the market and then put them into a flexible organization.

We should have releases daily, the larger release packages every couple of weeks and new product deployment within six to nine months. And we are moving down that path and the business is seeing significant improvement in our ability to deliver faster, reduce costs driven through reuse of things so that we don't have, we are reducing the complexity and simplifying our environment.

This journey to the cloud native is not easy and requires collaboration support from different stakeholders that many partners involved. On the one hand, the cloud stack providers because we need them to incorporate the capabilities required by the telco operators for the telecom services.

I think that it's very, very important to highlight the scope of what we want to cover. I think that a lot of telecom operators today are already ready in terms of cloudnative infrastructure, but it's not because you have an infrastructure that you are able to run a network cloud native network function. So it means that it's a total ecosystem maturity that we need to

Develop. There's a lot of applications today that have been moved to cloud but doesn't necessarily mean they are cloud native yet. And that is another reality that we are dealing with and helping mitigate with our customers.

Great insight there from our Cloud Native Telco summit, our very first online summit and is still our most popular one, so stay tuned for that later this year. Don't forget, that's going to be, when's that mid-September I think. So mark your calendars for that right time. For our next viewer poll, we want to remind you what the question for this one is and as again, we've got three answer choices and we are only allowing you to vote for one of them. And the question we are asking is, what is the role of cloud native in successfully provisioning digital services, essential, optional or not necessary? Go ahead and vote on the TelecomTV website. You'll find all the polls in the DSP leaders section on the agenda page and we will take a look at the state of the voting at the end of this session. So let's now introduce our co-host for this session. I'm delighted to say that Franz Seiseer is joining us. Franz is VP tribe lead TDAs at Deutsche Telekom Technik, Franz, good to see you again. Pleasure. Excuse me. I'm very pleased you're here talking about cloud native with us. We're going to ask you to give the address in a moment, but first let's introduce our other panelists. I'd like to get 'em to introduce themselves briefly starting on my far left with Neil.

I'm Alfredo Musitani from Telecom Argentina with sales of digital services.

Hi everyone. Mirko Voltolini I work for Colt Technology around architectural innovation.

Good afternoon everyone. My name is Laura Murphy. I work as a senior transformation lead at BT.

Great, thanks everyone. Well Franz, would you like to take to the podium and deliver the DSP leaders address? Thank you.

Good afternoon. Pleasure to be here. Right from the screen down to reality. That's actually a very nicely timed event because people who may know me in here know that last couple of years I was talking a lot about ORAN. I'm not talking that much about Oran anymore. I changed in the tea recently to eat my own dog food. Now what does it mean? I'm pretty, I think I have a long history in the journey of first virtualization and then cloudification and always trying to advocate that this is the route to go, but always an architecture and strategy level. But now I got an opportunity which I took to operationally be responsible. So I am now responsible in Germany for engineering, building and running all our platforms to produce customer data traffic. It means mobile core, fixed control platforms and stuff like that. And luckily I have one team in there already which is cloud native because we are deploying 5G core for standalone and that has my teams when I was still doing that part, were very active in defining the standards.

Now we are implementing, we have an MVP running already and we are currently working to get it scaled for a large scale consumer launch most likely later this year. I also have teams which are still working a bit more in classical mode. So I nicely can see the differences and where you can go and where you are still stuck with mainly virtualized technology, which very often is still too close from my feeling to what we had in the past with appliances. So strategy going cloud native in DT, totally clear. We talk a lot about telco as a platform and the platform of course is cloudified production of network functions. Also, as I said already nicely. So thanks for putting that video skills of course is important. So you still need to have all your networking skills of course, but you need to amend that now with software skills to put things like a 5G core into your networks and make it to run it and to produce it.

What you also need and they couldn't resist. You need to have a proper architecture and if things go right, I managed to convince them that I'm allowed to show one single slide, which is the most complicated architecture picture you probably have ever seen and it's not done for here. We really use that picture internally in DT to explain cloudification. So this is really something we're using and how you need to read that. It's a burger, obviously, we didn't have burger for lunch and would've been even more fun, but it's still, I hope we all had lunch and you don't get hungry looking at it. So burger of course, sorry, I'm doing the network function, so I'm of course I'm the meat. The most important, the most tasty piece you can decide now if it's vegan or real meat, but we are the juicy part of the thing.

But you also have bread and things in between the bread. The lower one is the cloud layer, the upper bread is all the tools for automation management and orchestration and they are platforms. So one and more important thing architecture wise, we have one cloud platform to produce all the network functions. We don't have vendor specific silos, which we had to some extent in the virtualized environment. But for cloud one, cloud layer, all the network functions one set of tooling for automation to use for all the things and that's why they sell it. And the tomatoes are so important. They are always the adaption for the specific network functions to the cloud and building the automation solution. So in one burger you have more tomatoes on the other you have more only and to me or may not have cheese depending on what the meat in between requires, but this is the architecture we are following.

So that's very clear. That comes and that's super important of course is a fundamental change in operating model because you're not operating silos anymore, suddenly your operating platforms and to make that happen, that leads to from my practical experience, most important thing you need to work on, it's not skills, it's not technology, it's mindset. Mindset of the people making us up to now. The guys who are used to run their silo, they're responsible end to for everything. They don't need to talk to anyone besides the supplier which they need to beat all the time obviously. But other than that they went suddenly. They're depending on other people, they need to talk to other people, they need to ask other people for help. This is a barrier you need to work on. This is the issue you really need to work in the teams that they understand, they only can be successful together.

And that's the real essence in going cloud and really bringing people to work together, work as a team, split responsibilities that in the end you can bring the right operating model in place so you can run this whole thing and troubleshoot if required in the right way to still be able to produce the services in the stable manner. Why? And the left for Costa Hope will be also the key discussion we have here. Why do we do that? We don't do that to say who are we are. Cloudified cloud is not the means in itself. Cloud is a tool to get more flexible to become faster to enable automation. It forces you to do automation because it's so much more complex. You don't start to fool around manually to really drive us down that road to become more efficient on the one side which we had, but also to enable much faster innovation psychics because suddenly we're not talking three big updates a year. We are talking software update every second week. So you can adapt much faster and much smaller steps to adapt to requirements as they're coming from the market. Try it out. If it doesn't work, you roll it back to really come to this completely different level of flexibility. And I call it software speed even in producing network services for customers. Thank you.

Thank you Franz, thank you. Mindset. I think we'll get some interesting reactions from our guests here, skills, people and mindsets, not just the technology. Would any of our panelists like to quiz Franz on anything we've just heard? Now it's an opportunity to shoot a question at Franz if you'd like to do so. Otherwise we will go straight onto our first question. I've got a question for you. Good. Where did you get that burger from? Because the places I've been to for burgers, they never looked like that.

I must admit this. I said I just changed the role a couple of months ago. The burger existed before I came into there, so I need to credit the guys. I really, when I saw it first time I really was laughing saying, are you serious? This is, but it works. It's much better to explain to people not deeply in technology what it's all about versus you come with these typical pictures with 10,000 of boxes and what is that, right?

Well, talking about explanation, it pains me to say this, but it feels like we have to once again define what cloud native is because number of times we've been here and we think we know what we're talking about and then we'll have a conversation going and then it transpires that some people don't get it and it's the part of cloud native, it's the first word, it's cloud, which seems to confuse a lot of people. Do we still need to get this sorted out or are you Alex, say, our panelists here, are you confident that we now understand cloud native or is this still some kind of concept that is still lost on a lot of people in our industry? Franz, do you want to start off first and then we'll go to our guests?

I have a certain understanding. Obviously I hope I'm the only one with that, but it's like many times these terms are then misused by everyone say, oh, everyone wants me to be cloud native. So I somehow tweak it that what I have is also called cloud native, even though it's not even, I have to admit sometimes a struggle because not everything body, if you look at this narrow definition of cloud native, some of the network functions never ever can be cloud native. As long as you have state and need to keep states, then let's stop this technical stuff. But it's super difficult to make them cloud native. Most of the things can be done, but we are mixing it together. But I hope we have kind of a common understanding.

I would add, I mean I think you can look at this. I would say that generally speaking, the industry now understand this much better than was in the past. I look at it from three areas, the technology and we spoke about it, but I think the paper actually has been published does quite a good job in describing that. There's the people skills and mindset and Fran talked about that, that's quite important. But also it's the commercial angle. The commercial angle is how do you change the picture with cloud native applications, bringing them to market much faster and also enabling network as a service or the ability to bring together different applications and glue them together with APIs and technologies that I support. I look at that, these three angles. Plus I think we also need to look at cloud native apply to the actual functions. So the core functions as well as cloud native apply to the control layer of the network and I think that's also much easier to address as we have more control on that side. Thanks Michael.

Neil? Yeah, I mean I really like the burger analogy because some people want more onions. Some people might want a plant-based burger, although I dunno why. So for me, cloud native actually started with how do we build the telephone switch for the modern era. And if you think about the telephone switch, which made all of us exist today, dreadful technology that it was you've effectively got a platform for delivering services and you could deliver lots of different services and telcos were super profitable at that point in time. So how do we move to the world of delivering those services and innovating, as Frank said, on a regular way that allows us to deliver services in a consistent manner that allows us to manage it without having to do heavy lifting. But for me the actual real goal for the cloud native was to build an efficient platform.

So very early on in NFV we could see that it was never going to be efficient enough. You had too much disc or not enough IO or too much memory or not enough CPU. And actually in my previous place I resisted it because all I could see was money being wasted from the point of view of can I really generate cash out of this and have a platform that's truly multi-service. So I think the innovation part and being able to deliver stuff fast into the customer's hands in the way that we used to do with a telephone switch and I spent most of my life ripping them out. So I'm not a fan of that technology, but it delivered a great set of services for many users for like a hundred years. So that's what I look at from cloud native and actually we're in the kind of almost I think the fourth generation of cloud native mythos back in the early days. If you think about Twitter, who remembers when you used to get the whale in Twitter? The way they solved that was mythos and moving into a cloud native platform where you can scale up, scale down, scale in scale out. And in our world in telco I see and the customers we serve, that's really what we need. You think of new year when you're sending that happy new year message, how many people actually get it? Well with today's cloud native technology, everybody gets it and that's the beauty of it.

Thanks Neil. Laura, can I bring you in because we focus a lot on technology, but we've known from the outset, cloud native also refers to a mentality, methodology, mindset, mindset. It's a people, Franz has mentioned it here, mindset with the work you do and your focus within telcos, what's your thoughts of the cloud native message getting through to teams?

I think this is where it gets tricky because cloud as a technology is not a static platform, right? It's an never evolving set of capabilities and so on and so forth. So that's a shifting target and then you're putting cloud into organizations that themselves shift. And I wonder if this is where the ambiguity around cloud native or cloud hosting comes from, that continually changing environment in which you're trying to enact it. I love the part of the video which the gentleman was saying actually just because I put stuff onto cloud does not mean it's cloud native. And that's something that I've worked through with teams a lot and I always use the furniture analogy as opposed to a food one. For me, cloud hosting is where I put my pre loved pieces of furniture in a new house and I can twist that and I can give them extra storage, I can give them more processing, I can decrease my reliance on physical infrastructure, I can access that remotely in some way, so on and so forth.

But there's the same quirky pieces of furniture that they always were and they're deeply intertwined with the environment in which they were created and they retain that dependency. Whereas for cloud native, I've moved into a new house on a new street with a new set of neighbors, I have big windows, those neighbors are waving through the window, it's a lot more flexible, scalable, I can add bits to my house, I can take them off, et cetera, et cetera. So that mindset shift of teams to really embrace the full spectrum of that technology and to see themselves as actually generating value for the customer and generating value in that particular part of the value chain is absolutely huge and absolutely significant if you're really going to generate the full value of the technology.

Thanks Laura. Any comments about the defining cloud native understanding of cognitive photo?

I really, really agree in this that you said that the cloud nativeness is not about technology mainly, and many of them tell is about the mindset, it's about the organizational mindset that I think we are as organizations are kind of a different animal besides ourself and this is much slower to change. And I love what Cheetos about the manifesto. The manifesto, it came from the agile manifesto, maybe came from the social manifesto, but besides politics, I get that there is a lot to be done into agility that I think it came from lean mainly before it was the lean and the Toyota is still working with lean manufacturing and I don't see this lean portion in the telco industry. I see a lot of energy into going to the cloud and making it cloud native in cloud native in the functions but not cloud native into the transformation, inside transformation and the inside transformation, it's agility and it's taking every portion that does not go into value to the client out. So if I have to make any report that is not giving value to my customer, I threw this report and this OKRI threw it every OKR away and just leave the one that gives value to the customer and I think this portion is not easily understood.

Yeah, just quickly for me, of course it's easy because I just refer to the cloud native manifesto and unfortunately I cannot take the credit because it was written by our operator members. But I think now the important, the next important part as well is the definition, but how to really agree on assessments. So how do we assess cloud nativeness and how much of those validation processes and test processes is really needed in the industry. I think that's where we are currently. Also having quite some discussions with regards to the meaningfulness of processes. And then with regards to the mindset, I think it's also about building trust into own skills. So first of all, I assume that many of the employees France better than I, but in British telecom or telecom, are probably not necessarily the cloud native gurus. So even if you are upskilled as an operational specialist, how do you build trust into the technology? How do you build trust in your own skills and how do you manage SLAs and accountability?

Good point. Let's put Franz on the spot right now. You do represent a large telco and we know from our conversations over the years that telcos on this, there's a big range of cloud nativeness. Some are at the very beginning, some are just thinking about it, some aren't even thinking about it, some are pioneers. So to answer Anita's question there, when you've got this large workforce, how do you go about this?

I said this workforce of course is not uniform and luckily there is already one team doing the 5G core, which is really data truth, DevOps. I have other areas, we still run a virtualized EPC. This is classical waterfall split between operations engineering as we have done it for decades. But there we do true DevOps. So fundamentally different setup, fundamentally different mindset in getting things done. They really think cloud. These guys, of course there are guys knowing three GP, but the majority of the team is not going to 3G PP. They're going to con Sure, yeah, difference. Very different way of thinking. Still the struggle with the cloud people because they're even more strict. We always have this, what can we do from an cloud native application side versus what cloud people expect and they tell you why shall I tell you that I changed the Kubernetes version?

You cloud native, you should be able to deal. Yeah, you know are not because you still have limits and certain versions of software only certified for certain versions of Kubernetes and if you change that then suddenly it doesn't work. So there are some of these learnings you need to go through, but it's about mixture. Of course it's not one single person, but you need to bring the right people together. The good thing is typically you always can get engineers with new technical challenges. So once you get them there and say, hey, you are working on the latest thing out there and on the hottest street, sorry for that wording, that's typically a certain huge amount of people I would even say they get intrigued by it and they're keen to explore. Of course there are some I have done that leave them alone that you need to figure out.

But most of the people really start to become interested and if you put the right mix together and look a little bit on the chemistry between the people, this is starting to fly because engineers typically, they're really keen. What they need to learn is to communicate, to communicate with the surroundings, to not see the other team as supporting them. And you throw something over the fence and you then wonder if one week later nothing is coming back. But you never asked if they understood what to do, if they can commit that they didn't know I told them they should. These kind of things that you need to build and that's the journey you need to go through but you can make it happen.

So this leads on to another point that I'd love us to cover. You've got a dedicated team and the 5G SA core work, there seems to be a strong case for focusing on the basics, get the basics right first, build that cloud native team correctly, get it working and then from that foundation you are then able to go off into whatever it might be, service creations in different areas and technologies, but you've got to get your foundations right first. Now that seems great on paper, but I'd imagine reality is a little bit tricky for a lot of telcos and you haven't got the luxury to sort of step back and think about this. It just all happens at the speed of light. Any,

Yeah, so this is one of our biggest challenges. We've mentioned a lot about the people. How do we measure the people and their suitability for this? Because at least in, I've worked in just about every telco here in the uk, none of us were great at measuring how good our people were. Oh, Fred's a great guy and Sheila's brilliant, but actually what's the real measure and how are they as engineers developing the skill sets and the human side of capabilities to be able to flourish in this scenario? And what I've learned in this period is actually in people's careers they kind of learn a bunch of stuff and then they kind of stop learning. And then for me, cloud native, actually if there's a way I would describe it, it's centered around lifelong learning and if you aren't in that space, you're not going to make it in this world and it's about how you communicate but it's also about how you adapt and change.

So there's a lot of papers out there that are prescriptive about processes and pipelines. For me that's kind of, oh that's not cloud native. That feels like the old way, but how do you have a team that simply says actually what we're building here, it's cloud native but actually it's got such a high mission priority, we're going to put extra unit testing in, we're going to shift to the left. And without that sort of thinking, you'll just end up with your mess on a really horrible platform that's hard to manage. But I think the other thing to add to this is this world is about declaring an outcome and being very declarative in what you're trying to, and actually for me the genesis of writing stuff well is getting that declaration so that your engineering team build what you need and what you want and hopefully what the customer wants to buy. And actually in a couple of projects we've run at Juniper, so we have a Juniper cloud native router, you can log onto any of the clouds and press a button and you've got a Junos router, it runs on it's completely cloud native and we built that with our customers involved in the process and because of that we've got a way that it works that suits their needs both from a legacy point of view but also in adapting customers to adapting their teams and their platforms to move to the future.

Thanks Neil. This is really, and Laura, this is coming back to what we said at the very start of the day, let's not lose track of the customer and it is requiring a focus on the customer value that is driving all

This a hundred percent. I think there are so many Cs going round in my head at the moment. One is definitely customer value and that focus, and I completely agree with the declaration of intent in order to drive the value so that again you're using the principles and the ways of working effectively and you're not delivering stuff that doesn't have value because it's an awful expensive tool. I think the way, and again I build on the points around skills and aptitude and desire. I often think of it in terms of moving from a pyramid organizational or team structure to a hive in terms of the classic pyramid information goes up, decision comes down quite multilayers of hierarchy, big releases go no go decisions, et cetera, et cetera. Lots of kind of layers of decision making on there. And the way I'd encourage teams to think about themselves as they approach cloud is to think of themselves in that kind of more hexagonal framework in that you can see hexagons come off as you spin off microservices, they come on as you develop new offerings for the customer.

That incredible focus on customer value there but also as a team or as a person, you can imagine yourself in that structure. And actually where it's worked with teams for me is that it encourages that collaboration and that I actually will go and drive my continual learning in that process. I will go and drive the value, I will go and talk to that other team over there who previously I had nothing to do with because suddenly I see the link between my work and their work in a much more value stream led way of working, which ultimately, even though I'm working on this part leads to this overall framework. I think there's also a wider transformational point beyond that around leadership around, you mentioned teams working on MVPs, right? So there's a pilot approach here which I think builds teams in terms of delivering cloud native applications.

Let's create safe space for them to learn and grow and develop, but that also leadership needs to enable that safe space and that interplay between the teams. That needs to be a kind of new value driven output that we're going to go after and ride. And perhaps that's what you measure in terms of the richness of the collaboration. Do we deliver value, yes or no? Is the work that we're doing quality or is it full of defects, et cetera, et cetera. And actually how is the flow of the work working? Is it still as kind of up and down through the different decision-making forums as it used to be or is that actually the teams are humming together really nicely?

On a practical level, I'm just thinking about how we have approached this and how maybe we could learn from the past. If you look at the industry where at the beginning of a massive transition towards this model, assuming that this model is going to bring all the efficiencies we need and will help us take different services to market faster, everybody start from zero cloud native and traditional developmental and operations. If you want to move to the nirvana of a full a hundred percent DevOps, I think it's inevitable to start with a specific element of the stack. I like the knowledge of the burger and matel, but in the end what we all do is that we build another burger alongside the existing sandwiches and panini that we have. And so it is an area that is hard to expand from the initial deployment but it's inevitable because I think you want to bring the proof to the company about the fact that this type of a way of working will bring efficiency, will bring benefits from the service standpoint. So I think it's inevitable to start from that. The challenge is how you scale it, how you expand the burger to the right side and take away all the rest. And I think that requires a different approach. You cannot build another stack alongside the existing one but need to try and move alongside. And I think here is where programs and all we're discussing just now about empowering people and expanding the skills helps move this from this additional stack to a more general one.

I agree. I just build on the point about leadership. So in our team now, so if we hire him from a manager position or a director or anything, you get given a project that you have to build yourself and collaborate with the team and if you do it, you're in. If you don't adios, it was nice to know you but you're probably not right for us and that is lacking in telco. It doesn't exist today. We have that nowhere in the industry. I've been all over the world in the last year seen many telcos. We do not have that way of thinking. All of the hyperscalers, that's how they behave and we need to think about that so that it's not just about doing, as I say, it's about the leader being able to walk the talk and actually be a leader that they can look up to and be inspired from and that they're working and behaving in the way that the team needs to behave.

Lemme tell you, if we don't get that right, this cloud native thing will just be a thing we talk about forever and it is so important. It's kind of weird now having worked in telco for almost 30 years now, working for a valley company for the last year, things that we talk about here are just the norm and it such a, it was like a wow, this is insanely different. We have got to absolutely fix that and we need leaders across the board that know how to build this stuff. I made the point last year about if you were to have a hackathon between telco leadership and hyperscaler leadership, who's going to win it? That's one of the measures and tests that we need to have. And I think engineers, they're here to build and solve problems. They love to do it. You give them a floor space to do it and a runway to do it, bang, they'll solve any problem you've got. So that is the crucial thing, but having someone that they are working for that they believe in, at least in my experiences has been super, super important.

I fully support that The people need to see that leadership is able to listen and understand their problem and help them solving the issues they got stuck with. If they feel they talk to someone who I don't know did whatever else the day before and has no glue at all what's going on? It's super difficult. They see they can anyhow do what they like because until you recognize they're fooling you it'ss anyhow, we are moving so fast you cannot afford, sorry. It takes you two, three months to figure out that they fool you completely and what's happening here is far away from what you expected to happen. So you need to be able to meet your people on a certain eye level to really be able to have a meaningful conversation. Maybe not everything directly but you need to make sure also the newer structures in between that these guys know what they're talking about and not only sitting on the chairs and keeping them warm.

We've heard a lot, we've heard a lot of great ideas, some new insights. I think this is a good opportunity to ask our in-room audience if there's any questions for any of our guests. I've got to just shoot my eyes. The lights are really bright. Robert. Right in the front box seat. Can we get a microphone across? Thank you.

Hi there. Robert Kern from ALU Research. Great conversation. Great sessions already today. Alfredo, I think you brought up just in passing the lean Telco idea. I think we've all been in the industry long enough to have seen that come. I'm struck by how common many of the ideas particularly around organization and leadership that you're having today are exactly the same as were experienced by the Lean Telco. I know we have Nick Willetts in the room as well. He knows very well all about the lean Telco idea. Why did we not as an industry fully take on board all of the principles of lean manufacturing? I know we're a different industry but the principles is very common. Multidimensional teams, different style of leadership, much more collaborative. Why did we not do that then? And why are we now looking to cloud native to provide the forcing function to make that happen?

I really think that this is about our history. We used to be the only one provider and then after then we've been overregulated and we will been the victim of the society because we were delivering the safe network and we did good. And I think this make into learning a lot how to just justify where we are. So we are very great at justifying what we are and justifying the investment in next year generation. This is what we did. But I think we are in the point that we can change that. May I bring one very different approach? Yesterday I was in a by chance I went to the Argentinian embassy in London. I was invited by a friend and it was a conference on a very much different thing. It was an organization, it's called anos and what I bring this to us, this organization is an organization that work with the prisoners at the maximum security, the telco providers now because we are the bad guys, the worst guys.

We don't do the thing, we have a little revenue, we cannot find the investment we are so we are the bad guys. No young guy come to us. So now I try to bring this because I think we can do by ourself change and change how we envision ourself. What they do is they try to change the mindset of the people and change into being a victim. As we all feel here, I think we are a victim of what we've been doing with 30 years and change into, we are full of engineers of everything and full of people that have a growth mindset like Carol Dwells essay into this growth mindset and fixed mindset and think we are the point of changing and what is the point of changing that is changing ourself, how we envision ourself and making value for the customer each time not making a better service that is very solid, making that makes any sense to the customer, to their final customer in what we are delivering. So go ahead.

So I think you need to step back, we've changed the world. This industry has changed the world in massive ways that only 20 years ago you wouldn't have flocked you imagine Covid in 2001, what it would've been like. So look, I think we do kind of you, I don't feel that bad. Have we got challenges for sure, but industry goes through challenges. Look at the car industry in the eighties and nineties. Where is it now? Right? I don't think we're quite at that point there, but I mean to come back to your question Robert, it is about leadership to some extent and what are we measuring and where are we measuring it? So I remember our lean project on data centers that I was part of and I was new to the organization, I was looking at it saying these guys are nuts because they're going to apply lean in the very thing that is the genesis of every single project in the company. And it went badly wrong because no one knew actually where they were in terms of actually how is this performing, is it good, is it bad? It was more like, hey we're doing lean, let's roll it out. And that's just a nonsense basically you can't run an organization like that. So what happened is the data center organization, unsurprisingly everyone left went to work for Equinix and the hyperscalers and everything stopped and it's like why is this project all of a sudden read?

And for me that is the genesis of cloud native, which is how do we ensure that that whole kind of process of the organization is joined up and the thing that you need, the objective that you're trying to get to is well understood, the organization's built into it. It's an OKR that really is adding value. I think that's the bit that went wrong on this. I think there's a real danger which is I suspect the reason for the question that we might repeat that mistake, it's done us in this room to not allow that to happen because we were lucky we had 4G that kind of arrived and billed us out of not a great time from 3G, six G looks pretty challenging to me right now.

I fully agree on lean, I fully agree on lean even though what the story you are telling, but I think you have to go to the value proposition of everything not mimicking what we do with, I will be doing agile, so I do every mimic of agile but not the end of the agile. It is delivering value to the client and failing and starting something else. No, I did the big room planning and everybody get there and stay for three hours altogether. I don't know.

Okay, thanks very much. Hopefully Robert, you've got a couple of pages of notes there. That's great. Not really. I think you might have got time for another question. I'm struggling to see your hand. There's a hand in the air somewhere in the air. Wasn't there Manish over there? Over there, over there. Over there at the back. Yes. Sorry, the lights here are really strong. Can you pass a microphone over please?

Hi there. We said that the last session tomorrow will be about the customer, but perhaps we could actually talk about it a little bit today. So as we think about cloud native, how can it actually directly improve the customer experience for whom we all exist and service reliability,

Please. Yeah, actually I want to answer this one as I was kind of hinting in the beginning. So the commercial side of cloud native I think has got two angles. One is the speed of development can help us bring things to market much faster. So that's one of the angle that we can definitely leverage. The other one is the ability of cloud native applications to sit in the same environment. With that you can create a much more power proposition. I'm thinking about network as a service bringing together connectivity, cloud security, and maybe also value added applications on top of it. So obviously it's possible to do it even without a cloud native application or it's much easier to do it with application residing in this kind of environment where you can use APIs between applications, create a much more power capability. I think these are two angles, speed and capabilities.

Can I add one thing? The business scalability. I recently have the chance to meet between guy from Google and they grow with this, the scalability in their mindset. So I do not make any project that is not globally scalable. We do all the time in our company, we do, this is one project and I tell them, can you do in two month 10 of these projects with the same kind of people and then in two other months a hundred projects like this and then in the two other month thousand, this is scalability. And I know that cloud native is the basics, but it's not just the cloud native, it's just the cloud native way of

Thinking. I completely agree. I think the other part is the continuous nature of cloud native. So Microsoft have done an amazing job at this. If there's one thing they've done right, it's this. So you think of teams, the first day you logged onto it in Covid and teams, the last day that you logged onto it is covid. And how different and more that was was because in their process they were constantly taking feedback and then okay, we can just add this thing, we can do this. That is where I think we as telcos can make a massive difference. So hey, and I'll give an example, right? And I saw this in Korea recently where the age population were being attacked with scams and all of a sudden the next day in the email system and on the platform, they're able to offer a security service for free.

Just press a button, we're going to turn this on and we're going to filter out all these scams. There's so much data that we've got in the network for things like that that we don't use it at all because it's too difficult. And for me, cloud native is unlocking that instant kind of customer need with data that we've got providing something on demand. And it's that service delivery platform for me that makes me excited about this as a solution for telcos to sell more things to customers, which if we're going to track more than a pound of share, that's what we really need to do.

Great, thanks everyone. More comments to answer the question about the customer facing question. Otherwise we'll move on. Thanks for the question. It was great. Just a reminder to our online audience, please keep sending questions in as well. We touched on this earlier, but the spectrum of where telcos are on their cloud native journeys because there's some telcos of excellent cloud native integrations and fantastic teams, experienced teams doing lots of great things, but there's many other telcos who either haven't started or still trying to, still trying to establish these teams haven't quite got that cloud native philosophy sorted out. So if it is to become important to successful service provision to the benefit of the customer, that's what we're here for these two days, what more can we do as an industry to help ensure telcos successfully make this evolution? Franz, have you got anything from your experience that we can do collectively?

Yeah, what you always can and should do is lower the barrier of entries because of course if you're first faced with cloud native, you are standing in front of a wall of complexity, fact. So what do you need to do is great best practices standardized where you can, I mean it's relatively straightforward on the cloud layer. Cause almost everything today is plain manila Kubernetes, so that's fine. But there's of course also the top layer where we are classic oss. And now going in that area where it's much more difficult, there are no such string and standards we have. So sharing best practices and helping these guys to come over, you always can go of course and seek for some help, but in the end you need to understand, I think that you need to invest to a certain extent in your people and your workforce to move.

And there's always, if you do something fundamentally different and cloud native is fundamentally different to what you are doing today. There is a certain peak where you are running certain things in parallel for a certain amount of time. This cannot be avoided. So there is a certain that's the case you need to make for yourself. How much are you willing and able to invest in order to come over this barrier? Because afterwards, if things go work like we envision and we are working against, then you come to that level that you can become much more efficient. It's all about sharing and helping to move.

Any other thoughts about how we can overcome a lot of these apparent obstacles and challenges to make us more cloud native Anita? Well,

I think as Fran said, the more positive examples we have in the market, the easier it will be. Also for operators who maybe don't have this large number of employees and skills to embark on the same journey, I think there is no way out of technology development. So it'll come anyway sooner or later. And again, back to the topic of how to ensure a real openness and compatibility and interoperability. I think that's also something where the industry to altogether need to develop trust that this is possible to achieve because it's also about total cost of ownership. So that's another angle. So one thing is of course that we want to grow the top lines. We want to faster and better react to customer demand. We want to at the same time to improve the operational efficiency. At the end of the day, total cost of ownership also needs to be predictable.

Think let engineers be engineers. So how do you create a pre field for them to learn and break things without breaking the main network? I mean, are you giving them space in computer? Are you giving them space and time to think about these things? Are they getting together to do hackathons? Anything that gets to the point of doing rather than reading is just a must do basically. It's great to read about it, but hey, I've done this and by way I'm now writing on my cv.

Isn't that a barrier? This fail fast approach? Because it's like for telcos, it's a big no-no, no chance.

I prefer success first than fail fast. It's telco guide. You can have that. It's kind like give them the tools so that they don't have to feel fast, that actually we know this is going to work or we know that's going to work. And then occasionally I like to do this, which is actually we're going to change the team a little bit. I'm one of these weird people that loves watching people and how they behave. It's like, wow. But genuinely, I've just seen so many people that with the right support go from this person that was on a PIP to this person that's now winning awards. And that's by just giving them a space to perform and letting them fail. Let 'em come back and say, Hey, this was a nightmare. How can I fix it? And being that supportive leader when they need it, but challenging them when you want to get something out there, basically.

And I speak from my own personal experience. I was very lucky we set up the first internet company, we broke. No one noticed today you break the internet and your bosses on BB, C news. Hey Howard, sorry about that. But we forget how for many of us, we were able to learn through this industry. Now it's much harder to do that real live learning. But actually cloud native is beautiful because you can build something, change it, but not actually deploy it. And actually I wanted to plug something. There's a thing called Opnet that I'd encourage everyone to have a look at. We're effectively taking some of the genesis of Kubernetes and applying it to networks. Not a Juniper thing. It's a kind of industry thing that's come out of CubeCon and stuff. But it's using that sort of model to actually design and build networks, a lot of which are now anyway. And also in that kind of programmable thinking the biggest user of AI right now is programming by a mile. So that's another way of generating the skills by, hey, learn cloud there, but the same way you're going to learn AI at the same time.

If I can just build on that, I definitely support the idea of pilots in safe spaces, right? Get your hands dirty, muck in, start to play with the technology, learn that, build your own skillset, build your own confidence and so on and so forth. And how you interact with other teams. I think you've pointed to the importance of leadership and creating that space. I'd also point to the importance of leadership in modeling curiosity and going out there and interacting with us as an industry to develop solutions for your own particular organizational context. I think half the tricky thing is that actually whilst the is relatively standard, it's coming into an organization that has its own cultural suppositions around risks, scalability, interactions, collaboration, continual learning, innovation, et cetera, et cetera. And I think the more you can demonstrate that you as an organization believe those values, you're enacting them, the happier your path to cloud will be. Because actually you are demonstrating that mindset. You're demonstrating that this technology, you consider it to be valuable and you consider it to unlock customer value. And actually I'm modeling these behaviors which we need to do to go out and build to build the most of it.

Sorry. But the thing is, so I agree with that, but actually here's what's true. If we keep going the way we're going, our industry's in super trouble. So the message I would say, if anyone who's got that kind of, oh, it's hard, well are we going to keep doing what we're doing? Or are we going to do something different? Because keep doing what we're doing. What was it? TSR minus 10, it'll be minus 20. We'll be like the industry that really got it wrong and business schools will talk about us forever. So I think there's never a better time to drive change because what we've done for the last 10 years hasn't worked. But

Surely having a really good cloud native ethos is probably the only way telcos or the best way telcos are going to attract new talent or redirect existing talent. Surely that's the place everyone wants to work. If you are software engineer is in a good cloud native environment, what are you finding for recruiting?

Guess, guess where I have the lowest average age in my teams exactly there. Because these are the guys where they're able to attract the people they see, they can work on something meaningful. It has a direct impact. You're not one of, I don't know how many in Europe, in a hyperscaler, you are working real state of the art topic and something that goes to life operation relatively soon. And this is something, this is really attracting people because they say the impact it can make working at an operator on cloud native is fundamentally different versus they're working at a hyperscaler because they're so, so much closer to the real product. And that's something that really resonates with people. They see.

And this suddenly me starts happening that people from other teams coming asking, how can I join that team? It seems what they're doing is so much more exciting. And then you have to drop the weight. Weight. I need you there because also what you are doing needs to move. So we always call, you also need to move into the burger to come back to the picture. So we need your skill there because you are also on a roadmap to move into that. So that cost, the goal is very clear. Everything will in the end be part of that nice. The burger will grow. But

You get to the point to diversity, because right now we mainly grow with the people that started many years in our communities, study long life learning. But what I see is that in our company is that we are bringing people from other companies that started much later than us so they don't have the problems, maybe have other problems, but making this push in diversity into our leadership teams also makes different vision of what we can do. For example, people from Amazon or from Google, maybe they don't have the truth, but they have a different view of how to solve things. And this fail safe and fail fast and go to DevOps and how to work with our partners in a safe manner I think is,

But then if they're not on the bus deal with it. Everyone in this organization's got someone who's not performing. Why aren't you dealing with it? How you make space, right? So what's your bottom 20%? How do you support them to get out of that bottom 20%? But if they're consistently there, maybe this isn't for you. Maybe there's something better for you that you'd be potentially more happy on. And telco is probably one of, don't forget we all came from government organizations predominantly Telco has got that problem massively. And unless it goes back to my initial point, how do you know the people that you've got are great? If you're presenting about what you've built in some event, how can you stand up on stage and say, I have the best team. And I'll say, why do you have the best team? And you can put the metrics up there to say, here's why for that. The people in that team, you've got them forever, they will be loyal to you and they will build for you. And at four in the morning when you call them, they will pick the phone up.

Interesting. I think we'll just stick on this question. We will go to the poll in a couple of minutes because we've only got a couple of minutes before we're out of time. But I think we should maybe pick up on this, Laura Alfredo mentioned diversity there. This is another good chance for rejigging our workforces a bit and having more representative workforces.

Yes, of course. Because there's enormous excitement around cloud technology on an average compared to say really interesting reports from the UK government and TED in particular, which would indicate that girls in particular, though I'm sure there are other demographics we'd need to address, start to feel a lack of confidence regarding technology and computing in schools at roughly age 11. And clearly we all know the kind of different balance of workforce across technology, highly skewed towards men right across the board. And so we're grappling at the tail end in industry with a question that starts very young in the school system. And so how you can address that as well. Well, interesting work that we've done at BT with returner programs code first girls around the pivot of people from other sectors of industry. We've even had an opera singer, et cetera, et cetera, come in and start to work on code and start to work on cloud.

Because really it's that behavioral mindset that you're looking for the aptitude, the kind of curiosity, the actual technical brain as it were, as opposed to actually the detailed knowledge in the past, given that the rate of technical changes so rapid. So I'd just bring that angle in as well. Yes, there is widespread excitement, right? A guarding cloud, but actually some groups feel less of a part of that, and we're talking about going back years. And so how do we address that as industry? How do we role model those different groups at the top at leadership and how do we create industry events that seek to outline these incredibly exciting career paths to these different groups?

Thanks so much, Laura, Anita, there are a lot of different groups, there's a lot of different people working on different aspects of this. I guess we always call for collaboration between our industry bodies and you. Do you think there's room for all these different projects? Do you think there's more demand for communication between the two? So we're not duplicating work and that we're clearly identifying which areas we're focusing on?

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's something I can really confirm that the different organizations that we speak to each other, and first of all, we do have also in many cases, shared board of director members. So that's one vehicle to avoid application. But also, of course we speak to each other because typically we have the same, we fish in the same pot of resources for the different works we are doing, and it needs of course to fit to each other and therefore that's something we will continue to do. So that's the only thing I can say.

Great. Thanks Anita. Well, we are almost out of time, but before we wrap up, I do want to have a look at our poll and see what the current state of voting was. Here was the question as a reminder of what we were asking our viewers, what is the role of cloud native in successfully provisioning digital services and the vote so far? Well, there you go. That's pretty comprehensive, isn't it? 79% so far say that is absolutely essential to provide digital services. Franz, any surprises at all in that so far?

I'd like to talk to one of the not necessary. Here's the 11%. I'd really like to understand the reasoning. There's

Thanks. Right. Well that is the end of session three. We will return at 1550 for our final session today, which is building digital infrastructure from core to edge. In the meantime, we here in Windsor have a networking break. There's refreshments, there's pinball, there's coffee. And for the online audience, don't go away. We are about to start our next extra shot program with Charlotte in just a few moments and she'll be picking up the conversation on cloud native with her guests. So don't miss that. Please stay with us. But for now though, big thank you to all of our guests. Thank you.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

But at this point, we are going to come to our final session of the day. That session is building digital infrastructure from core to edge. Now, regardless of whether a network operator has an open or traditional network strategy or whether it'll rollies on the public cloud for a lot of workloads, even a software first service provider still needs chips, modules and boxes. But what infrastructure will they need and where will it be operated? And what does the digital service provider network look like? And what does that mean for service creation and delivery? And of course, the customer as we know, is key. Now before we begin, let's play our next highlights video, after which we'll be joined on stage by our panel experts. This highlights video is from our next gen telco infra series.

We need to be more flexible, more efficient in the way we upgrade our networks. So one key tool for us is to consider CICD tools and in service software upgrade features to ensure we are automating the deployment and testing of our network, which means to simplicity. In terms of from operational perspective,

Definitely scale helps a lot. We've just gone towards a full, let's say, refresh across. So we skipped the VNF model and we went straight from PNF towards the cloud native now. So we halfway through our three year program of modernizing the core across the group, but it was done in one process of finding the right vendors for each of the

Markets. So we are working a lot on multi-cloud environment with a software that is able to be deployed in the public cloud, in the private cloud, or in hybrid environment. So we think that with this architecture, it will be easier to introduce future generations of mobile core and we will take advantage of the current investment in the core solutions.

Fortunately, there's a lot of drive towards ensuring six G is not a complete rip and replace. So functions like the NGMN, et cetera are driving the fact that it should be pretty much software driven as well. And because of the architecture, I think we have a good level of confidence that it wouldn't be too disruptive in the future evolutions of mobile.

Okay, fantastic. Let's invite our next session speakers up onto the stage. Let's give 'em a round of applause please. And for this next session, we have Francesca Serravalle from Vodafone as our co-host. So Francesca, if you'd like to come and join me here at this brand new and very exciting table that we have.

Nice. Okay. Hi everybody. Let's delve into the topic of building digital infrastructure from core to edge. We're going to meet our speakers in just a second, but as you know, each session has its own poll. One question, three answer choices. You can pick just one. Here is the question, will all future network platforms need to be GPU based? So please go ahead and vote on the telecom TV website. You'll find all the polls in the DSP leaders world forum section on the agenda page. And we will take a look at the voting at the end of this session. Now, as I mentioned for this session, our co-host is Francesca Vale, head of Infrastructure and Energy at Vodafone uk. Francesca, thanks very much for joining us. Again, thanks for inviting me this year. You were here last year of course. So great to have you back. Thank you. Yeah,

Okay, excellent. You are going to give a co-host address in a moment, but first let's meet our other panelists and I'm going to ask them to briefly introduce themselves starting at the very far left with Dean.

Hi everybody. My name's Dean Dennis. I work for Verizon. Obviously, I'm sure you're aware who Verizon are. I run the global solutions team for emea.

Hey everybody. Very well aware that it's us between you and what lies ahead in the evening. So we'll try and keep it a little bit interactive. That's what I've been assured by my fellow panelists. Chad, I work for a company called Rakuten Symphonia. I had the global cloud platform business. Great to be here.

Great. Thank you everybody for giving us the opportunity today to talk to you. And again, I'm very conscious that we're between now and drinks. I'm Daryl Jordan Smith. I'm the Chief Revenue Officer for Wind River.

Okay, excellent. Thanks everybody. So Francesca, if you'd like to make your way to our DSP leaders address Lecter.

Thank you. Good afternoon everyone. This is the last session, is it? Yeah. So hopefully we'll wake you up. I know it's always difficult, right to keep the audience engaged at the last session. So when we talk about becoming DSP, which is the main, the title, cso, DSP leaders, what do we think about? We always think about innovative business model, innovative partnership model where we think connectivity as part of broader ecosystem bundling with platform and application. And when we ask ourself what are the key enabler, what are the catalysts, the first thoughts that comes into our mind, it's service innovation. And I know we, we've been speaking about service innovation in the previous session and it's about cloudifying the experience of service provisioning through catalog driven marketplace. And we also think at teleco, a platform virtualizing cloud defined both the IT stack and the network, the network stack where basically the BSS and OSS are all cloudified and based on microservice architecture.

And the network workload is virtualized through SDN and NV architecture. But if we think what really in Japan, all this transformation, this is about high capacity, high availability, data center centric infrastructure with age-based architecture and strong interconnection capability. And that's because we need interconnection to be able to reach the ecosystem to develop synergy, to give access to the ecosystem that our customer wants. And it's also about complying with the trends of distributed architecture, distributed architecture from an application perspective, distributed data architecture, distributed AI architecture, and even the security network workload. They're all fully distributed. So to build on top of what I say, they just want to mention what Vodafone has done as a multi-year program, which you'll probably know called Red Stream Evolution, where we have created a unique and single converged backbone, which is serving the consumer, the broadband and the enterprise customers.

And that comprises of more than 200 sites span more than 55,000 kilometers of fibers. And it's as part of this investment, it's a multi-year program. We have created an age-based architecture and we have done so because we want to decentralized the services. So those edge sites, they're hosting service platform, transport platform, IP and optical platform, internet platform and content platform really enabling us to deliver low latency services but also enabling local breakout. And as part of this rate stream evolution, we have also invested heavily on SDN through hierarchical architecture. We have an optical controller, an IP controller, and a TDO transport domain orchestrator that will automate the service provision in the service assurance and the entire life cycle. And in the future, obviously we want to leverage on the open PI to make the transport network more programmable. We have also chosen some of the sites, a number of sites to deliver our telco cloud, our virtualized core.

So it's an on-premise approach. And as based of this program, we have really looked at the demand and we have created an investment roadmap that deliver megawatt. So this is when we started talking about megawatt and not kilowatt our NAVI approach. It's based on VMware fully horizontal approach, enabling a multi-vendor approach as well. And in terms of hardware, I know you were mentioning is it a white box or not? No, it's not a white box approach. We use DE and HPE now in terms of design principle of the architecture, there were three criteria. One, it's future. So we have built a 10 gig access, hundred gig aggregation and 800 gig core scalability is another thing because it's important that we maximize the investment that we make. So adding on top rather than replacing. And then finally keeping the opex flat. And we did that with two things.

One is moving from an active olo to a passive olo. The other things is through making our infrastructure green, basically we can only deliver a green network if we have a green infrastructure. So we are deploying solar panel in our core, in our core and data centers. We are simplifying the network, we are close inside, we are switching off a platform, we are removing fca. So those are really for us important criteria to deliver what I call a green, interconnected, edge based and infrastructure. And only if we do that, we can then enable that. We can become a catalyst of transformative use case and transformative customer experience.

F, thank you very much. Please come and join me back here. Okay. I mean that's a really great insight and when do you put it that way? That's a hell of a lot that is changing in the network. So I just want to come to the panelists here and see if any of them have questions for you based on what you said to get things going. If they haven't I have, but I'm sure they will do so.

Sure. I have a question. You mentioned energy at the end of the conversation and energy is obviously a very costly thing, but it's also a very regulated thing in the context of telecommunications. Some countries have three to 5% of their grid delivering power to cellular sites and telecommunications infrastructure. And what we're seeing there is that obviously not going down with the density that's increasing, but are there things that we can do there, like you were saying solar and putting more processing there, doing things at the edge of the network versus bringing everything back to a core data center that you can see us managing that ecosystem from an energy perspective more efficiently?

Yeah, that's true. I mean when it comes to just, you say normally there is a clear linear relation between data growth, 5G rollout and energy consumption, but we put ourself a challenge and we say no matter if we're rolling out 5G and if the data growth, we want to keep the energy consumption flat. And it was quite a big challenge and we had to do really quite few things in the radio, in the transport, in the core. Obviously the first things that we did is really try and simplify the network as much as we can. And as we move from legacy to a fully cloudified, we try to shorten that transformation. It's a transformation program which moving from a PRIs mode of operation to a future mode time, but we're trying really to accelerate it so that we don't have a double stack of it.

Legacy and network as well. We also leverage a lot on big data. So we have a team ourself, we work in a very agile way. So we are building use case on a big data platform, which it's a blueprint architecture on the cloud. And through apo, which is made of product owner, part of my team, data scientists, scrum masters and developers, we are developing a backlog of use case, one of these use cases to create ingest data, energy data from passive infrastructure and active infrastructure and then creating a heat map where we could go and take a targeted action. So there are many things that we're doing. Obviously we're also delivering intelligence in the radio part where we could change the radio resource dynamically based on user distribution and the traffic. So what we are doing, it's a lot, but it's a really big challenge to keep the energy Flo. So it's a complete

I have a question related to the edge that you spoke about. Edge actually means different things to different people, but in the context of Vodafone, the question I have is related to Vodafone's been an advocate of using multiple hyperscalers as well as for part of their business. You referred big data, et cetera. And now with the combination of what you've started doing for a programmable network, including edge from an operation and control standpoint, if you zoom out, what do you think the end state for managing this kind of hybrid architecture is going to look like in a couple of years? Each of them effectively has their own way of being managed and which is suboptimal in the long run.

I think if I look on the future, to me it's not now the case, but I was saying the future, the intelligence will be distributed and into the edge. So now when we talk about what we're trying to do, actually we're trying to create centralized service orchestration platform that can really orchestrate the end-to-end the end-to-end resources and the radio resources, the natural resources and the core resources we have of course the domain, the core and the radio and the trust will have their own domain orchestrator. But eventually if you want to monetize our network, we need the service orchestrator that we will be able to dynamically provision, manage the entire network networks lies I think in the future, which include also the edge resources. I think probably in the future I would see this intelligence having been a bit more distributed because I can see we are becoming more, we are going towards a more interconnected world, right? Lots of internet platforms interconnection with content providers, interconnection with platform providers, but also we need a more seamless experience between network providers as well. And eventually I would say in the future as we go towards more of a proconsumer we consume and we provide resources to also other wholesale and network provider, I would say we would need more of a distributed intelligence, but

Intelligence is shifting towards the edge slowly. So you see more of an autonomous management.

Yeah, it has to be because as you say, the complexity will become higher. We will need to have more of a distributed intelligence, not the case yet. I don't think we are there, but that will be the future.

Now, just to build on that point, where do you see the investment leading in terms of new revenue streams? So is it about customer experience or is it about providing a platform to deliver over the top services that we don't even thought of yet?

Well for now, I mean I'm head of infrastructure, so I can see the big investments is really to enable a fully end virtualized network. So we are investing heavily into expand power space. It's a big investment investing. If you have an on-prem cloud approach and you have to deliver megawatt, it's not cheap, it's expensive. It's really, it's big project. And obviously that's I think within the ramit, but within my remit, so investing in infrastructure and data center expansion to be able to then deliver containerized core networks. And once we deliver the containerized core network, then we have the end-to-end networks lives, the service space architecture. Then we can also leverage on open API approach. And then having these emerging revenues from the enterprise and the different vertical. Obviously we are in a time where CapEx investment for us it's very high because if we want to leverage on the opportunity of becoming A DSP, there is a lot we are investing on DSDN, on the NV investing, on virtualizing BNG investing a lot on expanding. We are expand, we need to expand. It's the digital fabric that eventually reach out our customers. And if we want to deliver customer experience, we want to have end-to-end control of not only not the quality of services, but quality of experience overall. So I think even we're investing heavily also on not only expanding infrastructure by expanding our fiber footprint as well in a proactive way where we use geo intelligence to map radio program, fix it, program demand, and we can create a demand driven topology.

I've got another question. Yeah, no, absolutely. So Francisca, sorry to ask you tell that. So when you were so interested, there's lots of questions. So I spent a lot of time obviously in this industry and other industries and the capital expenditure and operational expenditures are very key topics, particularly in telecommunications. And what you said earlier is that you're trying to manage that neutrally. So what you save is what you'll reinvest back into new infrastructure. Did I understand that

Correctly? No, what I was saying in terms of, I was trying to say let's try and keep it flat, which means as a network provider, we also, as I say, we provide services, but we buy services from others aware. We have a lot of lease line and we buy call services and we offer call services. When it comes to LI line, we used to buy IT services and we moved instead from manage IT services to dark fiber or to a passive approach where we have full control on how much on the cost, but also on the scalability of our capacity management basically.

That's great clarification, but from my perspective, do you take an annual view of that or you take a three year, five year? How do you look at that?

We have different view. We have a one year view, a three year view, and a long-term view. So it's the way we manage our investment program. It's quite governed. It's not like one year. And we had tried to comply with what we have said the year before when we say three years. So basically it's also a way to take accountability that when you want to invest, you invest through a long-term view. It's not strategically, not tactically, because a one year view will be a tactical view, right? So that's important. Even when we say sometimes, so I'll introduce this tool because it helped me with automating this workflow. Is this strategic? Is this long term? That's the question we always ask does is it value driven or is it just a capability that a thick one box automate one thing and that's it, and then it create complicity in the IT landscape.

Okay. Well I did have a question for you as well f, but I'm going to give you a break very much. I'm going to give you a break. That's all we got time for. No, not really. It's not just you answering questions here, so we'll move on to another talking point, but great introduction and great questions. Thank you. Now we're talking here about the evolution of communications network infrastructures and talking about it from the core to the edge. And in a way this might be an oversimplification, but planning and building a communications network used to be relatively straightforward because there was pretty much a network for each service, but now it's much more or moving towards a much bigger multi-service, but cloud oriented headache that could be actually adding complexity into the mix as well. Is that fair? And if it is, how do you address that complexity and the challenges that come with that, fewer silos? If you like Darl, if we just start with you,

I didn't think you were going to go to me first. I was hoping to cheat and listen to all my colleagues, but certainly from my perspective, what we're actually seeing is observability of network-based infrastructure, layering in elements around that around some of the things that we were talking about earlier today around AI and using some tooling there both deterministically and through inference, allowing us to get better insights to what's going on. I think you touched on it, looking at how the network might use more power at certain times in certain places and optimizing for that. I think that there's a lot of opportunity for improvement there. The problem is, this is also what we discussed earlier. Each one of these systems still pumps out data in different context and there is no way of actually collating that efficiently at this moment in time without also doing other silos, which then actually layers even more complexity across everything that's going on.

In addition to that, the company that I work for at today at Wind River, we started at the edge. So everything that we've done historically has been at the far edge in aircraft, in automobiles, in devices. And we're seeing that creep into the intelligent edge IE around the base station itself into the core. And we see more complexity there because there's brownfield complexity there with all the semiconductor technology that's there and how do you collate that? And we're seeing that evolve and become quite an interesting area of opportunity for us because we're seeing increases in needs for security increases to drive more performance out of the existing infrastructure there issues around getting power to those locations is also another big issue. And then last but not least is how do you actually drive the performance that you need almost in real time in that space in order to deliver that benefit back into the infrastructure. So it is another layer of complexity that's converging. The edge is converging with the core from an infrastructure perspective.

And Dean, if I can come to you because you are looking to deliver services using these new platforms to enterprise customers, in some ways there must be a list of pros and a list of cons as the network is evolving.

Yep, absolutely. Well, I think that the key word is trade-offs. So the multi-cloud environment is a serious challenge for most customers specifically in terms of IT not necessarily being a strategic decision to move in that path. It's just happening organically. So instances are popping up in the different CSPs and hyperscalers and trying to control that and manage that and then create the environment where the experience of the end user is as good as it can be and consistent as it can be is very tricky. I mean, you think about the pace of change in terms of the scur, if everybody's familiar with that. So you've got frame relay and ATM private networking, what was that, 20, 25 years. Everybody knew what they were doing, everyone was fine. Moved on to MPLS again, another stretch, another couple of decades. Then we switched to SD WAN and the software defined era in sort of 20 16, 20 17 in real terms.

And we've already moved on to SSE already moved on to SSE and the challenge of keeping pace with technology change as well as the arms race in the vendor space is a big one, right? So the approach we've taken is to abstract the technical layer from the operational layer. So the ITL stack sits air gap from the technology stack because the technology stack is just impossible to keep up with. And what do customers want? Why do they want it? You could meet five customers that have five different choices in terms of technology vendor. And so to work around that and manage that carefully, the network of a service strategies is where we've gone with it.

Okay, interesting. Vivek, from your perspective, Rakuten, how are you seeing the difference between, I mean there's still a lot of legacy network around, let's face it, and operators are at a different point in moving away from that. How are you seeing the challenges as some companies move into a more cloud oriented network? And of course, Rakuten Mobile in Japan had the greenfield opportunity to build something completely new and therefore have a completely different perspective on things.

So before I get to that question, I slightly disagree with the first comment you made before Dar answered that it's a headache and it's an overhead, it's a natural consequence of evolution in the technology landscape today, it's cloud native and Kubernetes five years from now, 10 years from now is going to be something else. We'll be back here hopefully having a similar conversation. So this is powerful course. I guess the choice that telcos or enterprises can make is do they lead? Do they wait and watch or are they laggards? It's not necessarily going to change anytime soon. Technology just enabling you to do things hopefully simpler, faster, better, cheaper. Coming to the question that you've asked, there is a distinct, actually there's a bit of a change as well. There was a distinct difference let's say two years ago in how the we were having with operators across the globe in terms of their desire to do something in terms of transforming digital infrastructure and the kind of concerns or questions that they had in the last 24 months or so.

The conversations I've had with the CTO CXOs are changing quite dramatically. One of the reasons they're changing is because this was also covered in the first session today, I think, and Dean you also just mentioned, I think there's growing awareness within the telco exec community about the need to abstract the infrastructure layer of technology and network from the external facing service facing view that their customers get to see. I think it was Susan who probably said, nobody says, comes to our website or your website saying, well, I'm a bank and I want to buy an SD van, and that's just a manifestation. They want to connect offices together, et cetera. So I think I completely buy that, and Rakuten and Symphony started to see that recognition. We work very closely with some of our infrastructure partners like Dell and HP who are also seeing that exact same shift where for example, on things like network transformation, there is a clear shift in temperament and understanding and appetite within the telco landscape where the CTOs are now saying, regardless of O Ran or vRAN or dran, they're saying my core and edge infrastructure, which includes transport, has to get ready to do things in a more agile, limber, elastic way, and I can do an independent discussion and vendor selection and POC or pilot about what I'm going to put on top of it.

Yes, there are some constraints or rather guardrails that they keep in mind when coming up with the strategy, but they're realizing rather than try to bake the whole enchilada in one go, they're going to have to start slicing it up. And I think there was a burger up as well on the slide. So similar analogy. So I think that is actually a very welcome shift because as I guess everybody in the room agrees, telco as a community is known for being super agile and fast. No, I'm kidding or not.

This hopefully allows us to have a slightly better conversation in a year or two from now, at least within this limited construct. And going to the theme of core to edge, unlike Thelman mentioned, the Rakuten Cloud platform, which came from the robin.io days, was also born in the edge, but also more specifically, the stateful edge will become super important for the telco world because in theory, it's great to have stateless architecture and Kubernetes, but IP addresses are kind of important when you come back to life. So you can't just stick your finger up in there and say, hopefully I'll get it back again. So solving those real world problems at scale is what things like Rakuten Mobile gave us, einen nine drills have given us. We've been able to be very fortunate that we got a chance to be at the cutting edge of delivering some of this, and now we're playing very collaboratively with the likes of Intel, Dell, hp, et cetera, on the P states, C states for energy savings.

And we've already got fairly advanced stuff coming out in a few months where we've actually been able to show real world examples of double digit savings on actual workloads. So I think that is a major change that's happened, at least in my limited view of the world for the last 24 months in terms of both the focus of the operators on how they see the digital transformation for the network. Now willing to say we have to do it in layers, not the whole thing, and the fact that some of these technologies are enabling a more elastic future, which is where you want to go to.

Okay. We've got a couple of questions, commenting questions from our online audience, which I want to come to very quickly. The first one is, and I guess this is a bit of a clarification, that having this multi-service digital infrastructure provides greater opportunities to get new services to customers. Is that a fair assessment of where we're going that this makes it easier? Dean, if I can come to you and then may

Francesca? Yeah, I think it's a really interesting subject, right? Because the ability to be able to create new revenue streams, new services and deliver the experience at the same time to the customer piece is obviously really very much dependent on the quality of the core network and the edge plus the access. So it is an equation that needs to be balanced. I think the investment and capital investment in the access layer is really important in that discussion. So that really does open up the Pandora's box alongside and paired with the intelligence in the edge and the compute power in the edge. And the question of, well, what do you use it for? Well, clearly there are opportunities for operational efficiencies, right? So AIOps, big data ml, I mean you think about the size of the data lake that we currently sit on in terms of just pure scale of operational data day-to-day data. And what you can do with that in terms of processing that and the insights you can get from it if you've got the capability is enormous. And the final point I would make is that the capability of the Edge device itself, the handheld device with neural et cetera, is actually opening up a whole set of opportunities on which you can hook onto, but you need to have the layers in place to be able to deliver on that.

Okay, that's a great point because that actually ties in with an online audience question we've just had in, but Francesca, I just want to come back to you for a second. We also had a question about whether the shift away from the legacy silos and more towards the new cloud oriented, edge based network, is that still a little bit too slow in terms of what's needed by the service delivery part of Vodafone?

Well, I think actually we're doing pretty good, right? Because we're being proactive in many ways. One is investing in the infrastructure, the data centers, the fibers, which is key, right? To deliver the capacity and the services of the futures than delivering on the intelligence from SDN and NAV and et cetera. But we're also moving towards a more agile ways of working as a company, as the employees as well. We are adopting a failing fast culture where we really try and innovate many business unit and we move from this POC culture into the MVP culture where two months we deliver something, we look on whether the value has been proved or not, we either productize or if not, we just move to another use case. So it's really the cultures and the ways of working that are changing. Even if you think the fact that we are also creating a unified inventory, a unified data architecture, that in itself will enable collaboration across the different business unit. So ways of working unified inventory, unified data architecture that I think it's a key enabler for driving collaboration and driving that solution model that customers want. Customers want solution, they don't want capability and that's how we are doing it.

Okay, so the human silos are being broken down at the same time as the network silos is what it sounds like? Yes. Okay. So the question we've got here from our online audience is AI has been discussed during the sessions in one form or another, but until we address network capacity, that remains a risk of having advanced AI that's going to operate way below its true potential. So for AI to deliver on its promises, the network and the infrastructure needs to be there to support that. How will telcos overcome this? Of course, that's

10 gig access a hundred gigs and I think capacity key, I mean no doubt capacity in terms of fiber asset, it's really important. And what it's also really important if we're talking about then processing awareness as well within the data centers. For us, it's a different story because we work with cloud providers and where we have strategic partnership, we created data hub, we create blueprint architecture, data pipeline, ML pipeline, and then our data scientists are building all sorts of analytics for consumer, for enterprise, and for network analytics as well. Some of those analytics are related to energy management, some others are related to the way we do CapEx investment where we use AI to help us understand where we will have a bigger ROI and so on. So I think this way we built the infrastructure, the capacity, and then we leverage on the cloud services for giving us the infrastructure to build advanced AI use case.

Okay. I just want to see if anybody else on the panel wants to address that issue. Are the networks that need to shift this traffic from one place to another to enable it to be processed and the workloads to happen? Is the infrastructure there and ready to meet the needs that we're seeing now in the industry?

I think that's a use case driven question. To be fair, I mean the way the question was framed probably could be interpreted in many ways, but one way to look at it, especially given the edge construct that Francesca also referred to was there are several reasonable use cases which are making themselves now available where you process data the closest to the source of its origin, which is typically the edge and you need the result back at the edge as well. You don't need to backhaul that traffic at most. You might want to send the metadata back, in which case the backbone of the network isn't necessarily your choke point. It's probably the power in the compute and the storage capacity at the edge example could be near real time, real-time facial video recognition in high sensitive areas like airports or defense establishments, you don't want to go 800 miles to ask somebody if that was VEC or Francesca, by the time you get the answer back, it's probably too late.

Or as I think Dennis had given an example a couple of weeks ago from Dell that driving on your car down the road and you see a shadow and you don't want to go back a thousand miles to say was that a deer or a shadow? Because by the time you get the answer back, there's probably a slight issue. So those examples will require to the person online who asked the question, yes, they will require a certain amount of infrastructure capacity at the edge, but it's less to do with the network, it's to do with compute storage processing on the edge. But if there's larger questions around large language models and constantly ingesting them, et cetera, with big data lake, et cetera, and trying to draw insights in real time, sure, because then you're burdening quite a bit data path across the network.

Yeah, I was going to say, I agree with you. I think it's very use case centric and I think that it's going to evolve over time. Yes, we need more network capacity because more applications and services and innovation will interact with the network. I think Dean, you said earlier you dunno what the killer application's going to be, but you know it's going to be there. So we're going to be looking for that. But as what you were saying from our experience, we provide flight control systems, we provide safety certified systems and vehicles. That's the core of our business. A lot of that processing is evolving in that edge with more compute, more power, more utilization, more efficiency there. We see that happening there around that use case because you can't necessarily guarantee an aircraft is always going to be connected to a network at every point it flies around or a vehicle going down the highway doesn't necessarily always connect.

So you want to be able to do some of that processing locally. You want to be able to collect that data whether it was a deer or not a deal deer, and actually transition and evolve that. And at the same time, the buying nature of people that travel, say in an automobile for example, when I was younger it was all about the driving experience. Now it's evolving to being what do I do in the vehicle as I go from a to be? And the bio has changed and the same with the aircraft industry, the commercial aircraft industry, the same as your experiences going through airports. That's all the changing and it's those use cases that will evolve that, but I think the industry will lean into those use cases, help solve those problems as the network evolves.

Okay. Yeah. Can I just add a point to that? It's a segue really, but the capacity and elasticity of the core network is what enables all of these functions. And when you think about the criticality of these applications, these use cases, you're in a vehicle, it's got to make a decision, something's happened, it's got a process, make a decision. If you're having a network upgrade, that's not going to help. So what you've got to have is an AI ops driven, proactive, forward thinking, AI driven operational model, which actually clears the problems before they happen, anticipates, bottlenecks, et cetera, et cetera. So the two things go hand in hand. You've got the AI piece on the edge and the customer experience, but you've also got the AI piece which drives the performance of the network, which keeps everything going.

That the analytics I was mentioning and the relation with the cloud providers, that was to introduce cognitive capability within our own business unit. But if we're talking about use case that are offered to enterprise or consumer that requires low latency, then it's about creating synergy with distributed cloud, which we have done where we bundled our connectivity, we host distributed cloud of cloud providers into our edge, and then we can enable those critical and transformative use case that requires very low latency. Really, as I say, I mean ai, it's fully distributed as an architecture workload, so it depends on the use case as you say.

Okay. Coming to another related talking point here, but I'm going to come to the audience in a few moments, so if you've got a question for the panel, please get ready to put your hand up. But on a related note, there's obviously a lot of an awful lot of talk these days about next generation computing, accelerated computing. Our network operators hampered if they don't have a large bank of graphic processing units, GPUs for their own operations and also to be able to use those GPUs to be able to offer the services that their customers are now wanting and needing. Is this becoming table stakes? As was mentioned earlier, if you can get your hand on them right now, but is this where all operators kind of need to think about and need to go? Anybody want to start off with that one is

Dean, I'm more than happy to take a stab. So I think it really depends on your investment stance and what I mean by that is we've talked about cloud providers today and logically you can buy resources from cloud providers to give you that functionality that you need. Do you invest in it and bury it in the network depending on where you see the future in terms of your revenue streams, absolutely that's an option. But then you do then have to take on board the maintenance and the ongoing end of life end of support and that whole cycle life cycle piece, which can be challenging given the pace of change.

Okay. Yeah, no, absolutely. And we can see network operators going in both directions right now. Any other

Francisca currently we see a use case or a need to invest in GP from a NATO perspective, we do see that in terms of AI use case, that could be a driver, but more a driver of partnership rather than investing ourself as I mentioned.

Well if you're an Nvidia shareholder or an Intel shareholder, you definitely want that capacity to be bought by everybody I'm sure. But I think I agree with you Francesca, it is not there needed today and it may evolve in the future depending on the applications and the use cases and the different business models that occur depending on what the operator wants to do.

And I think so far we've seen some links to specific services based on those investments particularly where there's a need for in-country data security. That's

FI don't have access to GPUs. What am I going to do? What were you doing a month ago or a year ago? I mean? But yes, if you do get a real clear AI strategy with use cases, et cetera, you could probably do something on the top line in terms of monetizing and providing new services. You could drive better insights into your network, into your billing, into your product conceptualization. But unless you are the vast minority in a few years who have absolutely no access to the ability to do AI compute, whether on your own or using a hyperscaler or some of the specialist cloud providers who are coming, I don't think it's necessarily a doomsday scenario yet almost is a bit reminiscent of the evolution in silicon every five or seven years when there's a step change, when there's a glut where people just try to get their hands on it.

I will admit that the slightly deterministic nature of AI could be one of the reasons where something comes out in the industry which wasn't anticipated, and then you could be one of those people regret saying, oh, I wish I'd put in a big chunk of money on that strategy. But if it's not obvious and if you were a fiscally responsible board, I think all of them honestly would be challenged to say, do you really have a clear business case to do a massive spend like a meta or a Microsoft today on something which is not currently a clear and present existential need for your business? It could help, but is it what's stopping you from doing your day job? Probably not right now,

Especially when there's quite a few demands on what CapEx there is as well. So let's come to the audience. I know we've got a question over here. If you say who you are and your company and your question please.

Yep. Hi there. It's Tom Burton here from Cambridge Management Consulting. My interest in this question is from a cyber risk and cybersecurity perspective, having compute and storage in the corp has a lot of very significant advantages. Nevermind the physical security that you can wrap around it with moats and gates and walls and if need be guns. There are also economies for scale and be able to wrap some very advanced cybersecurity technologies around a few core data centers. As you move customer computer storage out to the edge to the base stations and things like that, then obviously the ability to apply those same controls on a distributed level become significantly harder. I'm interested, how are you addressing that challenge, being able to apply equivalency in the risk management and the security out on the edge and therefore able to gain the benefits without sacrificing risk and confidence?

Okay, that's an interesting question where you want to go because it's hard because that's a question really designed for the chief security officer, isn't it?

I'm not a chief security officer, but I deal with a lot of aerospace and defense agencies in the US and abroad. It's a big concern for them. They solve it in slightly different ways in terms of secure network-based infrastructure and what they do there. Our focus is minimizing. We have some strategies associated with minimizing the surface footprint of an operating system in that edge device to minimize cyber inference and attack and also at strategies where we work with a lot of our clients to be able to move those workloads that might reside on a public cloud into a private cloud instance. And we've, we have a software element to try and solve some of those problems. But you're right, it is a huge problem. Security at the edge is going to be both our friend in terms of securing and our enemy in terms of all the risk that would occur in that space. And I don't think the industry is mature to the point that you suggest unless it's a controlled DOD type instance that we have that solved.

I'd just like to add something on that. So I think it's a very valid question, but the current evolution in the technology for edge, not just the compute and the storage side, but the command and control infrastructure is actually evolving quite quickly that there is a reasonable level of risk mitigated control available today. I think the question would be if it's just a few distributed ED sites, then does the cost of that control plane and the security plane justify the investment at this point? I think only if it's a scale deployment, it'll probably make sense. But for example, and this is true even for some hyperscalers who are now going to the edge because that's where the cloud is moving, you can actually have donged encryption devices which are geo centered, which means if somebody steals a rack and runs away, it blanks out the blade and it's asymmetrically encrypted, which means you can't read anything on that ever.

It's gone. If you're an operator, you can recover it because you've got backups in your cloud account. So that's one example, but it's also, an analogy might not be the best analogy, but if you go back a few years, the little bit of money we had was stored in a safe place in a vault in a bank and then came these newfangled things called ATMs, which is what's happening with the edge now. The bank is the core network and the ATMs are the edge, and they did get secured over time. There were some nice movies made about somebody trying to steal an ATM, wonder how much they got out of it. But so I think the question is valid. The attack surface does get expanded. There is a ton of compliance directives from nist, et cetera, and if you look at that body of collateral that's being applied, not just with DOD, but anything that's sensitive, whether it's CI data, PI data, customer sensitive information, et cetera, I think this problem will get reasonably well tackled in the near future.

And just to add to that, there's another dimension which is that not only the data in the computer has moved out from the boundaries of the physical enterprise or location, but also the users have so over covid anywhere, anytime, any place. So access to it, who has access to what, where and when. And then of course there's the regulatory challenges around that depending on where the data is, where it's being transported and what happens to it, where it reach its destination. So there's lots to consider there. So point taken. Absolutely.

Yeah, I agree, agree. I think this is important. It's not just the fact that our network is becoming more distributed is also the fact that the application are moving to the cloud and the users are fully distributed and fully distributed. So that creates, we're moving from a perimeter type of security to something where the threat can come from anywhere and we really need a zero trust model and a security architecture. By design. I can only tell that we have a very strong security operating model and everything that I do, any change, any use case, any data that goes out, it has to go through the security operating function and they do an EM impact assessment and they can come back with yes or not and this is what need to be done. Obviously I think as we move from perimeter security to more of, I think more of holistic approach, probably peering with security infrastructure security provider where they have kind of layer one to seven type of capability that they can offer, then I think this is key as well as maybe changing and transforming your security operations center to become more data and AI driven.

Okay, great. Great question. Great answers. Thank you. I think we have another question over in the file corner again. Name, rank and serial number please.

Francis Haysom from Appledore Research. Again, interesting. The conversation mainly talked about technology, but one of the aspects I think that we kind of miss is the existing infrastructure, investment and investment cycle. It's extremely slow in organizations. You could say it in some senses, it makes a Soviet year, a five-year plan looks agile. But I'm just interested in do we need to look at as much less about the technology but actually our agility in terms of changing the way that we buy infrastructure or the way we procure infrastructure? Sorry, to pick on Francesca again, in the time that you've been evolving your infrastructure plan, Vodafone has divested itself of I think two major European operators. How is that changing your investment in this infrastructure plan given quite a major change in the business itself? Sorry, it's not about Vodafone, but do we need to change the speed of the cycle?

It's a great question and something it kept me awake a few nights in those years and the reason for that that you can see the service, everything. So software, very agile, very fast, and then you actually, you need to build the infrastructure, expand the data centers, and it's a two years project or one and a half year as you say. So how do we make sure that we align the infrastructure expansion with the demand roadmap? So it's really an important thing. And there are two questions. One is we need to be faced a little bit. We have two to three years facing, right? I need to look ahead of three years because it takes one year, two years to build and expand the data centers and deliver megawatts. It's not an easy thing. The other thing question is, okay, so I invest millions now in this project, how far do I go in terms of demand?

Do I look at three, five years, 10 years, the month? How much do I need to invest? We are always thinking, oh yes, there was one question where you're saying we have now we are going towards a cloud enabled network. What challenge do we have? That is a key challenge because we always see, oh, it's about delivering a scalable infrastructure, but we still need to define the specification of all the electrical and mechanicals and everything when we expand on data centers and sub components. Once you reach the maximum capacity, you cannot add on top some other. You just need to throw away like generators and they cost a lot. So you really need to create the right compromise and say, okay, a buyer generators looking at the 10 years demand, but I buy other component maybe looking at three years demand that will the OI will be. So it's not, I think it's a great question. It's not an easy answer probably there will be different view, but I think it's a compromise in looking at what's the capacity upgrade component by component or you need to replace completely,

I think it's about the disaggregation that gives you the flexibility, but with flexibility you get complexity. And can the industry address the complexity? It comes back to the points that we were asking ourselves earlier. So certainly from our perspective, we believe that disaggregation is a good thing. We think that gives you that level of flexibility. So you can swap out a generate or you can swap out bits of infrastructure without impacting other elements in that, and it gives you the flexibility in terms of choice and then commercially that also drives cost in the right direction in theory. So from our perspective, we think disaggregation is part of the answer, but with that it's the complexity that goes with it. And I'm pretty sure you guys have looked at that as well.

I mean, I agree on the complexity versus the choice part, but I have a slightly different take on the question that Francis posed and I think it'll be interesting to see Vodafone or Francesca's view on this as a thought experiment ignoring the laws of computer science and physics, assume that in five years data demand is going to go up by a hundred x in the uk. How much more network capacity are you going to seriously build, not just Vodafone, all the operators in the uk, it's a thought experiment. It might never go up by a hundred x or it could go up to that level in 20 years. And the reason I'm posing that as a starting point is that there was a reasonably valent attempt made at ran sharing several years ago in multiple parts of the world. Some of it succeeded, some of it didn't. Various reasons we had passive infrastructure sharing in the UK Beacon, CTIL, et cetera.

Maybe it's time to re-look at that model, but not for the ran bit Now, not for the passive bit, but if you have a kind of harmonious requirement for back hauling traffic from your respective endpoints and the endpoints are now mobile because your customers are no longer fixed points maybe over the coming years, that starts becoming a potential collaboration model. While the telcos still compete on everything else, there are bits of the infrastructure which they may want to look at and say, well, this makes sense for everybody. It's better for the consumer, better for the environment. I don't have to dig up roads all the time, and how much fiber are we going to lay individually? So that's one way to look at it. There is already a small precursor to this, so it's perhaps not a complete abstract notion. It hasn't made its way into the consumer telco space.

To the best of my knowledge so far, at least not directly, the neutral host model, the kind of things people like building networks, et cetera are doing. They are solving an existential need in stadiums and mass transit systems and smart cities by saying every operator wants access and the ability to provide services there. But it's financially quite stressful for every individual operator to build all this infrastructure. So they're sort of acting on behalf of the venue or the tenant owner saying, I'll take care of the infrastructure, build and act as an aggregation point. But then you have the ability now to provide service from any operator. Now, I know it's not quite the same example as a full network, but in the theme of disaggregation, to go back to your point, Francis, maybe one of the elements, and again goes back to the point of how do you eat an elephant bit by bit, maybe the answer is saying, can I solve the whole debate in one go? Probably not because it's too complex, too many moving parts. Some of it's competitive and it is differentiated competitive, so you don't want to share it with the other guy. Some of it is not. So maybe that could be something to explore in the coming years.

I think that will probably be the trend. And I'm sure if you go and speak to Mark Gilmore, sorry if I mention your name, but it believes this is going to be the trend, right? Sharing more on the back hole and the infrastructure part. And I believe that could be, I think, and I can support this because we are seeing more dark fiber deals coming our way. So it's a way to say, oh, let me use, you have a lot of infrastructure capacity. Can I see? So we are using commercial agreement rather than infrastructure sharing, but it's commercial agreement that I can see that happening. I think there was one more point that I wanted to make. You made this one and another one, sorry, segregation.

We'll be coming to it very shortly. Actually. We're getting a bit close on time, but there was a very quick question. And it kind of almost relates to that because if you're talking about sharing access infrastructure and neutral hosts, et cetera, that then puts a greater focus on, so where do the operators compete? Well, they compete because they have separate core platforms. They have the brains of their network and their subscriber management, et cetera, is still separate. But what we've seen in recent years, and this is just how it is, of course, is massive, massive investments in 5G in particular in the mobile side, and then fiber access. So an awful lot in the access. But the 5G core, which of course is what enables a lot of service creation, delivery. I saw a stat the other day in Europe, there's very few operators in Europe with a 5G standalone core deployed. So all these amazing services, network slicing, et cetera, et cetera, they're not there yet. So is this the time where there needs to be a much greater focus on what's happening in the core, the logical core of the networks to be able to develop the services that can make use of all those access investments? I'm going to come down the line, but if we can get some relatively quick answers because we are pretty close to time. So to Dean. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, I mean you'll all be aware of the significant investment we've made in the US in the C-band and public and private 5G space over here in Europe. We don't have a macro network capability. So it's purely private. And to your point, I think the ability to really drive value out of these investments is hinged on the capability that's built in the core and what you can enable and what you can trigger and how you can build on that and get the flywheel effect to move away from solving tricky connectivity issues into the real value chain of the customer. So that's my view.

Okay. Vivek, are you seeing more focus now on core investments and core deployments?

Specifically core transformation, yes. Whether it's SA or NSA is perhaps a secondary level detail, but when it comes to 5G, there's been a very significant uptake in telcos now saying we need to sort out core first.

Well, I think standalone is going to drive economic benefits, but with the economic benefits to come new services, and I think the operators are kind of stuck there. What are the new services that are going to justify that investment? And to your point, I do see a lot of operators, not necessarily in Europe unfortunately, but around other parts of the world investing more and more in standalone core

Yes, we're investing equal in access transport aggregation and in the core as well. And I think it's important, right, because eventually you want to monetize the investment through networks slicing, but also to monetize the net slicing you need the service orchestrator. In the business case, our service orchestrator is linked to 5G rollout, so it's really important to invest on all the domains.

Yes, a lot of puzzle pieces to put together, as you pointed out so well in your opening address there, because that really set the scene incredibly well. So we are almost out of time for this session. That time went really, really quickly, a great discussion, but we do have to end there. But before we do, let's take a look at the poll results. And as a reminder, the question we asked, will all future network platforms need to be GPU based? Let's see what the results are. Okay. Alright. Will NVIDIA's share price go down right now as a result of this? I'm not sure. Not sure. We need to put this online, see what happens. But that's a pretty interesting, not sure is pretty high there though. So we'll see how this develops because I think as we've mentioned, these polls that are on the telecom TV website, they're not closed because we've entered this session.

These polls are open. So if you haven't voted, please do go and vote. So that's the end of session four, and that is also the close of the opening day of this year's DSP lead as well forum. We are going to be back on stage tomorrow morning at 9 25, a bit later, so you can stay up a bit later. And that's 9 25 UK time for the first session of day two, and that's focused on unlocking platform opportunities with network APIs. In the meantime, we have a final edition of extra shot over in the corner for our online viewers. For our in-person attendees here in Windsor, we have our annual evening social. It starts at 6:30 PM and will be held in the orchard room, which is near the entrance to the hotel. So see you all. For those of you here, see you all in the orchard room at six 30. But for now, let's say thank you to all of our guests. Great.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

It is now time for our second session of the day, which is titled Leveraging Telco Cloud for Advanced Operations. Now the use of cloud platforms by telecom operators is reaching a new level of maturity with many now adopting a hybrid model. And while the potential and capabilities of public cloud platforms for telco workloads are frequently discussed, how have private telco cloud platforms evolved in recent years? What functions and applications are optimized on a private cloud and which workloads are better suited for public cloud? And how is telco software such as OSS and BSS evolving as a result? We're going to be discussing this in a panel that's going to be coming up shortly, but before we get to that panel, we're going to have a quick one-to-one chat on stage. And rather than look back at the past year for an industry-wide progress report, we thought we'd do something a little bit different for this fireside chat. Instead, we're going to highlight on an interesting service model that was really recently announced in Africa, and I'm pleased to say that joining me is Harker Singh, who is the CEO of Ascend Digital Solutions. So Harker, if you could join me on stage. Let's have a round of applause please for Har.

Great to see you. Thank you for joining us at DSP Leaders World Forum and we're going to be taking a quick look at a recent development in Ghana with relation to a planned, shared 5G network. So can you just tell us a little bit about Ascend Digital? What is the company's role in Africa's telecom and digital infrastructure sector just to set the scene?

Thanks, Ray. I think it's a pleasure to be here. As S and Digital Solutions, we are transforming the whole landscape of digital connectivity in Africa. Starting in Ghana, we are really focused on reducing digital divide and increasing financial inclusions, and over the last about four or five years, we have built a shared rural network providing connectivity to about 3.4 million subscribers. We have recently completed a program, we've plumed the whole country with fiber. We have upgraded the whole optical infrastructure to hundred gig backbone and also the data centers 200 gig simultaneous connectivity have been done and we are the partners to the government institutions. We provide connectivity and service and solutions as part of e-net and we have brought in a lot of digital infrastructure into the rural areas by extending the fiber infrastructure to post offices, police stations, schools, hospitals across the country. And that whole platform has enabled us to actually launch a new initiative that we call as a network as a service. So we are really focusing as a network and putting together a ecosystem and consortium of global technology leaders and MNOs to come together to build a 4G 5G network as a service.

That particular initiative is called NextGen in Fraco at the moment, O-N-G-I-C in Ghana. So can you just tell us about the specific role of Ascend in that and how that's come about?

So as Ascend, we are the largest provider of neutral digital infrastructure in Ghana. So we have fiber infrastructure, we have our own data centers, we have our own optical backbone infrastructure and a whole software defined core. It's the first what we call as a digital super information gateway that we have set up in whole of West Africa with a period of one year. So as a key consultant partner to NextGen in Franco, we are bringing all of the digital infrastructure and the key part of the component is the modeling around it at how do we work with the industry itself to build up the complementary infrastructure for MNOs so they can actually roll out the services to end customers. So as Ascend, we are providing that base and the platform of neutral infrastructure as a complementary infrastructure to the m and

S. Okay. In what way does this marker a shift in the way that 4G and then soon 5G services are going to be provisioned in Ghana and then in other markets as well? Because this is a single shared network and as I understand it, NGIC has the only 5G license in Ghana, is that right?

Yeah, that's right. I think to understand what we are doing, I'll just take you back five, six years ago where I visited about 39 countries in Africa and we started with a mission of about creating the biggest digital pipeline and the single digital market in Africa. That's where we started and we had some successes and mostly because of covid we had to stop now looking at these markets, the biggest, and you can say even in the GSMS study recently, the gap is a usage gap. How do you bring more and more usage? How do you bring more and more demand on this infrastructure so that there is enough, you can say applications and content, content goes into the markets. So these markets are usually very depressed in terms of how and what the user should be and how those content and services are coming together to build the right level of services to the end users.

So when we look at what we have done here is we are not looking at bringing the boxes and the software and the data center and the fiber and optical, I think that's been done in multiple markets and MNOs have the biggest specialization and the biggest CapEx to deploy those network. What we're changing is the paradigm. So if you take a Ghana as a market, you have two largest operators exiting the market. I'll say that's three. So Vodafone exited the market bought by TerraSol. AAL was sold back to the government, and GLO has also almost exited the market as well. And there is one large operator with a significant majority in the market and the market share. So the tier two, tier three operators are not able to bring that CapEx that allows them to compete. So what we are bringing is a model that brings that network as there along with the network component.

What we are bringing is the devices, the whole ecosystem of applications and platform, and this will be the first cloud native infrastructure which we are using. The core network from Microsoft Nokia is bringing up their RAN with the components of Open Ran. And I will say we have also been able to get attraction from new players in the telecom market like Redis, which is a geo platform company who are also bringing up their 5G RAN solutions into the market. With all the collaboration we are able to do bringing these large digital players with cloud native open ran technologies, we are also bringing the whole digital ecosystem that Geo did, which basically Alliance did in India. Okay. So we are using that whole model that was done in India to market, which is the same a RP levels as in Africa. We want to replicate starting in Ghana and go beyond. So the paradigm that's going to shift is bringing the devices, bringing the infrastructure, bringing the applications and the platform to drive just not the connectivity but the usage on this platform. And we have also learned from some of the other initiatives around the world on the Share network and we are based on those learnings, we are actually complimenting and getting the MNOs to be part of the venture as well.

Okay. Yeah, I mean it is quite a tough model to pull off. And you mentioned the company with the large market sharing gone and that's MTN, I mean, is there an expectation in time that they might join and use this shared network or is the expectation that MTN might get its own 5G license?

So I think that's depends upon how we actually move ahead and the government moves ahead and all the MNOs are part of it. So we have not as NGIC, we want to have the network shared among all the MNOs

Every service provider, and the whole idea there is just not the service provider that exists in the country. We want to create an economy which is based on digital entrepreneurs. We really want to bring this open access neutral infrastructure where an entrepreneur can come up and say, I can set up a private network for servicing this industry. I can set up this private network for this industry. So we want to open up that whole ecosystem that has been subdued, subdued a long time. And as part of this whole stuff, we have also got commitments from our partners technology leaders partnership to build the very first technology innovation lab in Ghana that is only going to work on research and use cases for bringing up more and more shared networks in Africa and in the emerging markets. In addition, we are also setting up a software services factory to bring more and more jobs and create localized content and application for the engineers and the graduates. So what we are driving is a purpose built infrastructure that not only drives connectivity digital wide and financial inclusion, it brings to the level where people can start building the applications and IP locally in Ghana starting basically then going beyond in Africa.

And just very briefly to close out the hope, the aspiration is that once Ghana is up and running, that this model will be replicated in other markets. Is that

Right? Yeah, so the contours of what is there in Ghana are very similar into multimodal markets in Africa, largely because market size are anywhere from 10 to 15 million to 30 million, and there are a few large markets like Ethiopia and Nigeria, South Africa and working on the three or four operators, I don't think the markets can have that level of CapEx going into the markets and being able to compete. So we really see there is a space for this thing there with the right model, commercial modeling and the support from the technology partners bringing the device in application platform that allows the market to actually grow. So yes, so we have been in touch with few countries who are looking into this model in Ghana and I think we will see in end of this year when we launch. So the success of this will become a blueprint for taking it just not in African continent. We are also getting interest from other emerging markets in Forest Asia and also in Latin America.

Okay, interesting. Well, Harri, thanks so much for joining us today and telling us what's going on with Ascend and with these developments in Africa. Really incredibly interesting and keep us up to date as well with how it develops.

To meet. Thank you. A round of applause for Har please. Thank you very much. So it's time now for a bit more the shuffling of chairs as we invite our next panelists up to the stage. So while we do that process, here's a short video of highlights from our digital support systems summit.

The biggest benefit of moving to next gen BSS and OSS digital systems is agility. It's the ability to actually participate in opportunities that in the past completely bypassed us a telco. Not

All the telcos are jumping over to the public cloud. We still have substantial resources and will for the foreseeable future in our own data centers, in our own cloud. So multi-cloud and support from multiple platforms is the way to go.

Adopting cloud Native Paradigm does not mean that we have to also move to a public cloud deployment pattern for sales piece. I think especially in my opinion, they need to choose between private, public or hybrid cloud deployment patterns according to their own requirements and also taking into consideration about the local regulation requirements as well.

The migration of applications into cloud native environments is a good opportunity to rethink data architecture. The old approach of having master data management in applications and a big data lake for the data scientists to run BI and operational data stores for other purposes. I think this all needs a rethink

Customer experience is also extremely important. And making that translation between the messy tangle of legacy mishmash that we've been talking about underneath and then presenting it to a customer in a seamless way, there's a lot of work that needs to go on behind the scenes to make that happen.

Okay, fantastic. Now before we meet our co-host and our panelists as we dig into the topic of leveraging telco cloud for advanced operations, as you will know, each session has its own poll. One question, three answer choices. You can only pick one. So here is the question for this session, which should be the lead choice for hosting network workloads as you can see three choices. So go ahead and vote on the telecom TV website, you'll find all of the polls in the DSP leaders world forum section on the agenda page, and we will take a look at how the voting has developed at the end of this session. So I'd love to invite or welcome my co-host for this session. Greg McCall, head of chief Networks officer at the VT group. I think you've, you have been to this event before, but you haven't been a co-host

To it. Great pleasure. Thanks for joining us and of course we have a great panel as well lined up. So let's meet them and let them introduce themselves as starting at the far end with Andrew.

Hi, good morning. My name is Andrew Coward, I'm the general manager for software networking at IBM.

Hi, I am Jeff Hollingworth, I head of marketing at Anne Symphony

Okay, thanks everybody. Well as with all the other sessions, we're going to start with an address from our co-host. So Greg, if you want to make your way to the lectern and give us your thoughts.

Right. Thank you everyone and thank you Ray. Good morning. It's a real pleasure to see all of you here and for those of you that are online, welcome to I'd like to thank Ray and the whole telecom TV team for inviting me to co moderate today's session. And for those that don't know me, my name is Greg McCall and I'm the chief networks officer at BT group. We have some excellent panelists here today and we are going to discuss the topic of telco cloud for advanced operations. It's a topic that I'm really excited about, but before we get into the detail of that, I'm going to try and give you a little bit of an overview of how cloud plays its part in the network strategy at BT group. Our cloud native transformation is something that we've spoken about a lot over the last couple of years and it really is a key part to our network modernization efforts. But before we get into detail of that, I'd like to give you some of the background behind our transformation.

We are all witnessing a technological evolution that is really creating huge demand for connectivity. Firstly in providing a core service that enables these technology advancements to handle the increasing data loads that we are all seeing, but also ensuring that we can deliver fantastic customer experience. And secondly, in providing value added services that can help our customers achieve new levels of operational efficiency. The key to being able to do all of this is about building a fully programmable network. And that means it's a network that is not only programmable, but it's always on demand, real time AI first and supported by security capability and people that we've never seen before. So that is why we believe Cloudification is essential to the modern day telco at BT group. Our network cloud strategy, we've moved most of our network functions now into what we call our network cloud.

Doing this and leveraging the benefits of this really brings with it the key foundations behind our strategy. And while it's an ongoing journey, what we have seen is real benefits already. We multi-tenant today and that brings an increased level of efficiency, it brings an increased level of resilience and it enables us to scale our network functions independently from each other. As more and more of our network functions become cloud native, we are better positioned to deliver scalable on-demand connectivity. And also as we are doing this, it'll enable us to deliver new enterprise use cases. Additionally, we've recently finished the build and then the migration of all of our customers off our old Huawei core onto our new cloud enabled mobile core. This is the same core that will support our 5G standalone network, which we plan to launch later this year. But for us the mobile cloud core is much more than just a compute and cloud environment. It's a network that is built and been optimized for real-time communication and supporting traffic at real scale. The concept of continuous optimization is something that is ongoing and will be continuous. The other area that we are seeing a huge amount of value of Cloudification is supporting our network operations. Our network cloud enables us to deliver capabilities, services, network functions and lots of other capability across our network. In hours, these same activities and functions used to take us months if not years to deliver in the past.

A great example of how Cloud is supporting our automation AI efforts, which like all of you I'm sure is becoming even more important across the whole of BT is how we are using this to enable and upgrade and improve our network in real time much faster, in much more efficient and in much more reliable ways. We are also using it to monitor, detect and to fix issues before our customers even see this. And this is really critical as part of our operational resilience efforts. On top of all of this, we've also made a number of organizational changes and this is to help us to simplify our processes and we've brought much more closely integrated teams together from design development operations and we really started to see the benefits of having a full DevSecOps environment. And this is allowing us to focus on delivering smaller chunks of functionality to upgrade our network more frequently and ensuring that we do that in a highly quality way, but just as important as how Network Cloud is helping our operations. It's also helping us to think about how we drive product innovation and ultimately the combination of an AI enabled DevOps team and the cloud native 5G SA network. We believe this is the ingredients that we need to be able to offer the type of capabilities and services that our customers need both now and into the future.

But the final thing that we get out of this is we are able to create a platform that gives us real opportunity to expose our network. 5G era networks are massively software based, they're rich in capabilities and historically companies like ours, network operators used to keep their functionality to themselves. But through cloudification APIs we can now make that our network functions available to the developer communities and hopefully we'll be able to leverage their brilliant expertise to deliver new functions, new products, new services to our customers beyond core connectivity. And in turn we'll be able to make a fair return on that as well. So hopefully that gives you a little bit of an overview of how we are using cloud in BT to really drive our operations and drive our business forward. Thank you for listening. And with that I'll hand back to Ray.

Great, thank you Greg. Thanks very much for setting the scene and giving us the overview of where BT is now with its network cloud. I want to give an opportunity now for the panelists just to pick up and maybe ask any questions that they want to ask based on anything that you brought up in that opening speech.

I have a question. It is fascinating the journey that you've taken with the 5G core and the move to standalone, but there's a lot more applications behind that, right? Would you even be able to guess? Is it thousands of applications that run across the telco cloud large across bt?

It's hundreds rather than thousands and that is our destination for all new network functions. So that is our starting point and then we look at could we run it there or should we be running it elsewhere? But the majority of our new applications are running

On online. Presumably you're on a journey to move each of those applications into this new environment essentially.

Maybe if I could McKinney, of course there's the network but also the IT side and sometimes a mix and match, but how do you see also that side, especially applications like BSS and so on, how do they evolve and are part of your transformation?

Yeah, so in BT we've organized ourselves where we've got a digital division and we've got a networks division and we've got multiple cloud environments. So we've got an enterprise cloud environment, we've got a network cloud environment. Our enterprise cloud environment is where a lot of our enterprise applications run and we also are running a lot of our enterprise applications in the public cloud as well. So we are multi-domain and run hybrid clouds. What we are going through right now is how do we evolve all of our cloud environments to be consistent so that it doesn't really matter what use case or what application people want to run, they can choose their destination and obviously the network cloud is closer to our network and therefore where there's latency driven applications that will be the destination. And then equally in the UK we've got the TSA, the telecoms security act where we are obligated to keep some of those functions on hardware that sits closer to the network.

Since this is question time for Greg, how do you define and measure success for moving to cloud native?

It's a really good question and I think from a KPI point of view, I think the journey started with us really thinking about what is our long-term cost base, but also what are we trying to do in the future? And where we got to was if we continued in a vertical stack proprietary way, our cost base is going to get out of our control. So we took the decision four or five years ago to invest quite heavily in what we call the network cloud. And I think it's starting to pay off. Just the time it takes for us to deliver functions now is much, much shorter. We've all seen what's happened with VMware recently. I think that has turned out to be a really good decision of us moving off that as well. And then from a KPI point of view, it really is how are we enabling the business to deliver capability where we can make money rather than worrying about hardware, worrying about internal processes.

I just have a quick follow up question as well, and not just for you Greg, but for the panel as well. There's been a lot of telco cloud strategies over the years and right back at the beginning it started with we'll build all our own data centers and do everything ourselves. And things have changed obviously a lot, a lot since then. But do you feel, and I want to start with you Greg, because not so long ago you were talking about this to media analysts and you mentioned that other operators were now getting in touch with you to find out how BT got to where it is. Do you get a sense now that quite a few network operators have figured out what the optimum strategy, telco cloud strategy is for them and now they're looking to see who's done this model and that model and trying to pick up best practices?

Yeah, I think it's probably fair to say Ray, we weren't the first to start it but one of the first to have completed it, which I think is a credit to the team. It's a credit to the vision we had and the blood, sweat and tears that people went through to get us there. And I think specifically to your question, we get a lot of people coming in and talking to us. A lot of people are asking us what learnings can they take from us to ensure that they can accelerate their migration onto a network cloud as well. And I always start with this's probably two or three things. The first is you've got to have a mindset change. You've got to really think about a lot of our team we're very used to taking stuff off vendors and then beating up vendors to deliver the capability or the functionality.

You've got to change your mindset and you are the system integrator. You've got to work with the whole ecosystem to bring it to life. I think the second one is being able to collaborate and influence and make sure that you are flexible in what you're doing and what you expect from others. And then I think thirdly, it really just does take a lot of effort and also rethink on the kind of skills that you've got within the organization to bring it to life. So we've had to hire different skills and this kind of merge of software and networking skills coming together is where we've seen a real benefit.

Now obviously as we know BT has been able to do this and we're going to get into the options shortly, options for different operators and maybe look at what some of the battle models are, but maybe we can move on now and maybe dig into what it actually means for a network operator to run its own cloud platform and what this means in terms of operations and infrastructure and how it's managed as part of a hybrid cloud approach. Maybe here I can come to Merko first and ask about the cult experience because obviously cult is a company that's been working with cloud partners and running its own cloud platform as well for quite a few years.

Yeah, yeah, that's true. So we're a fixed operator. We don't have a mobile core, so I think has been maybe more difficult for certain type of applications to be moved to the cloud and doesn't make sense for instance, for optical core or route switching core to have to move entirely to the cloud. But the control layer for those networks is best place to run in a telco cloud environment, whether it's public cloud or private cloud. We can debate on that. If I look at the operational side here, how do we run applications in the cloud? I can look at two scenarios. We have a multi-cloud, hybrid cloud environment, a number of applications that we buy off the shelf from vendors that think about CRM applications or inventory that recently we introduced a new partner, a run from a cloud. And I think the model there is evolved from on-prem to cloud and has got lots of advantages.

You don't have to take care anymore of the development of the application is done by the entirely, you get capabilities overnight without worrying about deployment of new releases. And maybe a challenge here is the move from a more CapEx based model to a subscription model. So as you shift in the way we spend money for that, then the other side of this alongside of the shelf application is what we develop inhouse. Yesterday were talking about cloud native applications. So all the control layer, the stack they were building to control the network, SDN, the orchestration layer is also something we moved to TECO cloud. And I think that is a different story in the sense of you don't have the benefit. I mean you need to keep developing those applications actually more intense in terms of effort than the previous model. And also you have to rethink about your entire stack. I don't see anymore in the future the strict separation of O-S-S-P-S-S and network more about the control layer that applies on top of the network being part of this open environment we're building.

Okay, I want to come to Jeff briefly here because Rakuten simply, you obviously have great insight into what's happening at Rakuten Mobile, built everything from scratch and basically everything runs on a private cloud, doesn't it?

I mean maybe I like the reason I asked Greg that question. It's always interesting when you'd have these technical discussions because maybe the fundamental question of just asking why are we doing cloud at all? 15 years ago we weren't doing cloud, now we are doing cloud and there tends to be always two answers to that for whatever it is. Either you're doing X in this case cloud because you want to be more efficient, you want to save money or you're doing X because it gives you capabilities to move faster, do more, have more agility, beat the competition. And I just looked Google before I came on stage just out of interest. So this year the telco cloud is going to spend, it's predicted 23 billion, there's going to be 23 billion spent on cloud in the industry to vendors, loads of vendors out there, really happy about that and they've set up organizations to celebrate that moving, but that means that we're already 23 billion down in the hole.

So I haven't seen a metric and the devil is in the details. That's why it's interesting to get inside various scenarios because when you aggregate at the highest level, you lose all specificity of actual progress. But in general, what's happened over that last 10 years is as an industry, our revenues have maintained or declined, but our operations have actually gone up. They haven't gone down. So we have to look at ourselves then and ask ourselves why are we doing cloud? And I liked the way that I summarized what Greg was saying, cloud isn't something you buy. Cloud is something you do. That's why it's so hard. We are an industry that enjoys buying things and what we rarely buy is not technology. We buy insurance and we pay a premium of that so that we can go and drink dry Martinez. And if something goes wrong is like I'm sorry you down down the hole, you go and fix that.

So having that intent or knowing why you're doing something I think is really important. So now if we go back to the story that I always tell about Rakuten entering telco, it didn't choose to do these things. They were cool and somebody told them to do it. They chose for two reasons. One, it's what they do everywhere else in their business, the most efficient way to execute a digital business. Everything's digitized or it starts with the processes. It doesn't start with the technology. And the second one, which was more important, they couldn't afford to do it a different way and they couldn't afford to do it a different way in terms of time and in terms of money because really the core thing about is that everything becomes programmable, which means that anything that you do twice, you write once in software and it repeats and it repeats and it scales.

And that's where you get this tremendous hyperscale operational effect where you can deliver exponentially more but your operations always remains linear or you can maintain your delivery but your operations exponentially decreased or ideally you flow off that way. But I think one of the interesting questions that always comes in my mind is if we can decide what those KPIs are, and I believe my biggest fear of an industry is this pivot a little bit to 5G SA because 5G has gone cloud native by birth, by design. If we're not careful, we're going to take that complexity and deploy it in a 4G static operating model, which means you've plugged it together and so you've got all the cost of complexity, but you haven't got any of that dynamic sharing or freedom or anything. And my last thing from 10 years ago when we first started doing cloud in telecom in a previous life we were working with an operator who we did a NFE packet call and they wanted to be first and they rolled it out and we got this really angry call and they said, well this is shit, it's just 30% less capacity.

And what they'd done is basically reassembled the hardware dedicated with a virtualization layer with a virtualized packet core on top. So all that was happening was 30% capacity as something fixed up there, spoke to something fixed down there and they didn't realize that. So they'd operationally recreated the past, which is what we do without thinking. That's why it's so hard actually. Again, there's not one size fits all and it's not a technology problem

Actually. Yeah, that was one of the learning curves from the early days of NFE, wasn't it? Just don't replicate what already exists. Andrew, I want come to you because if we're looking at how it's done and how success can be measured, you need to look at the different aspects of what comprises a telco cloud, right?

That's right. That's right. And at IBM, as we take our telco customers through this journey, there are three really big building blocks if you like, that have to be consistent. The first is platform and the platform you're going to run everything on. You can't have multiple platforms. You need the absolute consistency of that to the point my earlier around VMware obviously Red Hat and IBM are taking advantage of that migration pretty strongly as you might imagine into Kubernetes right now. That's the first building block. The second building block is at modernization. It's not that long ago since telco apps were virtualized in the first place. And so now that next stage of putting them in containers, spitting them up, enable 'em to scale out is a pretty heavy lift in some cases. And then the third element is orchestration and automation of that. And when you do that and you do that properly, it means that you have this flexibility so that any application can be placed in to cloud any area. If you go one step further inside, I can allow that into the public clouds as well. It's a kind of normalization effect that you get when you do orchestration. And I'd say right now that's the weakest area that we identify in telcos. They've had multiple goes at it. I think there's still a lot of work to be done there.

So these are all good pointers and good trends for the operators with the scale and the resource to be able to do this and take advantage of this kind of platform. But that's not the case for everybody. Is it Mackay?

Yeah, we are a vendor, so that's why I was asking the question. We are BSS vendor. We've been there for 20 years and of course we participate to this transformation. Well first of all, we'd done the first thing, which is doing it our own. Six years ago we decided we were going to go cloud native and we did that for our own efficiency. So we did this but also to participate to the transformation, of course we see different levels of adoption. It depends also on what kind of network operator we're talking about. There's tier ones like bt, but there's also small operators that don't necessarily can afford to invest in their own telco cloud. So if they want to go as they want to go into the cloud and take advantage of that, they usually use the public cloud and at a little bit more audacious because BSS is a mission critical software and we know that operators not always feel comfortable with a public cloud, especially there's privacy and data issues with all of that. But in general what we see is that the smaller operators are driving that adoption of the public cloud and they're taking advantage of the agility that comes with it. And of course because you adopt the public cloud, you can actually focus on what is the BSS function, which is bringing agility on creating pricing plans and then go to market and then you get marketing teams that can do that without worrying about the actual infrastructure. And in terms of the actual evolution, we've been 20 years. So of course on-prem was the way it was done.

Nowadays what we see is that the 10% of our pipeline of opportunities are still on-prem, but that's going to die very soon. Those kind of unique cases, 65% is actually private cloud and 25% is public, but that 25% is growing and is growing fast. So what I foresee at least from a BSS perspective or IT overall environment is that public cloud will become the default choice. I think the smaller operators are driving that, especially because as I said, they can't afford their own telco cloud.

I mean I think you've got to look at it through three lenses, don't you? It's that control where do you need absolute control? And we are not going to put mission critical applications in the hands of someone else. We run the 9 9 9 service for the uk. We need to have real control there. The second bucket is quality. How do you drive quality? And you can drive quality both public and private, but what are your KPIs that you're looking at to drive that quality? And then the third is cost. If you can run a use case in the public cloud cheaper than you can run it in the private cloud and you've met the other two criteria, then that's what you do. However, not all use cases are cheaper to run in the public cloud than in a private cloud. So I think you've got to get those balances right.

And this brings us quite neatly onto what exactly would an operator do with a private telco cloud and where does it make sense? Is there a clear and obvious way to think about the types of workloads that would run on a private telco cloud? Are we talking here about key service orientated systems like a content delivery network platform? 5G core obviously has been mentioned and you mentioned that as well, Greg and customer data and you mentioned the Kaylee there about there are sovereign data issues here, but are there some real obvious examples? Maybe we can start with you Greg, and get a few examples of what you think runs best and well for the customers and makes the CFO happy as well in terms of being able to deliver profitable services to customers leveraging that network cloud platform.

Yeah, so Ray, I think sometimes we get the weeds of the technology, which I think is what we're talking about. Our customers don't care whether we service their product through the public cloud, the private cloud or some appliance. They

League. Yeah, all they want is they want the best network, they want the best service and they want the best products. So I think when we look at it, it's not really thinking about too much more than how do we deliver an outstanding outcome for our customers? And sometimes we know that latency is really, really important. So we try to put those applications of those network functions closer to where the customer's going to be consuming them. So that is a good use case. You talk about CDNs, we in a number of discussions right now with CDN providers around could we leverage the compute that we've already deployed to host some of that capability because we know that that is the type of thing that is closer to the customer. But equally I think we've got to think about the network intent and what we're trying to achieve and then work out where best to do that rather than the other way around. Yeah,

I think it's really interesting to the performance discussion. We've had this mantra in IBM of slow is the new down and it's really interesting when you think about that from a customer facing application perspective. If you have a three second delay in a response time, there's a 56% drop off in customers. So if that's your main webpage or your provisioning system, then that's a problem. Conversely, if your website is just 0.1 of a second faster, there's a 10% uplift in sales as a consequence. These are fascinating statistics that for our customers are just driving the obsession with performance. And so to that kind of where do you place the app, then that most often is the primary consideration for anything that touches a customer.

And there's also the consideration here as well for if you're delivering, and we heard earlier about the importance of low latency during the API session and if you're going to be able to deliver low latency services, then you're going to need a distributed cloud, aren't you? There's going to lead towards edge deployments, isn't

It? Right? I mean another thing to think about, no application is an island and so you are only as good as the slowest link in that. So if that application has to call a backend database that takes two and a half seconds to respond, then that's why your application is now slow. So it's not just where the application lives, it's what else it has to talk to in order to function. And that complexity can be quite mind boggling. In fact when you think about how many different ways your systems are connected together. And so understanding that and managing that in real time and making sure that you are managing obsessing over the latency for every single one of those connections that app needs, that's what you need to focus on.

And Merko from a cult perspective, you've got this platform, you have customers, how does a company like Colt go about monetizing what it has in terms of its cloud assets and the kind of services it can deliver? Is it, well, I mean what kind of services are people looking for in 2024?

A couple of examples again has been fixed network operator. SD one has been massive success over the last few years. We run our SD one core and also our edge, some of our edge deployments for customers in our own private cloud. That is how technology has been built natively works very well also allows you to get in proximity of the customers. So often the customers, and I'm talking about locations here more than actually sitting in the public cloud, but running from data centers, you can deploy edge endpoints for SD one in proximity of where the customer actually wants to terminate the traffic. So it's also that location environment where you actually deploy in proximity of where the customer needs to be. So that's one example. The other example I'll bring up is network as a service. We built a control layer for our connectivity services, which runs again from our TechCo cloud, allows customer to consume services in on demand fashion, real time wherever we have capacity, which is many, many data centers and keep expanding that capability. There is a way to monetize and it also changes how do we charge customers the actual consumption model move to as a service, more usage base than you buy and pay all in one goal. So those are a couple of examples. Been significant successful with that model. So it's growing quite fast.

I was just contemplating, I was contemplating if we view what we're speaking about on this stage as a profession, so a cloud native professional and you're looking at the landscape of how to do that the best way then I think cloud native is not to do with infrastructure, it's to do with the applications and lifecycle deployment and management of it. So then not all applications are the same. We agree with that and the workloads are different and obviously then they have characteristics that must tell you where their placement is best. So some of the characteristics that have immediately jumped out to me in the past is if your application has complete predictability in load, it's always running at the same load. It's consistent and that's a good place to put it on private infrastructure, no point in renting a flat if you can buy it, if you're going to live there 365 days a year, no point in doing that if the application isn't changing very much, if it's highly static and it doesn't require any other services.

So there's no agility built in. Again, great for being kind of on that core infrastructure. A lot of the core applications in telecom hit those requirements and also for other reasons are very suited to private cloud. Now if you are experimenting, if you are trying to launch a new service and you have no idea, it can go from one to a million overnight. Public cloud is really good because you only pay for the opportunity and time, but make sure you can get it back if you need to because there's a great saying that we have that says failure is really cheap in public cloud, but success is really expensive so you pay a lot forever. And then the last thing that just to add almost a BP oil spill in all of this, and we haven't mentioned it once on this part, I thought

IT AI and data is a game changer. So data gravity suddenly we maybe come onto to this time.

We are going to come onto this in a moment, but I want to come to the audience to see if we've got any questions, but I want to come to McKayley first as well just to maybe comment on what Jeff just said there about a cost because we hear lots of different anecdotes

About the cost. Yeah, if you look at the BSS, it has that mission critical aspect of it, so I understand what Greg is saying, but on the other side it needs the agility that we were talking about and you want to try out new plans and usually an operator takes what, six months to come up with new plans because it is a problem. You have to ask them the ability to do that and the billing team and so on. Now if you want to become agile and launch new pricing plans and meet new promotions and then maybe you decide that actually it didn't work out, you want to take it out and you want to try something else, well that's where it's all happening in the BSS area. So BSS should be agile and should be capable of supporting that and the cloud is definitely the right environment for that. And of course us as providers have to be cloud native in order to support all of that. Yeah.

Okay. Now I think we do have a question one at the back here and another one at the front two. Put your hands up and let our colleagues know. So we'll start at the back there. If you can state your name and your company

Francis has Apple Research. Greg, good comment you made about your team needing to become more aware that they are a system integrator. I wondered, and it's across all the panel, one of the challenges that I'm a former vendor and you find that a lot of relationships with a telco are a bit of a zero sum game in terms of offloading of risk, offloading the manufacturer. And I just wondered as you move more to a cloud, a sort of cloud approach to this, a more system integration approach, are you finding not just that you're acting as a system integrator, but you're finding that the relationships, the ecosystem that you're having is changing in terms of the commercial environment? Is it driving a change and I wonder what the others are also seeing in terms of that rather than just being a kind of it's all your fault.

Yeah, I think it's a really good question and what we saw is a reluctance to change initially both internally and with our vendor community expecting us to build this kind of cloud environment and then we can just put applications on top of it and they would just all work and it'll all be fine just to bring it to life. The model that we ended up with is we had an ongoing, we don't call it a war room, it's not really a war, but a war room

Going 24 7 that basically it was an ongoing teams channel that basically all the vendors and everyone within the ecosystem could ask any question at any time of the day. And that's how we started to make real progress. People started to talk to each other and what you've got to recognize is the majority of people, regardless of what company they work for, they want to do a good professional job and you've got to create the environment where you can do that. Now that does lead you onto the kind of commercials, but fundamentally what we got to was we all have to be successful. The enemy isn't between us and the vendor. The enemy isn't between two vendors working together. Fundamentally, it's an industry as we said earlier where we are not awash with a massive growth other than on data which people don't pay for. So what we have to do is find better and more cost effective ways of the whole ecosystem working together. And I think we've broken through that to be honest. I think we've got great relationships with all of our vendors in the community and the relationships we've got is people are looking out for each other to make each other successful rather than to prove that they're not the ones that have caused the problem, which is where we were probably four or five years ago

And I'd just like to complete a thousand percent, that was the Rakuten experience, getting people into a room and everyone said we're going to make this work and the goals that they were set were traditionally insane. The moment people came together and it felt it was weird because you didn't have management of risk on paper, it felt riskier to some people, but it's not the risk kind of disappeared and then people felt that and then you get this flywheel. It is a real interesting human almost like experiment of how people forget kind of the problems and they look for solutions suddenly.

Okay. We have a question down here. If you can state your name and your company.

I'm Fred Ani from Tele Argentina, and just one question that came across is about the dependency on the cloud software in particular that you're using. In particular, what is happening in all the other industries? I don't think it's the same in the telco industry, but about VMware problem and it is going across every industry and I think what happened is that problem happened with AWS software as a service, not the cloud provider or maybe other one. And if you rely too much in one or the other. And what is the impact in VMware specifically because it's a real problem VMware right now. That's a question to everybody and other here.

Yeah, if I may, we'd see across different industries. Exactly that point of it is becoming a legal requirement to be in multiple clouds. The banking world is going through that right now. Every industry is thinking about resilience and the challenge with that comes to complexity because if I have to run an application in AWS and Azure or IBM Cloud and Oracle, then I now have this challenge of how do I normalize that and make it simple and which users go to which cloud because I can't just have one in backup. I have to run them both simultaneously and share. And so there's a journey that most of our customers are on what I would call cloud normalization, which is how do I take an application and run it on private cloud, run it on edge if I want to run it in AWS, run it in Azure and normalize that. You can imagine that the hyperscalers are not too keen on that idea because it commoditizes their cloud. But the reality is regulation is forcing the move to normalization and as a result there's a whole host of tools, some of which IBM provide that are enabling that normalization work to take place and allow the migration of applications in and between all these clouds.

I would add to that, I mean in general if you look at the specific of VMware, it's kind of like the same across all technologies. As a large operator, you have to have a dual vendor approach as a minimum. So you have also multi-cloud approach. I think I a hundred percent agree what Andrew said about portability of applications. We're not there yet. In the short term, most of us run dual stacks, so you have to be able to have a backup plan when something happens with one of your vendors.

The final word I'd say on this is it is about having optionality and I think that's what a harbor cloud approach gives you is optionality and VMware remain a strategic partner of ours, but there are some use cases that it's better for us not to run on VMware to run on either private or public cloud.

We are getting towards the end of the session and I do want to make sure that we address what Jeff very neatly called the oil spill situation. And this is to focused on what kind of impact has the emergence of generative AI had on telco cloud strategies because this is the kind of scenario where the traffic volumes could get massively out of hand and have lots of other implications as well. There's lots of talk about the energy implications as well and the chip vendors are all scrambling now to try and mitigate this. But we'll maybe start with you Jeff, as you already mentioned it in the past year, what's happened? How can it be dealt with and what have we learned?

I think I'm actually friends with the chief privacy guy at Uber. If we want to know how to design this, it's a good idea to go and look at the massive scale internet companies and just watch their journey. And what I think we'll discover is that they've built a network to support the operations of their network. So there's a separate data network that just is there dedicated to collect and distribute telemetry data across the whole operation. And the volumes of that data are mind boggling. Now, we always claim in telecom that we have this data, but really it's exhaust fumes. It is not machined, industrialized, prepared or managed as a complete system and that's what you need to get to. So we were fortunate in Rakuten because we built everything up from a distributed data center point of view. So it already has that kind of flow of data gravity to the data centers where the functions are and we collect it all back.

The second part though is that we do use public data sets for the automation services that we actually do and some of the modeling that we do. So we actually ingest that into almost like a private cache that we run our models on in the real time. And if it gets blown up, that's fine. We'll repopulate the cache over time, but the design of that data network is not something that you again leave by chance. It's a system driven operation and it really drives then from that point of view, it drives the center of gravity. If you want to start doing self-driving networks, then that data has to be in the network. It has to be where the network is because you haven't got the latency or the time to actually bring it to different places. So it's a discipline again, in its own right. It is fascinating and when you work at that scale, I mean that's, that's how we would get 20 something joining our industry to be honest, be so turned on by managing that amount of data at that scale and doing things that are that important. If we started marketing it telecom a bit that way, I think we'd get a different recruitment company.

Greg, what kind of in the past year, I'm sure there's been asked probably lots of times, how are you using AI to improve your processes, but at the same time you are probably seeing some interesting traffic statistics movements as well and how's that playing out and how does having the cloud platform you have enable you to do things better? Or does it not make any difference at all?

Well, I think Jeff makes a great point. I think as telcos we've undervalued the brilliance and the vast amounts of data we've got and we haven't used it either to monetize that data nor to improve our operations well enough. So I would start answering your question, but our network cloud is quite a vast estate. We've got seven control plane sites, 10 user plane sites, and two tool sites over 30,000 BGP entries. So you can't manage that unless you're collecting all the data and you've got all that data in real time and you've got that data where it's timestamped and you're not working off old data. So I think from a mindset point of view, we've had to realize that data is the key to running this complex network and that has driven a different set of people have come in and they are then challenging us to say, you've got all of this data, why don't we use it to do different things?

And I think within our business, and I'm sure many other people, AI has been a thing for some time machine learning automation. But what we are now starting to do is challenge ourselves on the standard things we used to do. Why do we have to do them in that way and how can we use AI to drive it better? And I always think about gen AI as the kind of little angel on the shoulder of your first line operators where they can ask any question and they can get an immediate answer and be upskilled in real time. And I think that is really the killer use case that we can start driving.

Okay. And McKay, I want to ask as well, from your perspective, and this is just from a sort of a capability point of view, has optiva been able to take some of the potential that's come from the upsurge in Gen AI and be able to more quickly perhaps integrate that and make use of it?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, again, the BSS environment is very conducive for the use of gene AI in the sense that we have the data that you are talking about and the use of gene AI can do several things. One is again, helping out operators to understand what kind of products and pricing you can offer and specifically even personalize it for customers so that you can help out in understanding what could be the best offers and specialize on specific segments. And Gene AI helps you right away in doing that or it can help you in your operations. Again, in looking at how efficiently you can build these plans and come up with new ones and just even conversationally interact, it goes back to the marketing team that is using is the end user of this function. And again, maybe being able to ask what would be the best pricing plan and can you configure that for me and let's launch it tomorrow, which is a dream right now, but it could actually happen if you have a gene AI environment to support you. Okay.

I was going to say, I know we've been playing buzzword bingo for the last day and a half. The one we haven't actually used, if you familiar with your cards, is edge compute, which starts to come into the fore with AI as a mechanism of aggregating, collecting, responding. In this AI world, and I'll give you an example, at IBM, we work a lot with what we call quick serve restaurants, which as fast food restaurants and in the quick serve business, AI is a very important element because it's taking orders. So as you drive up or walk into a store, you can now speak your order in what might be three or four different languages and that will get interpreted and you don't want to have that compute if you put it in the cloud, it's too far away. So you need this low latency response. So there's an edge compute opportunity that's starting to play out in this edge. Compute will also be important for the aggregation of the vast amount of telemetry that we're talking about because you can't push all that upstream. And so you'll need in the same way that cdn, so the number one use case for edge compute right now, the inverse of collecting and aggregating and shrinking and normalizing that information will be the other key use case that will play out as a consequence of ai.

Okay, and MoCo finally has the past year, have you as COL had to kind of rejig its strategy to deal with the demands for these new and emerging applications?

Yes. So I second again what Tan just said here, we're looking at the opportunity of running inference at the edge and I would expand your questions to include machine learning. It's not just about gene ai, but it's the whole set of data that you can leverage to build smart solutions. End to yesterday we were talking about the fact that telecom is just a piece of the overall puzzle. So delivering outcome to customers. Think about combining connectivity with AI at the edge, maybe iot, which is a typical use case for the industrial environment. Creating that type of smart industry type of applications is one of the opportunity. Then maybe going back to operations, I think I would like to offer another perspective is about how do we manage the data. What we're seeing happening and is a challenge is that we are collecting now data in multiple different places.

I think that the risk that we have is that we move from an environment we had on-prem where we databases scatter over the place with data, not in a good place to a model where we have multiple clouds with data all over the place again, and I think that problem hasn't been solved yet. We will like to avoid duplication of data. Imagine we collecting data from our CM environment, from our inventory environment and maybe sit on different clouds plus our TECO cloud. Think about how to bring this together is one of the challenges we have

And actually we're going to get a little bit into that topic this afternoon in the automation session there as well. But for now we are out of time for this particular session, so we do need to end the discussion there. But before we end, we're going to take a look at the poll results we got so far. Just a reminder, the question we asked was, which should be the lead choice for hosting network workloads? And here is how the voting has gone so far. Perhaps predictably, hybrid cloud has come out on top, but private cloud 29%, I dunno, that's a bit higher than I thought I have to say. And public cloud obviously still quite application specific it would seem at the moment. So thanks very much for voting there. Just a reminder as well that these polls aren't closed, you can continue to vote on the telecom TV website. So that's the end of our sixth session. We're going to be back this afternoon at 2:00 PM UK time, 1400 hours for session seven, which is improving network optimization through automation. In the meantime, for those of us here in Windsor, we have a nice lunch break, which is going to be served in the foyer. And don't forget the pinball and the all important charity tournament. Remember, this is your last chance. The lunchtime break is your last chance to get your high scores into Alex. And

Cup awaits somebody in this room. I mean, who wouldn't want this? You can touch it. Greg,

Just before we finish, can I make a public announcement? So SpaceX is launching Starship in about three quarters of an hour broadcast live. So while we've been solving cloud, like Elon's launching a rocket, see if he can get it actually back to earth. So if you want to watch that, that's on their website, about 20 past one.

Okay. You can be having your lunch and watching the next generation of internet Connect

Now for our online audience. Don't go away. This isn't the end for you. As we're about to start our next extra shot program, Sharla is going to be discussing the issues around Telco cloud with her guests. So don't miss that. Stay with us. But for now, let's thank Greg as our co-host and our panelists for this session. Thank.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

So welcome back. This is session seven, improving network optimization through automation. I mean automation has been a mantra in telecom for about a decade already and the drive for further efficiencies in the network along with data traffic growth is accelerating. Automation strategies, advances in AI are enhancing the opportunities, but further developments are still needed such as a unified approach to data collection and management along with improvements in energy efficiency at the same time of course adoption of disaggregation and open networking risks, adding complexity here. So we're going to get onto all of that in just a few moments without expert panelists. But first it's time for a quick one-to-one chat with one of our guests and I'm delighted to be joined on stage by Vish Maur, who's global head of engagement at the Telecom Infra Project. Vish. Great. Thank you very much for joining us Match. Of course, the Telecom Infra project known mostly as TIP, isn't it? Yep. That's what people talk about. Yeah, and Vish TIP has been incredibly, it's eight years, eight years Tip's been around and like the industry, the organization has evolved as well. Can you just give us a quick overview of its main areas of focus right now?

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks very much Ray, for the question. For those who don't know who TIP is very quickly, I know it's been around for eight years, we're also a trade association like the GSMA. We have around 150 to 200 plus members, organizations from telcos, startups, OEMs, system integrators, et cetera. The core focus and mission for TIP NOW is really trying to make sure that we can industrialize and scale the adoption of open desegregated network solutions and build on top of that so AI-based solutions or showcase the way these reference implementations can be scaled out. So what's happened now, right now in 2024 TIP is now in a place where it's just trying to create the structure to make sure we do that industrialization and do further innovation. So a few changes that have happened just very recently, our board, which has consisted of mostly emea, tier one telcos and Intel Dell and Meta, we just recently added Rob Sony from at and t to the board, which helps to generate a little bit more of a global cross section of understanding and strategy and that governance flow down is coming through into our technical committee, the IE, looking at future direction of these types of technologies and then into our programs as well.

So to answer your question there, the focus for TIP going forward is on five main areas. One which is continue to be one of the key areas is around open ran and we'll talk a little bit about how that's going at the moment as a community. So 50% of our membership is very much around open ran focus and that's a spillover into another program called Telco ai. Everyone has got AI in their language, but when you look at what we are hearing today from the first panel with a use case or demand generated ideology of services creating requirement for networks to perform, TIP is basically a community looking at what those reference architectures can look like in the telco AI space. Three other areas is around disaggregation in wifi and that's become quite a strong development path for a community of ISPs, cloud control providers as well as access point developers, hardware manufacturers on an open source code base.

So we talk about that and the other two areas is around transport, so fixed and mobile or wireless optical IP transmission. There's quite a bit of an abundance of change in that space where disaggregation between hardware and software is actually generating a lot of GA solutions in that space. And then finally not mentioned quite that much today is around neutral host and shared infrastructure. So there's a strong cohort of Tower cos and infrastructure providers, sis, and maybe the Garner example is one of those. But there is a really strong community and interest to try and leverage passive infrastructure and start to develop value chains and business models for densifying urban areas, not just rural but urban areas as well as private networks or in-building requirements. So those are the five main focal programs and a governance change et cetera

Around that. Okay. So obviously in recent years we've seen desegregation shift from in many instances from the planning and test and trial stage into actually deployments, whether that's in the RAN or in the transport side of things as well. How has TIP'S role evolved as things have shifted from PowerPoint plans, tests and into actual commercial networks?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean there are two, well three main things. One is there's an abundance of examples out whether it's on the ran, whether it's in transport, et cetera, where telcos or ISPs are really driving forward their own deployment plans. So they're coming to TIP to surface those and we're using those as reference points for the rest of the industry to see what is possible. So a lot of this is about trying to promote and to educate, so use TIP as a channel to do that. So our member community does that. They showcase blueprints, they showcase how vendors have come together and actually shown that there's deployment and integration and lifecycle management happening in those deployments. The second is actually trying to work out what is needed and what is the gap in the industry to build a bit more confidence. And so TIP's focus and has been for a couple of years we talked about something called Scope in MWC couple of years back, but actually our focus is on system level testing. So for that to happen, that requires a good understanding of what performance criteria or test criteria required to ensure that a multi-vendor system can be deployed, can be operated, and can be managed. And actually it's not just about feature parity, it's about performance as well. So what we tend to do is looking at the whole system in that regard. So secondly, beyond just test plans and test criteria, there needs to be capacity in the market for where testing can occur. So a lot of that can be in operator labs or vendor labs, but what we're trying to do is offer a service to those demand side players in the sense that rather than putting all the investment into their labs to have capable infrastructure and test capability, let's look at some neutral test environments to do that. So TIP is actually now focusing on developing a global federation of capable high capacity test labs and these are members of TIP who offer that as a service and then finally actually is catalyzing more deployment, et cetera. So some of the governments out there are interested in not just doing investment into labs but also seeing actual deployment. So we're working with some of the influential governments to release some catalytic funding in certain key strategic markets to drive forward more work and deployment.

Okay. And then can you just talk briefly about the importance of a harmonized approach to data structures in digital service provider networks and how TIP is working with its members here? And that's pertinent to what we're about to talk about, but this is something that you've been looking at, isn't

It? Yeah, absolutely. I mean there's two areas or two domains that we've been trying to look data and what sort of data structures are required. One which is a little bit more mature is around Rick and X apps and our apps and automation and optimization around workloads. Of course there are great, the big exam question is how do you get access to operator data? So through trial working with operators, we are focusing on particular use cases and applications and showing not only the ideology of integrable R platforms and applications, but also then looking at testing those in real world scenarios and ensuring that when applications are put into the network that they can be leveraged and the data makes sense in that respect that the new aspect where we are going in this telco AI project group which has just been started by Deutsche Telecom, Nvidia and Intel and a few other operators is then now looking at, and sorry, the other one, we are looking at digital twins as well.

So we're wondering whether there's a need set for digital twins capable with test labs, the telco AI project group just started up, that's where time will tell what will that look like? What are the use cases that will be generating a need to look at reference AI architectures or distributed compute architectures and what are the data requirements around that? Long short is we're an industry body, so we are looking for harmonization of approaches, so guidelines on how data should be leveraged, especially within the regulatory landscape, but also how do you actually bring enough data to start to develop out a marketplace of applications, et cetera. So we're still at the early stages on that,

But we hear so much we've heard it the last two days, but hearing a lot more about the need for real industry collaboration, the only way that a lot of these problems are going to get solved and TIP is one of those bodies that's helping that to happen. Yeah,

We're part of the equation. I mean we're certainly where maybe the GSA sits very much in the telecom operator space and looking at demand side requirements TIP can focus in on not looking at standards but actually looking at referenceable architectures that can be leveraged in the network to expose capabilities. So the world is moving towards this service oriented place environment and we all want a piece of the action and piece of the pie, but we need the ecosystem to come together and harmonize set of requirements.

Okay, excellent. Thanks very much Vish. Let's give Vish a round of applause please for bringing us up to speed with TIP. Now don't go anywhere ish because you are sticking around with us for our panel session now as ever, we need to bring more chairs onto the stage. So we're going to have our final video montage while we rearrange the furniture and invite our next panelists onto the stage. And this video is hot off the press, it's from last month's open RAN summit. So roll VT as they say.

We have started deploying open, ran in 10 turbine areas, pretty much urban environment where we have highly loaded site, which gives us a real picture of how Open RAN is performing in terms of KPIs and customer experience and whatnot. And we've been pleasantly surprised to see how open RAN is at par and in some aspects even better than traditional RAN technologies.

When we start using the power of AI and machine learning, the Rick is in a perfect position to exploit that power. And so as time goes on and we start launching better services and optimizing the network, that's where the R becomes essential. So right now, no we don't need it, but in the future, yes we do

Deployment of open RAN and its introduction in our networks will be gradual. As the Brownfield operator, we are very demanding requirements and also introduction of open RAN comes with some impacts in terms of operation, which requires also lots of upscaling on our site.

We need to disaggregate, we need to decompose the RAN software because if you want to run AI automation, you want to run the workloads in terms of CICD DevOps, you cannot do a monolithic kind of architecture.

We will see the deployments scaling in the Brownfield environment as the renewal cycles are coming and of course by then it is important that we are able to move to the horizontal model of architecture and break the silos.

Okay, excellent. So time to get into our panel, but as ever before we talk about improving network optimization through automation, we need to remind everybody that this session has a poll one question, three answers. You can only pick one as ever. Here is the poll question, what will have the greatest impact on improving network operational efficiency during the next five years? As you can see three options, you can only choose one. Please go ahead and vote. You'll find all of the polls in the DSP leaders world forum section on the agenda page and we will take as ever a look at the results at the end of this session. So with that out of the way, let's welcome our co-host for this session. Diego Lopez, senior technology expert at Telefonica and an Etsy fellow Diego, you are a veteran not only of the industry but of our events here as well. You've been to a few, haven't you? Yeah, I mean that in the best possible way. Of course your experienced, but I think this is your first co-hosting session, isn't it?

Yeah, I think so. So well, let's see. I hope it'll be up to the expectations.

Of course, absolutely a hundred percent. And we have a great panel as ever to go with our cohost. So as ever we're going to get them to introduce themselves starting at the far end with Anita,

Faiq, Khan I'm part of Rakuten Symphony leading OSS global sales

Okay, excellent. Welcome everybody. So Diego, if you'd like to make your way to the lectin for the DSP leaders address

So well, when talking about this, my role of co-host, thank you to those who decided to bring me here. Well I was thinking about the idea of automation and what we are talking, still talking about automation when if you think about it, the ideas around automation, automatic closed loops, et cetera have been around, well basically for centuries they were considered before what at the end of the 19th century. And from that moment on, we have the transfer functions, the closed loops, et cetera. And what I think I'm thinking about it, the real difference and what is keeping us busy and when I mean us, I hope the whole industry, but at least my team in Telefonica is about our data, about how we guarantee sustained and trustworthy data flows that can be properly interpreted by the control elements and that can reach properly reached the controlled elements as well.

So the idea is that anything, you have to think about it, what is important thing that we require to have proper automation to take advantage of automation while we deploy and operator networks should be about guaranteeing that those data flows are as they should be, they should be because everything else should be from the point of view of the operators should be exchangeable. Whether we are using an algorithmic control, we are using ai, we're using whatever other technique that comes in the future, what we own, what we have and we can generate. And what we can't control is the data that we are feeding it and the data, let me say on this because control actions are no more than data. The data that we extract for the processing of the input data they do this is very important when you think about these data flows is that to consider this bidirectional nature a control action is data, data coming out that has to reach the plant, what is being controlled the same way that the data that the plant produces a product of the measurements is aggregated, combined, et cetera, for being consumed by the element that is controlling in the closed loops the same way we have to translate this outcome in something that makes sense.

You think about it, the flows are the same in different directions and the processes are totally the opposite. In one case, we are aggregating, in the other case we are somehow aggregating, but it's important that everything is the same and we are working on making sense of those data in both directions. If you think about it, these data flows define whatever it has to do with a control loop apart from sure of the loop itself. That the loop itself has this definition that as I said, has more than two centuries of age and it does define the loops and cells, what they are connecting and the lifecycle. When you activate a loop, when you put this into actions, when you connect the loop with the appropriate data flows is what the law, whatever mechanism for composition that is essential in any system that is of a reasonable complexity and networks are whatever you want but is extremely complex and heterogeneous, whatever pattern for composition of the control loops, whether you want to build a hierarchy, whether you want to build a federation, whether you want to build any kind of cooperation mechanisms, requires again flows of data of different natures.

It's not raw telemetry data. We can talk about exchange of knowledge, we can take about exchange of models themselves, of parameters, whatever, but we are talking again about the flows of data and finally they percept something that I believe that in particular with the current trend towards the use of smart controllers, AI controllers, gen ai, whatever is more and more important that is about how you control essential properties that are related to things like for example, being able to authenticate the data themselves and the sources of data authorize who can use the data and for what and providing something that is equally essential that is accounting so you can know who use the data, what the data was used for. And so sustain goals related with explainability of being able of analyzing why something happened, some decision was taken, tracing it back to the reasons and tracing it back to how data was provided during the execution or during the training is the same.

We are reusing and the idea is to trace the paths the data are traversing and the sources of those data and being able to trace them back. Equally important is for whatever we need for doing some debugging, validation, evaluation of any model of whatever, what we need again is data. Is data that we can rely on is data that we can manipulate and that is available at the right time and at the right place. With this in mind, sometime ago we started a few projects on this. We have been working on these things since we started to deal with automation and with the goals of the different generations. We started this with our 5G original projects. Right now we are running two projects that are very much focused on aspects regarding with this warranties on provenance, on access control et cetera is a project that is called robust and we have in another project we call it horse in which what we are running is and defining is how we can define what if scenarios based on evidence, based on data. So we can evaluate in advance as well which is what could be the impact of a particular automated decision on the network performance and characteristics. And with this I will close here, I think that we have, I hope I have led some ground for further discussion and just let me remember when making the notes for this. That reminds me a comment I read sometime ago about councilor of a politician about the economy and well just translating it just remind that it is the data stupid. That's all. Thank you.

Thank you Diego. Interesting project there to looking at the implications of what happens if you try to automate something that I think people must have been delving into for quite some time and still trying to figure it out. But I want to come to our panelists now, find out if anybody has a question for Diego following those opening remarks. Fine.

So thank you Diego. This was very insightful. I'm not going to try to be controversial. Maybe if we take a step back and talk about nobody is going to go away from the importance of the data you mentioned about getting it in the right way but why automation? Why go with this whole journey? I still believe that maybe we are in other sessions also covering this point but not really coming out and I wanted to ask you, what's your view on this that what are the KPIs, what are we doing this for? I mean if it's for the sake of automation or if it's really for the sake of measuring true KPIs around how this closed loop functions or automation is really changing something, is it really about resource optimization in a meaningful KPI? Is it really the real end subscriber achieving the true result of this automation? I believe we all want to achieve that and there's no doubt about it, but are there really measurable KPIs in our organizations and operator environment is really measured on that or it goes back to the traditional KPIs we always measured on.

Well frankly just think about it at the end what we're talking is about another kind of data. We were talking about the telemetry data that you input, the control data that you output and then there will be some kind of effectiveness data that we had to make by comparison is another data flow and this is something I will use and not talk about only two data flows. I will if you allow me, I will use talking about the three data flows for sure. That's very important. I mean measuring what is the impact that we are achieving with automation. Taking into account that deploying automation has cost in several and taking this into account is something very quite interesting. During the lunch break I was talking with David, I don't know where he's, but we were talking about what the TM forum is starting to do on something that they call key ai, which is key, which is the E four. I have forgotten it, but it is about how you can value not only the performance indicator but the effectiveness. It's about the effectiveness that you have on the, and that's really important and again it's about, it's very, well it's not exactly metadata because metadata is about something else, but this about met information and knowing what, that's a very good point worth considering. Yes.

Okay. I'm hear about that in a couple of weeks in Copenhagen as well at the TM forum event. That sounds pretty interesting. Any other questions for Diego at this point?

I'd be interested to get your perspective on, you have all this data, how do you decide what data to focus on and what not from a perspective of looking at, we talked a lot about ai. Are there some natural AI tools or are we not there yet with the modeling? We have to have people look at that data?

No. What we are doing right now and something that we are starting with this application, something, I'm not going to pretend that we have AI and growth loops fully autonomous everywhere, but one of the things that we're doing is analyzing which are the features more than the data. I mean at the end is the data flow, but what is important is that you can derive features that make sense. We have several, well we have ran several experiments about which are the features for example make sense on guaranteeing that there is no congestion or identifying congestion before it happens. Right now we are running quite interesting experiments on whether we can get some early indications of a peaking energy consumption derived from the traffic, whether that's influenced like the share bandwidth that you're using or the size of packets, the number of packets, et cetera with some results for the moments are still, how to say it, not very definite, but identifying this is very interesting.

Anyway, what I think is important is when you think about a data infrastructure is the capacity of making it flexible enough that if you for whatever the reason you need to change the feature you're focusing in is something that should be doable with a reasonable amount of effort. The data is there and it's true during this morning somebody was mentioning that the amount of data that we can collect is something that well blows your mind and the idea making this selection is essential and having the flexibility of making this selection dynamically is essential. Okay, thank

Yeah, Diego, so Telefonica being an international company, what is your experience when you run those projects with regards to scalability and applicability to all the different markets and operations?

Good question regarding, no, I mean in general I would say that when it comes to the, let's say basic network behavior, and this is something that you can apply almost if you're talking about preventing congestion or protecting the network against attacks and things like that are something that is quite regular. Then you enter delicate situations when we're talking about data policies, when we are talking about rules about what is considered a personal information or not, what can be computed or not computed and that can be become tricky again and that's what calls is for. What we are trying to achieve is we refer to it as a data fabric and we are trying to apply techniques for semantic attribution of data so we can process it accordingly. It's tricky. It can be really hard when you even inside the European Union there are different rules. I know if you go to America that's something that can be really complicated. It's tricky and we are trying to build something that is flexible enough. I'm not saying that automatically will be working everywhere, but that Buddha allow people to adapt it.

Just imagine that maybe also the database is different so I don't want to ask anything what might be confidential for company information.

Yeah, no, no for sure. I mean there are things that we are not going to, for example, something that is for us is very important is when you are told by some vendor about I have a marvelous model, you can train it, give me your data, I will train it even with all NDA sign, et cetera. That's something that sounds a little bit and that's why for example, we are heavily working in synthetic environments. People tend to talk about now about digital twins. I prefer to talk about the synthetic environments because it's more than a twin or we try to make it, it's more than a twin or it's a twin on steroids. We are trying to generate data sets that makes sense. That can be useful for many purposes and normally are not necessarily realistic because they go beyond real situations. That's what we're trying to do. Okay. Sara Yuki? Yeah,

It might be not directly the optimization but the ones that are motivation to introduce the, there are automatic features, how to recover network in short time for the operators. So the era detection and the automatic recovery is I think one was the most important topic but the so that error during that happen so often hopefully. So that gathering the information is also that they're difficult in the case. So for that case, what point scheduling to improve that? No,

What we're trying to do is we are trying to identify mechanisms for early detection for identifying patterns that not necessarily mean for us and something and whatever the incident, something that when the incident is already happening and when you have already noticed this and the impact has already occurred, well everybody knows this and is well trying to recover takes time always. If you are able, and this is something that we have the impression that this makes sense is that if you're able to detect this ahead of the real impact that ahead even of the human capacity of the, and we are trying to reproduce this situation somehow. It's like having trained dogs that can smell something that is not detectable by humans but it's detectable by them. We are trying to do so because we believe that it's more equally important that this you are fast in your reaction is that you're fast in the detection the first step and that's what we are trying to do with all these synthetic stuff and these semantics. Okay.

So I mean it's obviously very clear all operators want to optimize their networks. Automation is going to help with that but you can't really automate without the right data sets and being able to manage that properly. So to come back to Daryl's point, I guess what sort of data lake for want of a better term do telcos need? How do they decide what they're going to work on? Or maybe I can put that question back to you Daryl, in terms of the experience or what you will have seen with the operators that you are working with.

Sure. I think from a wind river perspective, we're working with a lot of operators as they deploy ran at the far edge of the network and that's a disaggregated infrastructure so there's a lot of data that comes back on deploying but more importantly sort of data operations, what is the dynamic data that's coming back that allow us to automate certain functions around power utilization? We were talking about that yesterday and what we found is you can play with the p and c state of a microprocessor to save power, but it's the entire system that makes the difference. So you've got to control the software that's controlling the radio. So if you want from an automotive perspective, you've not got your foot on the petrol or gas pedal all the time, you're chewing up a lot of power. So we're looking at ways of actually leveraging that dynamic data that's coming in in order for us to provide insights observability to driving better network functionality and managing real cost benefits associated with a disaggregated more complex by definition environment that we're working on and we're seeing that become more interesting, a lot of operators and a lot of operators trying to figure out how they can scale that into other areas of the network

And Vish. Just to come back and clarify a point we talked about just before in terms of data structures, to what extent are you getting input from TIP members into what they're doing that's allowing you then to offer something back to the community?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean I'm just following on from what Daryl was saying, I think obviously RAN workloads are one of the areas that the TIP community's working on and the best results that we're seeing are very specific. Well and our app use cases coming out from the community, so we have 17 odd prioritized ones in TIP, but looking at energy saving cause optimization, slicing massive MIO beams, there are a number of applications that are being developed through an O RAN architecture and from that you're actually starting to see what the RF signaling and protocols are coming through the stack and how the application is onboarded and actually starts to have an effect on that RAN performance. The only way operators feel comfortable in testing that is in sort of a test environment that is controlled with R tests from VR V or Keysight et cetera, that actually generate the use cases in the real world scenarios to see the dynamic sort of results out of that.

That's what we're sharing in the community right now, but as I might be naive here, connecting the dots between what I've heard this morning through to now, if there is a model where telcos want to be a part of a value chain where they're generating or capitalizing on their network assets and generating service revenues and it might be B2B as Lauren was saying this morning, then there's got to be very specific use cases that actually then generate requirement for specific compute power in the edge and therefore data requirements as a part of that. I think yes, fair enough, there is data available but for an industry to scale at least 60 70% of those requirements through it so that you can actually generate some real returns in the industry, we've got to find ways to actually centralize that, aggregate it, anonymize it, make structures for actually exposing it, deal with market regulation policies, et cetera. So from a TIP perspective, that's where I see our member community wanting to go but time will tell whether we actually start to manifest platforms around that.

I build on that before I lose the chain of my thoughts? There's something I want to build on top of what Darryl said and we said are we saying that for telcos without open ran there is a real challenge in the openness to achieve the true automation because I asked this question because of course I'm little biased and have the experience of seeing the benefits of this in Raku and Japan. You look at the energy saving use case, you talk about it like the most common industry practices that okay, I can get it on the server levels on a data center or COTS level, but I mean truly what I learned in Rakuten Japan and open run environment that it is about the per user level and application usage and that is only possible because we had the opportunity to of course have the data in the most correct cloud native distributor environment, but the openness and I believe that this is a fundamental challenge to achieve the true use cases of automation unless we have that openness. So while I share this example, I wanted to ask again Diego and others that, I mean how are we intending to solve this without the slow industry adoption towards certain newness, which I know it's a big topic, we want to go there, we don't want to go there. It has its pros and cons. I'm not getting into that debate, but the openness remains a challenge to get the true benefit of these use cases. I don't know if dig or anybody else has any

Thoughts if I may the same way that open source doesn't mean free software. I would say that talking about openness in data exchange or even knowledge changes doesn't mean that you are providing all data that you can generate or all data that you are aware. It is true that we need some models or ways of sharing data but sharing data in the same way that currently I like very much the original idea around the internet, not what the internet is or what we call the internet right now is, but what it was thought of as a cooperating autonomous systems and the principles are around this good old protocol that is called BGP and I tell you what you can find behind me if you connect to me, I tell you what you can find and the cost in whatever the terms in hops or bandwidth or whatever it tells you the cost of reaching there.

It is the same. I can't tell you what I'm consuming or how much congested I am or whatever I tell you, I'm not exposing my data but I'm telling you what would allow us to collaborate. I think that that model should be applicable. We have made some experiments for different reasons because I had to do more with security and how much we were exposing. There is a protocol that has been standardized as well in the ITF that is colo alto that has the deal about exposing data about your topology and some measurements regarding your topology. I think that doing that way probably is a way to go. We have to define it and we have to guarantee provenance and integrity and things like that, but I think we have the bricks to build it.

I just wanted, we're going to come to energy efficiency specifically a little bit later on Anita. And I know that's something obviously that the NGMN looks at a lot, but you also do the NGMN does a lot of work around cloud native as well and obviously that comes back to automation and data use. Is there anything within the confines of the NGMN? Is this something that crops up that the members are asking the NGMN, can you look at maybe models around which data to collect from where and how to use it or is that not really within the domain as it were?

Yeah, good question. So not really looking into the usage of data. So we do have a network automation project up and running. It's focused on influencing upcoming 3G PP releases, but where we currently also continue our work is to achieve cloud nativeness and there is a strong belief that without being truly cloud native it'll be hard to automate, probably hard to impossible and therefore what we are currently discussing is how can we cooperate with other organizations like Tippo team Forum with regards to providing requirements for validation centers for assessment methodologies when it comes to autonomous networks for instance with regards to cloud nativeness of platforms. So that's something we are really keen to continue to drive in the industry to make it a reality.

What we're really seeing again over these two days is that nearly everything we talk about interlinks with everything else and you can't really do one without the other. And of course data is right at the heart of this as is security and I want to come to you as well to find out what NTT DOCOMO is doing. But I want to do in the context of a slightly broader talking point around the impact of network disaggregation and whether this actually makes optimization harder. We hear continuously from various parts of the industry that disaggregation it's complex, it isn't reducing energy efficiency, there isn't a lot of gains but of course from the supporters we hear that all of these things are happening. So is from Domo's experience in its radio access network is optimization, can that be improved through disaggregation? And I also want to get your thoughts on the data lake aspect. Is there a clear way about that Doomo has maybe about what data to collect and how to manage that?

Okay, so first back to the 4G because in 4G already introduced some functionality I think most of operator already into some features and from 4G actually we deploy as much vendor network that mean that we use a different vendor Z equip in the same geographic area and the gathering information from that. So each EOB and we do that optimization. So even though this a great or this much vendor network, we achieve that optimization like road balancing and our futures are defined as CGPP. So without standardization interface or standardization data, we can optimize the network. And as for the 5G especially open ran of course that CGPP define thats features and also that alliance define the use case and they also try to define that what data is needed to support those use cases. So with that data, even though the aggregated network we're using different vendors equipment, we can achieve that optimization and especially for the other energy saving, we may need to more information about the radio unit specification itself. That part is that sometimes not defined so we can control the policy but we don't know the detail, the sleep model for each RU so that case, so if that been provided some of detail, we can do that more optimization. But if that vendor provide just the standardized interface, not a hundred percent energy, other optimization can we try to do the work with our operator even though that so different business R you we use.

Okay, shame you weren't here first thing yesterday morning because Yago Tenorio was talking about some of the data they're getting back from their RFQ but unfortunately he can't tell us the details because it's an RFQ, but he was hinting strongly at some interesting data coming back from that process. Fike in terms of what's going on with Rakuten Mobile, what's the experience there in terms of optimization and automation? What lessons or what insights can Rakuten offer to other operators?

I think Rakuten story in itself has been revolutionary and in markets like Japan and Europe where Rakuten, Japan Mobile and with 1 0 1 corporation the biggest I would say the message is that to take the risk and accept possible consequences with it. I believe today in operator environment and C-S-P-D-S-P environment, there is a very risk averse mindset and which is the biggest limitation for industry to move as fast. We all would like it to move and that has been the cornerstone where that Rakuten was brave enough to share those experiences and bring that technology change. Again, I'll go back that we build and we were in the right privilege situation to build a fully cloud native environment which helped in the journey with the openness we had. But that has been the cornerstone in bringing the true automation and AI use cases which some environments struggle to achieve.

I'll build up on the same thing which we were talking about energy saving and it was something very interesting that the kind of percentage energy savings we were able to achieve because of the infrastructure we were able to build and the openness of the data by going on subscriber level and on application level to reduce the energy on pods rather than your traditional claims of other environments. Now as long as industry will, I appreciate what dig you said about the new protocols and standards being worked I appreciate, but I do find it challenging that with some of the proprietary infrastructure vendors we will always have this struggle because the openness is going to remain challenge. The automation results are not going to be what are truly beneficial to the true KPI needs of the industry.

Delta, I was talking about cooperation among operators because we are much more used cooperate with our competitors than our vendors. That's

Fair enough. Fair enough. I think that's the biggest message that there's a lack of acceptance to change and then possible learnings or consequences around it and I think the industry needs to be braver about it.

Can I just try and build upon this multifaceted issue but look, there are potential, if you think about the fact that we need to be addressing the challenge that a CTO of a national operator or a tier two operator is trying to face so that CTO sitting there being told by group or by CEO said, look one, you've got to think about disaggregation, create some choice in your RAN network. Two, I want you to drive forward some level of automation to get some real value out of your network and make sure it's optimized for the future. Three, hey everyone's talking about ai, you need to be user specific, start to generate and monetize your network. Three different things, challenges which as an industry to scale that out is massive and it's big. So if anything, let's just take the positives. There's some choice in the market.

You've got Rakuten Symphony, you've got rx, you've got Wind River, Dell, Samson Stack, you've got Avenir there, they are open, ran friendly, they're driving forward cloud native automated sort of scenarios. Should that CTO go and swap out a legacy network provider and try this out. Maybe not on my public or major network, but I'll give a discreet look at a private network play or something that is off the major network. Let me learn about it. Second is, can I actually start to drive forward some level of AI and automation? Actually yes, there's choice now in the market there are some open Rick players, there are some AI X apps out there that are probably more user-centric than our apps. Still a bit more standards to develop, but at least I can start to build a bit of knowledge, understand what data protocols and signals are coming through, understand the stack, how it integrates in.

But I'll do that in my lab in a controlled environment actually there might be my incumbent vendor might be creating ITSs, not going to share its data, their data with other players, but we might create a closed ecosystem there. So you're going to start to see that manifesting going towards actually driving a distributed compute strategy, putting edge cloud sort of strategy in play. That's where the CTO wants to be going. Are they ready to do that yet? No, there's still quite a bit to be worked through in the industry. It's a great challenge to have, but I think we've got to go step by step that CTO needs to feel comfortable and that's why TIPs, they're trying to get some reference architectures, blueprints models that are working well done to yago and getting a deal with I two CAT and getting a multi-vendor management system in play. Brilliant. We need to see more of that and we need to start not just talking about the science of this but actually get on of it and show some reference

Blueprint. And before I come to Dara, I just want to very quickly ask Fish. You mentioned there the RAM intelligence control of the RICK and the X apps and some of those tests and trials have actually been going on for about two years and some of the operators and things still don't seem to be coming out into the market despite what does sound like some quite significant optimization gains from some of those apps. What's holding stuff up there is how much can you give away from what

I think moving from trial to actual commercial deployment and scale does need to be a little bit more aggressive. I agree with fake. I think some of operators can probably take a step forward, right,

I think what the session, the first panel discussion yesterday was a testament like what we saw what's happening in Vodafone, but the way we said out of these three things, at least operator environment needs to take a leap of faith or aggressiveness at least on the two. The challenge is if you're going to keep playing safe, the true results will continue getting delayed. I know some of people will not agree with it, but that's Well the

What I'm thinking is that I would not say that this industry is or suffers more than of conversion than any other industry. I mean it is a big industry with many, many customers and many, many things that are critical. We didn't have that risk aversion when we deployed the first mobile networks. And in fact, when I joined Telefonica 10 years ago, when the mobile network architecture was already established, et cetera, to me to outsider the mobile network, it's not especially well architected if you think about it. Why? Because it was necessary to build the whole thing and the telcos were really, really bold in building this, making some mistakes for sure, but they made it right now you have to risk to a better risk because you have many important assets to keep and you have a very high price to pay if you make a big mistake. So when quickly decide ourselves, I mean in TED two, I always remember what Neils used to say that these industries has changed the world several times. Don't forget that. Well yes, when we are talking about let's try to invent a new network that is not mobile, it's not fixed, it's whatever. And then let's see if we have the risk aversion. Let's go greenfield.

Daryl, I know you wanted to come in there because you're working with some CTOs that are starting to take that leap of faith, right? Yeah,

I was just lamenting, I'm going to date myself here. I joined the telecommunications industry after being in the Royal Navy and the reason I did that 30 years ago, so I was going to date myself, I decided to go work for at and t and the reason I did it at that time is because at and t invented just about anything innovation was there skills? Were there people that I went to school with or university with wanted to be part of that then I'm worried about now because is the talent in our businesses have we outsourced so much to the traditional radio access or infrastructure vendors so they provide a complete solution so we don't have those skills to innovate and move as quickly. And that's a generalization topic some operators do and others. And now what I see to your point is CTOs saying hey, we need to get that back. We need to innovate a little bit more. We need to do disaggregation and move ourselves into uncomfortable spaces and learn again to fail quickly. We talked about that yesterday in order for us to do things. So we are seeing CTOs and operators that typically don't take those sorts of risks, wanting to take those risks because they see the opportunity to innovate will inherently deliver them competitive advantage and optionality in their own businesses and they're trying to do things differently. Okay, that's my perspective. That's what I've noticed and seen. Okay,

Now time is actually sort of getting on a bit and I definitely want to come to the energy efficiency point. It's already cropped up a few times, but also I want to see if we've got any questions from the audience as well. So if you do have any questions now is the time to put your hand up. We have people with microphones. Yes, we have one over here. If you could state your name and your company and who your question is for.

Hello? Hello, my name is Mo. I work around data AI automation and I'm from bt. My question is from Diego, as you mentioned about your early detection of incidents and events. Where are you at the moment in your journey? Because we are dealing with data swamps more than data lakes here and there and we have similar vendors, similar platforms, similar tools, and I want to know, do you have any experience that you can share here regarding the journey that you're going through to sort out your data before going to any other automation process?

Sorry, what we are trying to learn, what we're talking about early detection, what we're trying to learn is is we're making experiments to generate data sets that can be used to train systems that identify those early symptoms before a human can detect it and before the actual impact happens. How we do it is, as I said, we are trying to run synthetic environments in which we replicate conditions that normally don't happen. I mean well that when they happen in the real network are bringing us real problems. So for example, I dunno typical something that is typical is a massive distribute denial of service attack. When this is happening in your network, you don't have many occasions, you don't have any time even for collective data you simply has to reply to it. What we are trying is to train systems to detect those early symptoms and start applying countermeasures, whatever they are.

I mean typically when we think about anomalies we always are thinking about security attacks et cetera. But we can be talking about, well sometime ago I read that when these gangland style B video became so famous there was a overload in many places because people were asking like crazy for the gunnan style and the CVNs were not replying fast enough. That's an incident, it's not an attack. Well maybe it's an attack to good taste, but that's another story and this is what we're trying to do. We are trying to replicate to generate those data sets that are valuable because normally they are not, I mean they're not fully realistic because they have not been generated by the real network. But can help us in identifying this,

That you Well the idea is that if you simply want to detect the anomaly for sure you train the whole thing with normal behavior and whatever goes out that is an anomaly. We tend to go beyond that and try to generate situations that we know are going to happen and then trying to identify things that normally even for a very experienced operators are a little bit, well they are not part of their experience of the symptoms but they are a symptom. We are trying to identify that.

Okay, I'm going to move on to the energy efficiency point. This has cropped up a few times and essentially just basically ask can networks be optimized, automated for optimization and yet be more energy efficient because there seems like that could be a pretty tough set of things to put together. So Anita, I want to ask start with you because the energy men's been looking at sustainable network developments and trying to put some of these KPIs in place as well, which of course are very important. How can energy efficiency be improved at the same time as networks are automated and optimized?

Personally I believe yes, but we need to look into the details and what we are experiencing in our project. For instance, where different operators work together with different vendors that it's very hard to obtain reliable data points with regards to how much efficiency gains can be achieved and how much energy savings can we achieve. And there is still this big question, how much energy does the artificial intelligence consume? So if we use different models for network optimization, which also should lead of course or contribute to the target of zero what at zero load, the question is would we then just move the energy consumption to another place? So I think we really need to take a holistic approach here for being able to assess where actually we have the energy efficiency gains and where energy or in general power consumption is going down in total.

So looking at the overall picture and when it comes to KPIs, our recommendation was to link such KPIs always with quality of experience because I think that's something which is also holding operators back to launch such programs. Some are doing this very aggressively already now, but we heard also quite frequently that there is a danger that a user experience is damaged with different approaches and therefore I think quality of experience, a holistic approach with regards to energy consumption. Energy efficiency is really needed and also probably some form of KPI and source data normalization so that we can really rely on statements of different vendors, different operators, how much energy efficiency, energy improvements, energy consumption improvements can be achieved. It's very hard to assess the correctness of such data at the moment

And also which one wins out. You have to make that decision don't you? Exactly. Sad. Yuki, you mentioned earlier about some of the potential energy efficiency gains you were noting in your network. Can you talk a little bit more about that and how you see that progressing as data volumes grow? Will the efficiencies and the automation be able to mitigate that data growth against the power consumption that's required?

Yes. The topic dynamic changes, especially in the morning or daytime or so, we measure traffic and we control that radio unit accordingly. That is already operating both 4G and 5G. And so we see that. So the energy gain to introduce those futures in commercial network, because the setting KPI are little bit difficult. So not easy to estimate or not easy that the target performance because it highly depend on the traffic and also how much resource actually we have that and also it also depend on that. So are you type, so regulatory type is that the sweet mode is not so efficient? Honestly the latest one is that more efficient sweet mode, they help. So we have the characteristic of each area so we control, but basically we do that so simple operation like the town and TA and the base on the traffic and at this point we haven't achieved that.

So resource optimization especially is a basement part, but also introduce that the core server, we only introduce that more the resource pooling gain according to the traffic. Of course we share the resource among between the different south. So in that sense, some traffic is high traffic, some cell is a lot. Traffic in total seems average, but this also dynamically change according to that. So daytime. So that's actually, we already introduced in commercial. So I think that optimized energy saving is still that challenge. I mean that 30% or 40% is enough or not, is that, I can't answer. But we introducing those functionality and how we can more optimize with their additional algorithms. So that is current. So our network and I think it work even though they might be the network.

Okay. I want to come to you as well. I know that Rakuten's been looking into this pretty heavily. Of course you want to be able to take some of this experience international as Well

Yes, I think I've beaten on this point quite a bit earlier already, so I don't want to keep repeating it, but we take a lot of pride on the results we have achieved and we are taking it out in the industry. I'm very happy that we did talk about it in other forums and we'll continue to do so. We believe that this is where we can add to point earlier, Vish was mentioning as well, not only just from an open ran perspective, but other ways of learning where via Rakuten Symphony platforms we educate the industry and happy to take the positive results of that in the market and share experiences.

And Diego going to come to you for the final word here. Sure. This is something that Telefonica looks at and reports on its and data stats as well in terms of how it's doing on its sustainability journey. How much is the energy efficiency consideration bought into the work you are doing on optimization?

We are trying to bring, it is one of the key goals. I want to say that we are fully centered on this. We are taking into account other considerations and in general sustainability in its widest concept. Not only in terms of consumption of energy in a certain point of time as well about the reusability of the deployments we make and the fact that we are trying to contribute in a holistic view to our footprint in terms of consumption of resources. So this is very important and we are making, as we were saying about taking pride of that, how serious we are taking this.

Okay, fantastic. So we are almost out of time for this session, so we do need to end the discussion there. Let's first, before we end, let's take a look at the poll results. So far, just a reminder of the question we asked, which was what will have the greatest impact on improving network operational efficiency over the next five years? Let's see what came out transitioning to a cloud native architecture, got the biggest school, they were 49% deploying advanced AI and ML solutions, 40%. So cloud native ahead of AI and ml. That's very interesting. And leveraging SDN for dynamic resource allocation, 11%. So that's a pretty interesting, I mean, maybe we talked so much about the impact to cloud native here in the next few days. Everybody's like, yes, cloud native every time. Now this poll, as with the others, is still open so you can continue to vote and have an input there.

But that is the end of this session seven. There is one more to go guy and I have been talking over the past few days about how we're very focused at this event. We always want to bring it back to the customers and the final session we have is focused on that. We'll be back at goodness, three 30 in 16 minutes time, we're going to be back and focusing on the customer. So it's a short break. Just enough time to grab a coffee. The last chance to get the best coffee you're going to have this week for our online audience, we're about to start another extra shot program, so don't miss it. Please stay with us for now. Thank Diego, our co-host and our panelists. Thank.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

Well, welcome back. Welcome to the final session of this year's DSP Leaders World Forum. This is the final session. You have one more hour with us. This is the session that nobody wants to miss. I can see you all rushing in, dashing to get your coffees dashing from the coffee cart. Dashing to the chairs and welcome back to our online audience as well. Thanks for sticking with us. No progress report for this session. No video, no DSP address. This is just pure 100% discussion. So our guests today, Ray, are all members of the DSP Leaders Council. Do you want to say a few words about this August Institution?

Yeah, no, absolutely guy. I do. We know quite a few folks in this industry and there are some we know we can turn to for answers to some of the big questions facing the industry. So we thought, well, why not pull them together and ask them regularly about important stuff and invite them to talk about it through our channels and events like this one, and also to help them gain insights from each other. So we set up the council last December. Now we have almost a hundred councilors and a fine bunch. They are too, as you can see. But in all seriousness, we're planning to do more with the council for the benefit of the members and the industry at large, but without asking anybody for a big chunk of anyone's time because we know how precious that is and we're very glad to have the support of these lovely people. So I thank the councilors.

Yeah, indeed. Absolutely. Thank you, Ray. Well, let's quickly introduce our guests. I'm sure you know 'em already, but for the benefit of our online audience as well, if I can ask our guests from our far left with Neil to introduce themselves.

Good afternoon. Andrew Coward, general manager software networking at IBM,

When I said briefly a few words, thank you very much everyone. We have spent, as Ray said, we've spent the past couple of days discussing how CSPs can change and accelerate that change to DSPs and open up new service opportunities, unleashing digital service opportunities. And we scrutinize this process in a lot of detail tell, but we want to kind of flip the conversation a bit here and approach it from the customer's perspective because we always tend to talk about the customers in the panel and not in great detail. So here's our opportunity to think. Actually this is all about the customer surely. And I like to start off because I know you've all got strong views on this, but I'd like to start off by asking you do you think, whether it's consumer business or enterprise, what do you think the customer wants from A DSP? Not what the DSP wants to give the customer, but what do you think the actual customer wants from these operators? Would like to start us off, Susan. Hey Susan,

I want, let me make it very personal. I want an experience that solves my problems and whether that be multi household, whether it be multi people on the same plan, I have particular issues that are not being addressed today that I need solved from an enterprise perspective. I work with different family businesses and I can't navigate the website to find the solutions and I know reasonably what I'm talking about. So I can't imagine how enterprises managed to navigate this because the vast majority of them are not tech savvy enterprises. So I think we need to start to look at how do you take that customer journey and look at it. What is the problems that whether it be consumer or business have, what problem are they trying to solve when they turn to an operator? Because if they've got to that point, surely we must make it easy for them to be able to go and find what they're looking for in one packet rather than I need to buy this. Oh, Angie, then you need to have that and then you need to have that. Oh, but we can't put that all on the one bill because that's financed by so-and-so not my problem. That would be your problem.

Yeah, not your problem. You are the consumer. Shouldn't be your problem. Come on. I know we've got more thoughts about this. Jump in anyone. Sure.

So I think obviously at IBM, we pride ourselves in spending a large amount of time with our enterprise customers and indeed bringing them to telcos to solve the connectivity part of the entire problem statement that we're solving for. I think there's a massive disconnect between the languages that telcos speak and the languages that enterprises speak. Like that's saying telcos are from Mars, enterprises are from Venus. It's kind of that level of disconnect. Enterprises want the application supporting to the earlier conversations. They want to be able to manage the latency of that, the security of those things. And they want to understand it in application language, not networking language. The answer to an application story isn't how much bandwidth would you like? It's how can I improve the uptime efficiency and service for this application that is strung out across a global infrastructure. That's the conversation that's not been had. And I can tell you almost in a therapy session, which this is now turning into, this is deeply frustrating that we cannot cross that threshold and have that level of conversation with enterprises about their needs mapped to what they understand and not what telcos understand. And if we were to solve that over the next few years next year, then that would be a massive shift in how the industry is understood by enterprises.

I think so often we talk about the D and the S as a digital service provider, but quite often for customers it actually stands for dire service and that is absolutely not what they need. It's great that after 48 hours of our conference here that we are ending with customers. If we think about the panels over the last two days, actually there were only two other panels were actually the word customer when it meant the end customer came up at all. And if we think about that word customer and we break it down as an acronym, well the C will stand for complexity. Actually. The customer wants all of that taken out. They want it to be net easy for them. So the C in customer is all about reducing complexity. The U in customer is about understanding. It's about understanding their business, not our business, their lens, what is it that their business needs us as an industry to do.

The S in customer can stand for security and it can certainly stand for sustainability. And both of those have to be implicit in absolutely everything that we deliver. The T is transparency. Transparency in terms of the communication about what we are delivering, when we're delivering, when we are changing it, and actually being really clear about the service, the pricing and the billing as well. The O in customer is around optimization, optimizing everything. That's that performance, that's that flexibility, the scalability, but then also optimizing an evergreening with the customer. They don't want to know that you're going to upgrade them to the next service. It just has to be implicit by design. M is management, it's our responsibility, not their responsibility to absolutely manage it. Well, letter have I missed out in customer C-U-S-T-O-E-R, we've got an E and an R and the e Andrew's already talked about edge. Edge is absolutely implicit for APIs and real time data, but it's also around that experience. And finally the R absolutely about reliability. So we is delivering digital services reli. So there you go, customer as an acronym.

Well done Alex. Just to build on that, I think the key thing that you mentioned I was going to say is our customers want us to walk in their shoes and actually even more so the customers are trying to leverage things on the network. So I'm a gamer. I love to play games and I was talking to Geoff about this earlier on, the biggest challenge, and if you take video off the network, the next biggest thing that consumes bandwidth is video games. It is a massive industry and people love to play games as the casual gamers, as the hardcore guys. But ultimately I work because of my gamer. I went and found out who runs Epics network. I'm a big Fortnite player and I said, Hey, what can we give you that would make a difference in actual play from your customers who are also our customers?

And we talked about APIs and AI earlier. They said actually what would be really helpful is if we could have an API on the home gateway so we can see what's going on and that's walking in their shoes. And actually what they do today is if you've got kids or a gamer like me, you'll see the first thing that Fortnite says, don't play on wifi because it's crap for the most part because we as service providers put out these 20 quid home gateways when actually we shouldn't be investing in that as a thing into the house. And actually many service providers have done that, but I still think there's more to do. But if you're able to give an API, and to some extent this is a bit depressing because this is what telemetry was all about. And we started working on telemetry with Google in 2013.

The whole point of it was to give a weather map. Here's what the network weather looks like and we've used it for loads of other things, but we haven't actually given that visibility to customers. So in my mind, customers are using the network, what are they using it for? Who's the other part in that network connection? How do we work with both of those and working this part of the network user who's a customer and this part of the network user who's a customer and how do we walk in their shoes to make that experience something that actually they don't think about the network, which pains me to say that, but when people aren't thinking about the network, that's when life is working for them. And we've got tons of, we're talking about all sorts of wacky APIs on fraud protection and stuff like that. Don't get me wrong, they're valuable. We've got so many simple things. If we just gave visibility to it, it would make a massive difference for customers.

Yeah, so I'm going to gamble. I'm going to hope that my wife's not watching this. That's pretty safe bet. But my daughter is watching this, so I just want to speak out to her and say just what happens at telecom TV stays. At telecom tv. One of my coaching messages to people about successful relationships is to set the bar incredibly low because if you set the bar incredibly low to exceed that expectation is not that hard. Turning up just about makes people's day. The positive thing about our industry is expectations from customers are so low. It's unbelievable.

I just won a mobile operator or a telecom operator to just care about me slightly, just care about me slightly. And one of the most valuable customers they ever have. They've never even sent me one message or one phone call and just said, thank you. They don't care if their service works outside my front door, but I am surrounded by messages telling me that their 5G network is the best ever network on the planet and I'm in the industry and I don't care. It ties in to what we've all said, I think a little bit, and it is something that I'll give a call out to Chris, Chris Lewis about an interview he did at the Great Telco debate a couple of years ago with I think Philip Johnson, was it Jordan who used to work for Telefonica and now he was the CTIO for Sainsbury's.

He said, when you work for Sainsbury's, you wake up in the morning and you can taste the customer. If you can't taste the customer, they don't come in and buy things. They don't come in and buy things, you don't survive. And he said, customers to telco are an abstract concept and I think that's exactly how we treat customers. And I think if we could flip around and it is repeating everything that everybody said here, just try and understand the simple things that would help make the experience that we are providing slightly better and make us care, then I think you'll start to attach. So who started to rattle the cage a bit? In our industry over the last 10 years, the only company that changed slightly was T-Mobile, USA, nothing to do with technology. They made a very just very direct emotional promise and they said, we're going to just take the bullshit away. We're going to simplify it, we're going to uncarrier you. And they immediately have become just about the one telco in the world that's actually going into massive valuations, nothing to do with technology. It was trying to make a promise. And that promise, by the way, I don't think people really understood if that promise was delivered or not. They liked the idea of that promise because it spoke to them,

But yeah, they took the BS away and replaced it with another layer of bs, I guess. Well,

And that's what I mean, but let's go back to where I started. If you set the expectation really low BS that at least cares about you is better than bs, that doesn't maybe.

Well, yeah, and I was jotting some notes down at lunch and along your lines I was thinking, how do I get contacted by my service providers? My mobile provider contacts me if we only two things, one, I owe them money. Two, they want to send me something that I don't want. My full fiber provider contacts me for only two things. One, I owe them money, and two, they're about to plan a service disruption and I'm going to be offline for several hours and that's it. I don't get, how are you guy? I'd love one of those. Never had one in my life. Yeah,

I'm slightly nervous about sending out, Hey, how are you feeling today? We did that actually last place we did that in a survey was like, how are you generally feeling it? It became a bit of a laugh a minute. There was memes about it everywhere. But I think you're right about how do we treat customers as humans? But let me tell you, I'm going to focus on consumers for a minute because I think consumers are also people who work in business. So when they go into business, they kind of expect a behavior that they're used to from their own experience as consumers and they're so confused about what we sell, how we sell it, am I buying the right thing? And you go into 'em.

For the last year at Juniper, I've been traveling a while just trying to get a different perspective of having been 10 years in bt, is we all the same or someone doing something different? And across the world everybody's doing the same thing. You go and buy a sim and the experience is just, it's like filling your tank of petrol. No, how much do I need and what does this cost? And there's just very little in terms of, well, you watch Netflix every day, you probably need this. Or there's no thinking of actually what are you going to use our product for?

And then Geoff rightly says you set the expectation super low. I think I'm going to give credit to one company as well that I think has done a great job of improving it still work to do. But sky here in the uk, I've been a customer of sky's for I know 12 years and they do send me messages saying It's great to have you as a customer and did you know about this? And I really do think they've done a great job of turning customer centricity around. And by the way, sky own no network assets but are the number two network in mobile and fixed. Now I think in the UK that's pretty impressive. So it can be done, but I think there's more to do. But also I think the other thing we often do is customers expect telcos to give stuff away. We're going to give this away, we're going to give this away. And it creates an expectation of this is just stuff's just going to come. And actually I think we need to sometimes say, actually we're not going to do that.

Because quite often, and it's probably more on the business side, quite often there's a lot more expected than what's delivered, particularly if you go through a big procurement process. At least that's been my experience. And then again, being really clear and simple about what is this product and what does it do, what is it not going to do? But it goes back to I just think living in their shoes is crucially important. And I encourage you all this still sound weird, but going into one of the mobile phone shops and just watch for 20 minutes, it's insane. I go crazy. I know what I need to tell this guy, I want to tell him something. And then you've got some guy who's just like, Hey, I've got a target, I've got to hit the target. So I give that feedback. It's still email market bt, I was like I in one of your stores and heard this. Holy moly, he loves me for it, I'm sure. But if we don't believe it, I can tell you our customers in this industry aren't going to believe it.

There's quite a lot we can learn from other industries as well rather than being insular. If you have a look, I know you talked about retail and you look at what retail are doing in terms of loyalty cards and then using that data to find the intent behind the data. And there are some phenomenal startups out there who are using AI and data with the big retailers to be able to provide that insight to then be able to provide a personalized dialogue. And that personalized dialogue can be in the form of a personalized video. It can be a personalized email, it can be a personalized SMS. And I think that whether you look at pensions and insurance, actually again, they used to be in that realm of they might only talk to you once, but actually they've realized that you need to have a continual dialogue to be able to get that brand loyalty. And so I think there's quite a lot that we can learn from particularly retail and an awful lot from pensions and insurance as well.

Sure, sure. As Geoff said, and that video interview with Chris and Phil was absolute revelation and you can see it on telecom TV website if you go and find it, if you haven't seen it, it's well worth watching. Ray, should we move on because there's other ground we wanted to cover.

Yeah, absolutely. I just want to make one point just to follow up on a couple of things that were said there. You mentioned Sky Neil. I think in the uk, if you go back a little over 20 years and remember that Branson actually got into mobile in the uk, launched Virgin Mobile. It was an MVNO, they were on T-Mobile UK's network, and they got better scores for connectivity, reach, blah blah, blah. They were on better scores and it was the same network. Everything was the same except for the customer experience, but because the customer experience, because Branson invested in customer care teams, people thought the service was better than what they were the same service. And

That's still true today. Plus that in the UK it's exactly the same as bt. Exactly the same, yeah. They just have a different attitude when they talk to customers and it shows in retention, it shows in customer feedback, every metric they score better. Literally I built half of it. Every packet goes through the same thing. There is literally very almost no difference between

It. So maybe something to think about is just, and this is an ongoing every year, every decade, should service providers just be investing more in the support for their customers to give them a better experience. That might actually be a good, you might get a good return on investment in that. Just something to think about. But yeah, we do want to move on and go back and just come back to something that Andrew mentioned earlier, which is based on something that a question we got from the audience yesterday, which is about whether service providers really know how to properly communicate with their customers. And I particularly want to bring this into the enterprise realm here because there's a lot of instances where I think service providers, they talk about, oh, we spent time with this customer. We found out their needs. This customer, by the way, has a budget of about 25 million.

So of course they're going to spend time with 'em, find out what their needs and we delivered a package for them. Well that's great, you can do that for the big guns. But what about the thousands? No, the millions of businesses there are that need and everybody needs communication services. So what is the answer? We know that a good job is not being done to communicate with business users whether they're small, medium or even large. So what is the answer here? We heard from VM O2 yesterday, they're working with Accenture to get a better idea of what the enterprises need. But do we have any actual answers for how best to approach this enterprise challenge because this challenge has been going on for decades.

It has. So a lot of the time we're spending with telcos in their, what I would call their managed services business to enterprises, large and small is what I would call the democratization of data, meaning the ability to show your customer how well each of their applications is actually performing, video conferencing, telecom, TV streams, all of the above, and provide that in a dashboard to answer the simple question, is it the network or is it the application that's having a problem right now? That's the number one thing that when and if you sit in a call center of a telco, by the way, which I've done for a few days, fascinating. The calls that come in, the questions that get asked, they all revolve around why isn't Instagram working or why can't I make a WebEx call? It's not, I mean obviously you get that my phone's broken, but from a business perspective, it's all about that application. So democratizing that information, providing our dashboard means that they won't need to call you, but they can get that data very quickly and very easily. A relatively simple step. The data's there, it's just not being used in a way that's helpful to customers.

I think also that I don't think that they can do everything for everyone. So if you take that first premise and say, okay, they can't do everything for everyone, but surely again, you need to build an ecosystem of partners that you can then refer to that say, if you want to manage wifi network that's below this or whatever it is, here's a list of partners that you can actually collaborate with to support. I think again, looking at using the data, we were talking about AI yesterday and how it can be used and was all internally focused on the networks. Why don't we use some of those toolings to look at how are the customers using the network? What is the experience to start to understand how they use the networks? What is it that they're trying to do? And then start to build the products based on that.

What is that next step where they're going to need to say, okay, we can see that they're coming up to a break point. Maybe we should be proactive in saying, this looks like the next best thing for you, but also to work with partners that are going to be providing the applications. You're not going to buy that from your operator and give them that next step so that you're actually providing additional value in the chain. Building up more, a better experience on the network because it's not going to be the operator's network that's the problem. It's going to be their on-prem equipment, the wifi network that they've built there. But finding the right partners to work with for those enterprises is often very challenging.

Agree. So I mean, Andrew gave a great example, our MIS platform. Sir, I'm going to be a salesman for 10 seconds. Apologies. Our whole missed platform. We've been building AI into it for five years now. It'll detect why isn't something working and it'll just fix it. And I give an example, the largest supermarket chain in the world went from 10,000 tickets to a few hundred just by using AI in the network to all remediate, most of these problems are actually simple things. One of the biggest, cause we're out of IP addresses, DHCP, IP address, nothing works, right? And it's really simple effects and just allowing them to focus on what they do, which is sell their products rather than having to deal with network issues. And I just don't, in this world of the compute power that we've got of the cloud power that we've got, there are no more excuses for that.

And that's how we have to think about it. And we talked about mindset a lot. Again, I think that was more about how we work together. I think it's more about, hey, the champion here is the customer. Our mindset needs to be more focused on that. And I've got a low tolerance for it. As you guys know, when I've called out, hey, listened to this presentation for 40 minutes and you said customer at 39 minutes, I just don't think, and I think that's what Phil Jordan meant, I just don't think we can have that sort of behavior. And I kind of challenge our industry, which is, and that's something that I've been pushing in my organization. We sell to telcos, but that's not the customer, it's their customer. How do we get more insight into what they're actually using, what we sell to them for?

And actually a big part of that is networks for AI right now where we're building out tons of big huge platforms to support the GPU needs that are coming and we're trying to figure out, okay, what's the best way of doing this? And that's very much like, okay, what are you going to use this for? And again, walking in their shoes, but I just don't, we're going to have these excuses anymore. It just doesn't make any sense in the world that we live in now for us to have those excuses. It feels like the train companies

I would ban the word use case. All I've heard is use case. Use case, destroy the industry. No, don't talk about the word use case. Talk about the thing that you did for God's sake. Some of these things are amazing. The example that from Liberty gave up about the boats that was phenomenal and everything we consume or do comes on a boat at some point in time. So for me, we need to talk more about that because people, I remember saying the word use case on a call in front of my grandkids and they were like, use case granddad. What's that? I'm like, you don't want to know. Keep playing Roblox. No, I just talk about the thing and I think, Geoff, you said this as well, what is the thing that we're doing? We're so far away from that and that it drives me nuts basically. I've heard the use case just so many times. I want to talk about, here's the thing we did, we made a boat go faster. We enabled some family to speak to their cousin that they hadn't speak to a hundred year, whatever it is. Talk about that thing because the thing that will inspire folks to actually want to work with us,

Well that's absolutely about understanding the customer's business and it's solving their problem. And I think that more often than not, our industry gets locked into speaking with one persona or a type of persona at an organization, but actually to be able to solve those problems, actually you need to be able to speak to a suite of people across an organization. And I think there's a blurring of the roles as well and your traditional CIO, well actually they're also having afoot in the CMOs world. They're also having a foot in the COO's world and having a foot in the CCROs world. So actually your conversation isn't just with one. You have to, in order to understand the business problem of that organization, you have to be able to have a conversation with all of those personas to be able to really get deeply into it. You talked about boats and the previous boat example in a former life, absolutely speaking to one of the ports, they had a big problem about containers coming in actually by putting in 5G, being able to put in computer vision, actually looking at whether a container was damaged or not coming in looking at those assets then started to help save them money because they were able to prove that actually it wasn't them that was denting it, it was the previous port that had done it and that had absolutely the conversation, oh, look at that marvelous connectivity.

It wasn't that at all. It was actually, look at that. You're saving us 50 grand a month.

I've disclosed my personal relationships, so let me disclose my professional.

Up, it makes you feel better probably about the relationship you are with. I work for a guy Mickey mic. He's not a telecom guy. He's literally like working with someone who's like Ian Musk, Elon Musk, sorry, of Japan. He's involved in every decision we take from a business point of view, every business decision. He runs 70 businesses online in Japan. He's the digital services leader. 13% of Japanese GDP flows through his digital, he's unleashed the digital services opportunity. You can have that if you want. I'm going to get T-shirts of, yeah, we were laughing last night, so I said I was going to go home and speak to my wife. She said, what do you do? I said, I went to, we spoke about unleashing telecom and it was anyway different.

Mickey didn't join telecom to do telecom. Mickey joined telecom to integrate telecom into everyone's lives and the 360 degree journey. Mickey runs the biggest rewards program, membership loyalty program. So all of the telecom approach, if I was interested in learning more about what Rakuten was doing, I'd learn more about actually Rakuten Mobile and its commercial models. And its commercial changes because it's integrating how people use phones into them, traveling on holidays into them booking into their banking, shopping, shopping. So Rakuten has 650,000 small to medium businesses that are customers of their, they run their shops for them. We're looking at how we can integrate communications into their online shopping experience. So then customer support is a clickable link that is automatically transcribed, maybe applied, managed. It's not hard. Now if you then go out to those 650,000, I have a massive, so one I'll tie into a concern I have about customers in the industry.

I think we take our customers for granted, they've always been there. What we aren't seeing is an undercurrent starting around the introduction of EIM that allows you to change carrier tremendously, easily and quickly. In Japan, we are a hundred percent eim. So we put links in all of our online services that says, do you want to use us as your mobile subscriber, mobile service? You click it and you literally move over because we've got your details. You're a banking customer, we know who you are, we know your credit rating, we've got everything. So I think we have, there's a bigger risk in our conversations here that I've seen in the cable industry where you take your existing customers for granted so desperate to get those other customers and you wake up one morning and other people know how valuable the customers you had actually are and they've taken them and they were undercurrents of that happening.

I mean I've ditched the big carriers in the us, I'm tired of them. I'm using an MVNO and that MVNO is excellent. They run on Verizon. My bill went from $70 to 15. Wow. And the service is better and I love them. And do you know what they've got on their store? They sell me T-shirts and caps. They're merchandising me at the same time. It's everything that we are not doing. We're too busy getting excited about a quality on demand API that the won't work in the room we're in because we've stated we can't get coverage here, unfortunately we're a bit too low. That's not

I think the one message I'd give is actually look at what Rakuten's doing from the customer relationship. They didn't join this from a technology point of view. They actually joined it from, they understood the value of the data and the integration of the experience. And you don't have to own all those other properties because once you understand how to integrate, you can actually partner in a much healthier way. It's not just the sponsorship, it's now actually materially affecting business.

But it is coming back to that simplification and communication as well and making things easy. And I said it yesterday, when you go in and look at the services that are provided on everything is about the different plans that you can buy for your mobile phone. And then if you keep looking and keep looking and then keep looking, then you'll find something else. And then it's things like do you want SD one? And I mean nobody knows if they want SD one or not because they don't know what SD one is. Instead of saying what is it that you're looking for? You have a connectivity issue. You want to provide connectivity to your customers or understanding those things and simplifying it into language that people that aren't in the industry can understand. So I think one of the nice things about going to American Tower is that I work with lawyers and I work with accountants. So working in the technology organization for me is like how do I translate this into a way that anyone in the room can actually understand? And I think been one of the blessings of my journey, if you like in telecommunications. I've spent half my time translating technical speak into layman's terms so people can understand what it is that we're actually trying to do. And I think just something that simple is going to be a good start.

So I've had a similar experience with IBM actually I think it's fascinating to run a network division inside IBM for a company that doesn't care about networks in their everyday existence and to speak in language that the broader IBM sales and consulting teams can understand. So my reeducation, which is three and a half years into my journey so far, has been to speak app talk and not network talk when I open my mouth. And that has just completely shifted how we as a network group inside IBM are perceived by our colleagues and about the inclusion we then get in all the business that we do. Is that fundamental?

Thanks everyone. Ray, should we see what our audience think at this stage? Are there any questions from our audience based on what you've been hearing? Oh God, I can't see. I think, oh yeah, right in the front. The microphone is coming your way. Robert,

Excellent panel. Good to talk about customers and great insights from everybody. I wonder do you feel that we are, I know the term can be slightly overused, but at a point of inflection in how we think about what enables the next stage of growth because growth is really what tugs want. We're flat to down in the industry and I think we've internalized the idea that the next G is no longer the answer. We've talked about a few things. Orchestration automation seems to be pretty key. The concept of programmability, the idea that change doesn't have to cost a lot and if change doesn't cost a lot, then you can change and experiment a lot as well. That's a really new set of attitudes and I think reference points for telecom as an industry. I wonder whether, again across the panel you think that adds up to something that we are as an industry morphing, we're taking that on board or do you think in the sort of boardrooms that you guys are in on a routine basis, can you just do the same as last year but cost 5% less?

I am quite optimistic. I think there is still a lot of latent demand in the enterprise or middle prize market for solutions to the problems that they have today that will require good connectivity. When you look at the in-building coverage, when you start building out c-band or the higher capacity 5G, it doesn't penetrate well into buildings and they will require some kind of solution in building and I think the companies that are positioned to best to do that are going to be the operators. And I think we start to see the signs, whether that be private networks, whether it be in building coverage of the macro network indoors. There are many different technologies that you can solve that with. You're not locked into one. So I think again, addressing that in a way that solves that problem and then applying the right technology underneath that is something that the operators are in the best place to do.

But again, you're going to need to work with an ecosystem of players to do that because those enterprises are willing to pay those problems now you just need to find the right channel to get to them. So whether you go via a systems integrator or whether you go via your operator, I do think there's a lot out there and you start to see this happening. Verizon's made announcements about private 5G in combination with indoor coverage and they're taking a small business approach within Verizon to address that. You start to see it in many operators around the world. So I do think that they're waking up and actually moving in that direction. I just hope that they are able to build those communities and actually take those next steps because there is a big demand there. When you look at particularly enterprises that need to provide good network coverage, whether it be hotels like this, whether it be resorts, those businesses rely on good connectivity because if they do not have it, their customers will not stay and they will complain on TripAdvisor or Google reviews and people won't stay there. So it really impacts their business. Poor connectivity really impacts their business.

Absolutely. I think there's another point in the developed network world as I like to call it, we're almost at a point where we've got more capacity than demand. So if you look at some of the European countries, traffic growth was at least three European countries where traffic growth was around about 10% and only four or five years ago it was 30%. So on that 10%, if growth is 10%, what does that mean for us in terms of how we monetize the network today, which is typically based on price plans or speeds, right? I think this is a potentially really big opportunity for the industry to pivot away from the speed thing and actually focus on quality reliability and coverage again, which I think are more important to customers than speed, especially mobile customers. And I think it requires much than the same way with enterprises.

I think it requires telcos to have a different conversation about how they build infrastructure in places. How do they cope with seasonal changes of traffic where building a macro site for six months of the year doesn't make any sense? How do they expand beyond their normal method of thinking such that they're able to provide that connectivity where you are? Six G for me should be about one thing, constant connectivity. Forget everything else because if we get constant connectivity, all the other stuff that we've on about in 4G and 5G, it will happen because people will be able to rely upon a platform that's there in the car park at the airport, in the venue, in the hotel that's two stories down. They will rely upon it and that will drive a whole set of new capabilities that people want to use. And I think that last kind of four or 5% lack of connectivity is the barrier for telecom's companies to take the next step and make their customers, and I'm going to use a word that I hate to use, but it is important, become more dependent upon the network so they will put more things onto it.

There's so many we've heard it where, well I need two clouds. No you don't. And actually the risk of having two clouds is greater. You're swinging from one to the other is greater than one going down would be my sense. But how do we really make the network truly available everywhere we go? Someone mentioned that telecom industry 10 points down and I get where they're coming from, but this is part of the telecom industry and there's no way this is 10 points down, but there's all this, we've come absolutely focused on making this thing work. There's so many other telecommunications needs that if we step beyond it and think about those needs and put them in place, people will depend upon the network even more and be willing to spend even more. And I think that's what we've missed for the last probably 5, 6, 7 years.

I'll give really interesting example of that. I talked about quick serve fast food restaurants earlier in every fast food restaurant in America today is a server. The reason that server's there is because they don't trust the network. Meaning that if you walk in and you want to order a burger and the network's not there, you don't get your food so you go somewhere else. We have to solve that

A hundred percent. Again, in this day and age, why don't we have network everywhere? We've got some great stuff coming with satellite, but I don't think it's good enough. We need to make it better than that. And I think getting to a world where our carriers are able to interact with each other to provide that coverage at a cost or in a trading way like we used to do with telephone numbers. Hey, we don't have a route to this. Have you got a route to it? How do we get to that sort of world? I think there's a need and a demand for it. I think I look at my grandson Theo, when his iPad doesn't work, he's like, what is this world? Can you right? It's incredible when it's like Granddad, why doesn't it work? We're on the M four.

Right. Great. Thanks everyone. Hey Ray, this has been like a point and shoot panel, hasn't it? Question from Chris. It's like click and go. Oh, Chris, Chris, Chris, we've got a comment there because we're going to bring the microphone. It's coming right up to you now.

It does occur to me and it actually, Andrew, your comment triggered this in my mind to remind me to ask the question that in the future will the connectivity not be embedded in other things and we won't even talk about it and therefore we will pay for it through other means whether we're purchasing applications, purchasing content and other things. Because frankly that's what we all expect. We'll expect the connectivity to be there. So will telecoms not become much more wholesale and we will become more distant as an industry from the actual customers.

Revolut has already started that. So Revolut the payments app now they sell you an eem, they zero rate all their traffic globally and you get a very low connectivity if you're on holiday somewhere else. So they solved the problem but people weren't using Revolut when they weren't on their home network. So it becomes really interesting. So that connectivity has the technical ability to disappear into an app experience now then you get of course what does that really mean and how does that work? But that's what's happening underneath the scenes and those app people are the ones that are innovating around that.

And I think we'll get devices shout out, Hey, I need connectivity. Who's there to trade with me? It's probably way in the future, but you just imagine, hey, I've got no connectivity here, a ping and then someone says, Hey, I've got connectivity, I'll trade that with you. And what's the value of this transaction that you're trying to do? Because I think trying to solve this with these dishes and things put on walls, we're not going to solve it that way. It's just not possible. But there are other ways of more peer to PR or device to device to solve those connectivity things like the light system in here has got connectivity. Hey, I need connectivity. Light system just does it. That's the probably seven, 10 G or wherever it is. But I believe that's where I think we'll have to get to if we really want this to work in the way that it's always on and always there

And I don't understand. So just on that revolu, I'd love to know this, if they like reverse auction, who they connect to underneath. I haven't really looked at how they managed then their productivity costs. But you can see then if we thought we were disaggregated or disintermediated from the experience before, now we're going three levels down as an industry.

Regain the single pane of glass and be the super app. You've talked about the super amplification of Rakuten and everything that you've done in Japan. You've seen exactly the same thing in China with something that started out as chat in terms of WeChat. Well, it's a pervasive super app that you can do anything on from banking and shopping to everything else. And actually we haven't really outside of those countries necessarily as an industry gained that super app status. And if we don't do that ourselves, then actually somebody else will come in and we will all be disaggregated because somebody else will be the aggregator. Well,

Let's see what the results of the polls say because personalized services I think was one of the options, wasn't it For a minute there guy, I thought we were going to end this event with a reference to 10 G, which have made my

I was shocked. This is the first official reference to 10 G and its associated use case. Thank you for that.

Yes. So it's time to look at the final poll results and the question we asked, what is the best way for a digital service provider to increase customer satisfaction? Let's see what the results are showing. Look. Okay, I can't believe that. What I'm shocked as everybody that's voted got loads of money anyway. We've got simplified customer engagement. We talked about that 44% and that more personalized service that you want Susan and that we've just talked about there. Are you the 14% there? Is that your vote

For that? That's right. Yeah, absolutely. But that's interesting. So it just goes to show or this suggest. Suggest makes more optimistic, suggest you don't have to lower prices to get or keep customers, make them happy.

Right. Well that is the end of session eight then. Thank you all very much. It's almost the end of DSP leaders will forum for another year. But before we thank our guests, we have a few final announcements to do. We've got to say a huge thank you to all of our sponsors. We've said this before and we'll say it again. Your support is invaluable. We will not be here without you and thank you to all the attendees whether in person. Fantastic. Thanks for coming along. I hope you've got a lot of networking and all those watching online. I hope you all enjoyed the event from wherever you're watching from and in fact, I have just heard that we are on track to report over 2000 online viewers for this event. So we are delighted by that. That's up on last year. We heard a lot of expert industry speakers here on the main stage, also over in the extra short cafe. Thanks so much for sharing all your insights and expertise. Thank you to the whole crew here and telecom TV team. A lot of work is done behind the scenes. You don't see it. So thank you very much.

You all make us look fantastic, so that's great. What an achievement. Next up, we are going to resume our online summit series in September with a cloud native telco and we are back live and in person in London and with Chris Varney in early December for the annual great Telco debate book. Now to avoid disappointment please, meanwhile, Ray and the team are going to be pouring over all of those two days of videos, aren't you? And analyzing the discussions on telecom tv. It's going to

Relive it, relive it. It's going to be a wonderful weekend for the family. If you missed anything, you can catch up on everything online. Just as soon as we get all the panels up. I think half of 'em are already up. Actually they're all going to be made available as soon as we get them processed. One more thing, because we started this event with a little silly exercise to see where we thought we were on the scale of, well it was a DSP reality check, I think we called it. We had where we had fantasy towers at the end, number 10 where we all aspire to be and we had sort of abject doom and gloom with Martin on the other end and we marked the floor where the audience said we were. There's two tapes because we couldn't agree on where we were

Were. Let's have a look at that. Three and a half. Three and a half. Three and a half. So what we will like to do is after two days of discussion, where do you think we are now on a scale of not to 10, not being this little black box here and 10 being the black box over there. Where do you think we are? Are we still kind of hovering in the middle?

Right? I'm going to take the black tape go on. Then I need people to tell me whether I need to move to my left or to my right. Am I going to 10 or zero? Come on, let's hear some shouts.

Are we going down? Is this it? Are we getting more despondent after two days? We're getting more towards each.

Spinal tap. That's right, you were at 11. Okay. I'm getting more calls to go to this end of the scale to be okay. I've been told we're going to stop here. Look, this is where the other tab was. We're going to call it seven out of 10. I think the Negroni and the martinis are still coursing through the veins from last night and are leading to an optimistic outlook. Not as optimistic as Neil's, but so

Great, great, great. Well look, Ray and I are about to go off and do a final extra shot. That is it. We will see you all next year hopefully for next year's DSP Leaders World Forum. We'll let you know all the details later online. And that is it. Until then, please, please, please thank our guests. We've got a great selection on stage. We've had a load over the two days. But thank you all very much indeed and thank you all for attending.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

So we're at DT w Ignite 2024. We're in the sunny capital of Copenhagen in Denmark. I'm here with Vivek Chadha,, who is Global Head of Telco Cloud, at Rakuten Symphony. Vivek, good to see you again. Thanks for

So the trend of telco to TechCo is pretty well established in the industry. We know the why behind that transformation, but what about the how?

So if I take a step back and look at what happened with the evolution of the mobile network technology, let's say five or six years ago when the whole concept of OAN started becoming a thing to contend with. And the discussion is less about where OAN is today, but what it triggered off in terms of the thinking at the board level and what it did was it drove focus that for telcos to start becoming the digital equivalent of tecos as communication service providers, they would have to disaggregate at different levels and layers of their stack. And the reason for that was to create it a much greater degree of decoupling between integrated vertical stacks, allowing them not just economies of scale in terms of procurement, but agility to start doing things and innovation and change at a much faster pace without having to do the whole lot at one go.

And as an example, if you look at what's happened in the last two years and is now accelerating quite a bit, cloud transformation on-prem cloud transformation for telcos, especially in the core, is becoming a primary driver where a lot of mobile operators are saying regardless of their preference of which flavor of ran o or otherwise, they will go to, especially with the 5G SA change happening, it's a perfect intersection for them to say, this is one of the key things that I need to do in my network to set the stage for me to become more agile and nimble in order to do the other levels of disaggregation on top of the infrastructure platforms. So that's an example of how, which is visible today is underway and is only going to accelerate in the next two years. And that in turn will then get followed by other components of the network, whether they be the far edge, they be the ran, et cetera.

Now of course, this isn't just a technology exercise for the sake of it. This is all about helping to make the business stronger. What are the long-term revenue opportunities and business models that's enabled by bringing together cloud native architectures and ai? Because that's a lot of what people at this event are talking about as well.

So I'm probably going to be a little bit provocative on this long-term revenue opportunities for telco. I think there is a fair amount of discovery that needs to be done. I know there's quite a bit that is said in the media and the industry about various use cases and monetization will happen, et cetera. I think telcos are really good at what they do. They understand their business a lot better than most people assume they do. They understand the constraints, the physics, the economics of it. But what I think this will allow them to do, and this is just one of the levers in the long-term way, is truly understand what an elastic and a programmable network and allow them to do in terms of collaboration. I've said this in the past, all value in society is created at the interfaces. Right now most networks are closed or if they're open, they're open almost at a bilateral level with exchanging with a few select partners.

The advantage that some of the FANG companies or the OTTs or the hyperscalers have had is they've always built inherently webscale programmatic programmable infrastructure, which means it was easy enough for a billion dollar corporation to integrate with them, but also a small startup in let's say Hong Kong or India or Guatemala to say, I have something cool and I can use some of your services, but add on to that to create value. I think slowly and steadily, most operators are going to drift to that outcome. They'll all do it slightly differently. They each bring a very different flavor to their core markets. But the long-term revenue opportunities will inherently get enabled by elastic programmable network, which then allows a much higher degree of interaction and integration with third parties than is possible today. And that's where additional value is going to come.

So in what way can they capitalize on this sort of new cloud native approach and couple those new processes and ways of thinking in with what AI Edge IOT 5G SA can deliver and what can that do for their businesses in the next decade?

You sure you haven't forgotten an acronym in that? That's a mouthful. Okay. But I do get the gist of the question. So I think if you look at cloud native, I think which was the first one that you referred to, it's not just a collection of tools and technologies, it's also a paradigm. It's how you think about doing things in a much more industrialized but agile manner, which has always been difficult in the past for telcos. So what that drives is a very different way of thinking. So it's an operating mindset. It's also skills, but it's also processes. And I think the combination of some of these process cultural changes along with skillset, but also getting augmented with things like ai, and I've said this recently as well, AI to me is two things. It's first augmented intelligence, which means you start doing what you're used to doing in a much more automated fashion and you create headroom in the business by saving on opex, and then you lead to autonomous behavior where you do new things, which today either are not visible to you as a business or are very difficult to achieve. But AI is now breaking down those barriers and saying there's a lot more innovation you can do either at the edge or in driving revenue streams or product innovation, et cetera. So a combination of culture change processes and behavior, which allows the organization to be a little bit more dynamic and flexible in how they respond to the market enabled by cutting edge technology such as AI and edge, I think they're going to intersect to create new possibilities. How those possibilities mature, where they intersect with market demand, I think still needs to be seen.

Now of course, another aspect here is open source. Once you combine open source or open source with ai, what does that mean for a more cloud native telco?

I think that's an interesting one. So if you do do a dipstick analysis at the event today, I would argue close to 98, 90 9% of the audience who are operators will confess to using a significant bit of open source either through vendors or partners or directly in their environment. So open source is not something new for the telecoms community either on the vendor side or on the operator side. But I think what is different now is with AI becoming mainstream and large language models, and I've recently heard about small language models or personalized language models, what will be interesting to see is how much commonality is embraced by the industry, which is your upstream open source contributions versus how much of that is considered secret sauce where a particular operator in Europe might choose to say, well, this bit is specific to what we do and I think we're better off honing our skills on this bit while also enjoying and contributing to the larger open source community.

I don't think there's a single answer that'll address the variety and the topology of operators. We see the dynamics and the economic and technology pressures that exist in the western world are slightly different from Asia Pacific, are slightly different from the Middle East. So I think they will also have a bearing on how fast, how deep and how far some of these operators go in embracing some of these technologies. I have a feeling the Middle East and Africa region is probably going to lead on some of this because they seem to be investing very heavily on some of these AI centric technologies.

Now we talked about what these changes can bring in terms of business opportunities, but the other thing we need to consider of course, is the customer. What can this shift towards cloud native processes and the associated technologies and AI do to help service providers meet customer expectations because those expectations are changing up and becoming greater all the time?

That's a great question. Lemme take a step back before I address the potential new age of enhanced changing futuristic requirements of operators. I'm going to take an example of the conversation you and I were having a few minutes before. You and a few other colleagues have had roaming glitches while in Copenhagen, an ideal use case, a very simplistic one, but this enables customer experience, perhaps not revenue directly. Indirectly, yes, would've been if there is enough intelligence and power on your device to figure out you've got a roaming glitch and do something to sell, feel and auto correct from that. There's some stuff that already can be done, but it's not to the level where you will no longer have a conversation with me, hopefully next year saying, well, I didn't even know there was an issue, but I got a notification from a provider saying there was a glitch, we fixed it.

You're up and running, you now. Those are simple, low touch things, which actually do a lot to change customer satisfaction. I'm sure you'd agree with that. Absolutely. And these things have a way of having both positive and negative dissonance in your ecosystem. If you're having a great customer experience where things which you've gotten used to in the past are no longer even a factor in a conversation that is a plus for you, and it's a plus for the operator. So this is an example of very simplistic existing everyday problems that perhaps can do a little bit that we could do a little bit better, both as the vendor community and as operators. From a futuristic point of view, I think the ability to consume what you want, when you want in the format that you want, which placed again to the inherent strength of the operators because they are fundamentally the fabric that connects our society without worrying about the G, without worrying about whether it's an open brand based solution or not, because consumers don't care about any of that and neither should they.

I think in a very simplistic, crude manner. I think anything that elevates the ability for consumers to say, I can consume what I want when I want as much as I want, and have it be seamless as an experience for me, I think that is an endeavor from the consumer point of view for B2B and enterprises, I think once we see mainstream adoption of 5G, my last reckoning is it's still in the lower two digits globally active subscriber base. By the time it gets to 50% plus, I think we probably will start seeing real world applications on the enterprise side of actually slicing. And I know slicing can be done in 4G, but there's a few things you can do in 5G, which is a little bit more secure, economical, agile from an operator's point of view, where enterprises today, some of the large enterprises have a reasonable headcount deployed of managing their network infrastructure.

They probably are not the best equipped to do that. That's a connectivity problem that they are responding to because they find it easier to do it. And I think operators are best suited to deliver that because that is their core business. And I think once we hit mainstream adoption of 5G, some of these things will start becoming commoditized and convenient enough that it'll be easier for enterprises to consume them. Right now, I can't name the CTO, actually the CEO of a large European operator. They said we have private 5G currently as projects. We'd like to move it to a product phase where it's industrialized at scale, and this is one of the largest operators in Europe. So if they have this feedback from the market, don't get me wrong, they're making money, they're getting more and more orders, but they're having to deal with the majority of them at a bespoke basis for a variety of technical and operational reasons. Once this gets to commodity, I think that's where you'll see unlocking of the enterprise value.

And of course the other aspect, apart from business technology, the customers is security, which goes across everything that we all do. How can a cloud native telco ensure that they're providing robust security and compliance becoming more important in an AI world for these customers? I guess particularly for enterprise customers and governments and those kind of organizations. Does cloud, does your shift to cloud native make this not easier, but kind of better to manage in the medium and long-term, do you think?

Another great question. So I think 5G inherently is a little bit more secure than 4G was, but then coming down to the rest of the stack, if you look at something like cloud native, because it's microservices based, because it's completely decomposed, it actually allows a much more fine grain control of what's happening in the environment. Is it out of the box? No, it's a very opinionated architecture if you go to Kubernetes, but there's enough literature, regulatory environment available, compliance benchmarks available, whether it's nist, et cetera, that you can, if you're doing the right thing, and as Rakuten simply believe, we are doing the right thing. If you comply to those, you are inherently a lot more secure than you were in the previous generation. But that's just on the software stack. We cannot ignore the fact that the attack surface increases. As you disaggregate, you're opening up your network, you're allowing a lot more interaction, which I think is a good thing.

So those vectors need to be addressed as well. The cybersecurity community is obviously actively interested in this because for them, that's the next yardstick to conquer. And there's already a lot of good work done by some of the biggest players in the industry, and I make this an analogous to the central banks versus the ATM change when it happened, which is a similar shift that's happening when you go to disaggregated networks. ATMs are commonplace now and they're no less secure than a bank. So same thing is happening with edge compute and 5G and disaggregated. Is it a hundred percent addressed? No. Is it a problem that has significant unanswered questions? No. In fact, there's something happening in the industry that is actually going to seriously raise the bar for cyber threats. Post quantum cryptography is becoming mainstream. There's some stuff folks are involved in across the industry, including ourselves, and I think within the next two years, we'll see real world scaled implementation of this. Once that happens, I think the bar of entry, at least for some time, is going to be quite hard for malevolent actors to try and create issues. So I think it is something to watch out for, but I also think it's been acknowledged quite early on and enough input is being provided across the ecosystem, not just from the cybersecurity experts that this is a manageable problem in the long term.

Vivek, we covered an awful lot of ground there in a short space of time, but great insights on how things are changing in the telecom sector and for operators. So thanks very much for joining us today.

Always a pleasure. Thank you.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

It is simplify, modernize, and monetize, right? So simplify your and modernize your existing stack. Look at your opex again, but also look at new monetization opportunities, right? For instance, we feel that open APIs are going to give us significant monetization opportunity. Look at reducing their churn in your business. Look at increasing the RPU per customer. And we feel that at Tech Mahindra we have a unique combination of services capability that can help you simplify and modernize. But we also have a significant number of software assets with Comm Viva, which can really help you monetize it, right? We have a very strong marketing analytics platform, a very strong BSS platform that gives significant monetization opportunities for the telcos.

Scale at speed means many things for telcos, but first of all, it's not a tagline, it is a philosophy. It's a principle which we saw internally. First, as a company, we believe we are at this Goldilocks position of having the right scale and running at the right speed, and we think that that same fabric went passed over to telcos to drive revenue growth scale in the right timeframe. At speed is a mirror of our own abilities as a company, and that's really what we try to give as our brand promise to telcos. It is what we are that we promise to give you as an outcome.

One of the most important things that we have seen is monetization, and especially with generative AI and the era of ai, everybody's talking about monetization. Well, it's easier said than done. Tech M today is helping telcos monetize in a couple of ways. The most prevalent that I see today is the joint go to market with many of the products. So whether it's telco to enterprise, enterprise to telco, the second thing that I really see is the whole use of large language models and how you can actually monetize it by taking it to the larger public. We call it democratization, but really it's only monetization

Tech Mahindra has been deeply involved in the AI journey for multiple telcos. We have built more than 500 use cases, which are very specific to telco processes, and we are looking at every possible opportunity of a telco process that can be automated, and the enablement of AI and the overlay of AI on each of those telco processes. So making sure that we are able to bring in that process repository of AI use cases and making it relevant for our telco clients is what we are doing for a living.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

How telcos can manage costs and deliver new revenue streams | TelecomTV

We are at DTW Ignite 2024. We're in the sunny capital city of Copenhagen. I'm here with Mohit Joshi, who is CEO and MD of Tech Mahindra. Mohit, thanks so much for joining us today. Good to see you.

Thank you, Ray. It's wonderful to be here, and as you said, it's a beautiful sunny day. The best time of the year to be in Copenhagen.

Absolutely. Now, Tech Mahindra is here at the event with its slogan "Scale at Speed". What does that mean for the company, for your customers, for your partners?

So scale at speed is our new strategic narrative, right? The way we think about the way technology and operations is being consumed by the largest companies in the world is that there is a need for scale at speed. And historically, you almost had a binary choice between scale. So think about it as assembling a large land army or speed. Think about special forces now with the consumerization of technology, with changing demographics, with geopolitics, with AI, you need scale at speed. And we felt it was a wonderful and very compelling narrative, and especially for us, given the importance of telco to the tech end business, we felt it was a very important narrative for the industry as well.

Now, there's a lot of talk here at this event about how the service providers need to find new revenue streams, et cetera, but at the same time, they need to be managing their costs more. How can Tech Mahindra help them to manage their OpEx and help them keep that down as data volumes go up?

Absolutely. Look, I think the economics for the telco business have been challenging for a while, and clearly with interest rates going up with, especially in the Western world, not too much of a subscriber edition and the huge investments that have gone into the network and the 5G, the economics are a little bit challenging. The way we think about it is it is simplify, modernize, and monetize. So simplify your and modernize your existing stack. Look at your OpEx again, but also look at new monetization opportunities. For instance, we feel that open APIs are going to give us significant monetization opportunity. Look at reducing their churn in your business. Look at increasing the RPU per customer. And we feel that at Tech Mahindra we have a unique combination of services capability that can help you simplify and modernize. But we also have a significant number of software assets with Conviva, which can really help you monetize it. We have a very strong marketing analytics platform, a very strong BSS platform that gives significant monetization opportunities for the telcos.

Now, of course, one of the big topics at this and every other telecom event is artificial intelligence. It's on everybody's lips. How does AI fit into the Tech Mahindra strategy and how can you help the service providers with their AI strategies?

I think AI is a very fascinating topic because AI obviously is all pervading. The way we think about AI is that there are some AI use cases that are really happening across industries. So whether it's financial services or healthcare or telecom, you have use cases around customer service, for instance, and digital deflection. You've got use cases around cybersecurity. You've got use cases around talent, and you've got use cases around developer productivity. So these are the use cases that are pretty much horizontal and across the board, but then you've got specific vertical use cases for the telecom industry, for instance, we think the energy consumption of the network is a very powerful use case for applying AI. So we are thinking about what are the horizontal and vertical cases for AI and for telcos, we've got a hundred plus use cases that can be applied. So that's one piece of it.

The second piece I'll mention is that Tech Mahindra is also making a very significant investment from a research perspective. We are, to the best of my knowledge, the only service provider that has built its own large language models ground up, right? So we built a large language model for Indian languages and now for Bahasa Indonesian that has been built ground up. So we collected the data, done the optimization, got billions of parameters and are now testing the model. So that gives us a very strong foundation. And the final thing I'll mention from an AI perspective, which I think is really important because a lot of people are talking about UI AI use cases, but people haven't built the validation and testing frameworks to be able to take these use cases up to industrial scale. And we are investing in building a very strong validation framework for the industry so that you can go beyond pilots to enterprise use case adoption.

Well, that sounds like a very worthwhile focus because you can't go into this blind and not know what's going to happen once you implement.

Mohit, pleasure to speak to you. Thanks very much for joining us today.

Thank you, Ray. Thank you for your time.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

Autonomous core network for a higher level network stability | TelecomTV

Hi, I am Tony Poulos and I am at TM Forum's, DTW Ignite Event in Copenhagen. A lot of talk about autonomous networks at this event and a little bit of talk about ai, but I have assembled a panel of experts here to help me understand autonomous networking and core network stability. And to help me out with that, firstly I'd like to introduce I Gusti Panca, who is the GM of research management and ICT, strategic alignment at Telkomsel. Welcome Panca. Good to have you here. Secondly, Andy Tiller from the TM Forum. Who is involved in this day-to-Day and I'm sure will be a wealth of knowledge for us. On the panel is Juan Carlos Garcia, who is a senior technology and innovations advisor to the industry as a whole. And last but certainly not least, Fernando Camacho here who is the autonomous networks product director at Huawei. Welcome Fernando. Gentlemen, welcome. Let's kick off with the main question. Firstly, what is driving the move towards autonomous core networks? Andy, I might get you to start off with that one. Well,

Everybody immediately thinks saving money, but the motivations actually run much deeper than that. So as the networks get more complex, just managing them, keeping them running efficiently, you need the machines to compliment what the humans are doing today just to make it tractable. Of course, what you also get out of this is improved customer experience and ultimately if we can use automation to keep the networks running smoothly and efficiently, automate service assurance, automate the delivery of new products and services, they become tractable things that previously would not have been tractable so you can actually launch new services, which otherwise wouldn't have been feasible. So it leads to growth ultimately.

Well, and Juan Carlos, can you add to that? What do you think are the key drivers?

Well, I think it's very important question to try to understand the rational behind the Oracle development. And this is the case as well. In the case of this autonomy in the core network comes from the need to cope with the complexity of the new services and features that 5G is bringing premium services based on new functionality like the network exposure function and the network slicing that will bring great changes in the traffic patterns and the traffic behavior that will be very dynamic and will change depending on the location and the point in time in the network. And this is something that will require adaptation, very dynamic will be very difficult for humans to learn faster, how the traffic is changing in the network and adapt to these changes and project will need a lot of machine intelligence to track all these changes, to adapt the network and to be able to respond properly. So then the reason mainly for this is as Andy said, is to cope with this new functionality, sophisticated functionality that we're bringing.

Well I'd be interested to hear the network operators viewpoint Panca, what's your driver?

The most important actually because we have a very lot subscriber is around 160 million. And then with those subscriber, actually we have a challenge in terms of the operational, we have two kind of principle that are running our core and then we believe with the some sustain and then together with some AI inside through this autonomous, especially in the core, which is we have running our platform right now for the run autonomous network in Iran, even though until to level four, maybe 2025. So I think this is the best chance to follow to continue our e evolution journey. Not only stop in the run but also into the car.

Fernando, from a vendor's point of view, what are you hearing? What are you being requested and what are the drivers that you are seeing?

So I fully agree with my colleagues the fact that 5G is a complex technology core network that is very, very complex as well. So really for the operators just driving the opex of driving these technologies is increasing so much. It's actually eating up the revenue, the revenue growth. So autonomous network really is the right, I guess, framework to bring that minimize the level of human intervention so we can get the system to do the work. And it's also a great framework to bring AI to bring LLM to bring gen AI into the network. So it's really the way forward to try to reduce, to bring network efficiency and reduce the opex that is hitting up these revenues from our colleagues operator.

So how do you assess autonomous core network levels from a global perspective? Andy, perhaps you could respond to that.

Sure, yeah. Well a while ago TM forum members developed a very simple scheme for measuring the level of autonomy in a network. So from level one to level five, a lot of our operator members have set a target of level four by the end of 2025. We have a detailed scheme for doing this assessment and we've been running a pilot project with telecom cell involved. Fernando has been the co-chair of our project to do this where we've had 10 operators worldwide comparing their own level of autonomy using this scheme and we're creating a very standardized approach to this. So there'll be an industry benchmark.

Panca, I don't want to know what your score was, but I do want to know how you were using it and is it an advantage for you to use a system like this to assess the network?

Well actually we use the tools that provided by TM forum when we assess since the beginning where we are in the beginning we are only in the 1.8 for our score. And then now because helping by our partner everything, then hopefully we can be reached into the level four, maybe by end of 2025, even though actually we have some struggling for the use case. But this is not only as an end of our journey because currently we don't have the 5G standalone yet, then it'll be some dragging when we are talking about network slicing so on, then absolutely we will require this kind opting for our will trial ency. So on

Fernando, you're being asked to help out to get the numbers up, get the levels up. Are they calling you in?

Well obviously as Andy said we just run the pilot for what was very important to standardize these, the tools that operators use to measure what level they are. The thing here is that they're targeting level four, level four, maybe next year, I know 2025 or in a few more years. You need to know where you are in order to understand what you need to do in order to achieve that target. So it's very important to understand those weak points that you have today in order to improve those processes. Right. So these tools that we are trying to standardize after this pilot will help the operators do that, understand where they are in order to understand what the roadmap, what they need to do in order to reach the magic level four that they all want to be.

Well. And Juan Carlos, are you advising your clients to use the two?

Yes. Yes, of course. As Fernando says, there is the need to somehow measure to understand how far you are from your target. But I will give you my general view on where we are. I think we are not just introducing a new technology in the network. So autonomy is not just about technology, it's also about changes in the way organizations work. Traditionally we have seen operations run by teams of specialized experts running each domain on their own with assisted by tools. We'll see over time how these humans have an artificial intelligence assistant or agent working with them and improving the productivity to give the next step. That is once they get sufficient trust on the artificial intelligence that is working with them, they will leave the artificial intelligence to work on its own to reach the level of autonomy. I think that today we are in the process of bringing artificial intelligence assistance to humans in the moment of start to gaining trust on the artificial intelligence to be able to give the next step that is leaving the machine, taking decision on its own, on my view. Also, at the end of this journey, you'll not have absence of humans. So humans will be there always setting the intents, setting the objectives, monitoring the learning process, monitoring the models that the artian generates to understand if they are rational or not, and also providing the touch, the touch that you need sometimes in a service that is provided to castings. Okay,

Stability comes up all the time. We're obsessed as an industry with stability and always connectedness, if I can use that terminology. How important is stability Now when we talk about autonomous core networks? Andy, did you want to kick that one off?

Actually, maybe I'll defer to the guys who are actually really doing this in the real world. In the real world, yes. So maybe,

Yeah, Panca, tell us about how important is that stability factor?

Yeah, like what I already explained, that we will have a standalone with the NetApp slicing play with the very low latency sensitivity in the network. Of course it will be like something that we need to be anticipated using this kind of tools, everything in terms of the stability itself because this is very important to make our customer comfort and then they don't feel that there is some dragging into their performance when they use the surfaces.

We're also talking about the relationship of these core networks with other networks works that are operating within the operator. How important is that interaction and stability between all the different systems and networks?

I guess reliability of the networking itself is crucial. If you cannot trust your network really to get into a lot of trouble for us from the huawe point of view is very important to have the standards that will really help you measure that stability, really understand whether you have a stable network and help obviously our operators that they can measure that stability. So for us it's very important to bring this standardization into the stability area and they can have the right tools to measure the stability within the network. So with all technologies we core networks especially

Yes, and I think stability is something you need to watch when you go to autonomous networks because at then you'll have a lot of artificial intelligence agents taking decisions in different domains and in some cases they may take contradictory decisions that can put in risk the stability of the network. Think about, for instance, an agent that is trying to improve the energy efficiency while another agent is looking at ensuring the quality for a certain customer. One is trying to change a configuration in one direction and the other one in the

They can start doing continuous changes on the network and somehow you need the humans to be able to set the policies, to set the priorities, to be able to have the rules for solving those conflicts in this artificial intelligence network.

So Panca, what happens after you've done the pilot assessment and you realize the status of your network? What's the next step?

Actually in telkomsel after we've done for our autonomous network, especially in the run, because that is really related to the quality performance. Then thanks to 10 forum that there is an initiative with the core, which is also, this is something that we are looking for and thank you so much, we can be here and then being organized by TM forum to see even further about what actually we can leverage more into our technology intercom sales, especially for the core. So I believe that this is something that we can continue further for our collaboration with the TM forum and I hope we can meet you in Jakarta later on to have a more discussion with our engineer team to see the prospect for this kind of solution.

So Andy, the TM forum and its colleagues and friends have developed this assessment tool, but what happens after that? What's the next stage in the process when they get to the magic for

Right. So we've got the diagnosis today, maybe 2.5. The target is for of course that's going to cost money to get there. You need an automation project. So the first thing you need to understand is the return on investment. We have a set of tools that help with that key effectiveness indicators, which tell you what's the business benefit you expect to get from getting to level four. And then after that, of course you need to know how to get to level four. So we're developing in the autonomous networks project a set of blueprints and APIs and reference architectures which provide the guidelines for our members to actually achieve the level four automation that they're looking for.

And presumably, Fernando, you follow these rules with your clients and develop systems to support them?

We do. We do. Obviously, as Andy said, the average now is 2.5. In 2.5 and three. The networks are still run by the human highly skilled engineers, but with assistance of some tools and for example, while we develop the right analytics tools that the help then bring to this level three, we order to get to the level four, you definitely need to use the ai. We are actually working with the gen AI to try to bring all the 30 years experience we have with core networks to try to have all of that embedded into the intelligence that we're going to bring to the level four. But there is a challenge to get to level four. We don't want to, it is not an easy task to get to their magic level forecast.

If it wasn't a challenge, we wouldn't bother with it. In the industry, you know that Juan Carlos ai, is it going to be critical in autonomous networks? Do you think it'll be an essential component?

Well, just to give a different view to the topic, I think AI can even be used to track the progress towards autonomy. Because at the end, what you are looking for is to reduce the human intervention, especially in those tasks that are repeated, that routine and that the machine can do better, faster, and more often. And in this way you can always track how much the humans are using the systems or look at the logs and look at whatever, and then make a continuous assessment on how your networking general is evolving towards autonomy. And I think it would be very interesting also to do this kind of tracking, to really assess in real time, day by day, week by week, every month, how progressively humans are touching less than network and machines are taking and taking over some of the decisions over.

You make it sound so easy. I'm sure it's going to be a bigger challenge like Fernando was saying, than expecting Panca. Thank you very much for being with me today, Andy, Juan Carlos, and Fernando, thanks so much for your input and I think I gained a lot more knowledge now about what's happening with autonomous core networks, particularly with stability. Thank you again. Thank you very much. Thank you so much.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

Why network and IT integration are key for digital service providers | TelecomTV

We are in Copenhagen. We're at DTW Ignite 2024, the annual TM Forum event. I'm here with Nastasi Karaiskos, who is MD of Rakuten Symphony uk. Nastasi, good to see you. Thanks so much for joining us.

It's great to see you, Ray. It's great to be back here at DTW Copenhagen.

Well, at this event every year, essentially everybody comes together and the big talking points are, what are the big challenges for this industry? So let's get your perspective on that. For the network operators, the communication service providers, what are the biggest challenges facing those companies today

We love to get together to talk about the challenges in the industry. I think first of all, this event, how I've seen this event evolve over the years is it traditionally was focused on OSS and quite heavily on the IT side. And we see this happening generally in the industry, how IT and networks are coming closer together. And this event has evolved in that way as well. So the people that you have coming here from an operator perspective as well as the vendors who are here to sort of talk and help solve those challenges, often taking that conversation of merging the IT aspects of OSS and BSS with the network side as well. And it's great to see that because this is one of the significant challenges. Typically operators have been siloed with these internal departments. They haven't discussed or talked to each other. And we've ended up with a situation with multiple different systems, siloed systems that do not interact, do not talk to each other, heavy on the manual process side. And we're trying to fix that as an industry now as we move towards autonomous networks. And with the early adoption of AI solving some of those manual processes,

Rightly, there's a lot of talk at this event as well about business outcomes and serving the customer. But at the end of the day, a lot of that comes from the implementation of the right technologies. What kind of solutions can the network operators to deploy to help them get from their legacy past to the digital here and now?

The journey towards efficiencies and automation has to be done in layers. It's not a complete rip and replace. Some of the areas that we find operators are asking for support in that they are typically heavily reliant on manual processes are things like site acceptance. So they're deploying new sites around their network. There's so many people in so many stages throughout that process involved passing of paper emails, for example, and it's taking a long time. So we look at what we achieved in Japan. So Japan at our peak when we built the Rakuten Mobile network, we were deploying somewhere between six to 800 sites a day almost with zero touch provisioning. I heard one operator tell me today, they'd be lucky if they brought that many sites up in a decade and they were joking, but it's not far from the reality because it's such a slow, heavy process and it doesn't need to be with the right tools, with the right applications, you can completely automate the site planning and acceptance when you are planning out new sites, whether it's rolling out 5G or rolling out into new areas.

We use drone technology, for example, to look at exactly how the sites have been built, are the components built and connected in the right way? And you basically will not get a green light for that site acceptance unless all of these areas components have been put together in the right way. Everything from the adjustment, the tightness of each bolt, for example, how it's been put together, the health and safety aspect of the engineer, who's on site themselves, are they wearing the right gloves, the right helmet, for example. This can all be done on one screen, not a laptop or anything like that. It's automatically uploaded. Once it's gone green, the site will be brought into live and commissioned.

And how can Rakuten Symphony work with the network operators to help them make this transition and help them get to the next stage of their evolution?

So our OSS platform covers a number of different modules from an operation perspective, from planning and building to operating and maintaining the network. It's vendor agnostic, it's cloud and ran agnostic. So this isn't just for an open ran network. This can be deployed on whichever hardware vendor they are using. And we have deployed this on all of the major RAN providers. We typically look to start small and it's either solving a challenge where they have multiple systems that are not talking to each other and our platform is deployed as an umbrella system to bring those together or potentially to reduce the number of apps and tools that they have. Or it's to go in and bring new automation and efficiencies in by replacing one of the existing tools that they've got. So we typically look to start somewhere very, very small, avoiding any kind of disruption, not particularly huge costs either.

We know costs and budgets are to prove that the model works. And if you can prove on a very short, small number of sites that automation is introduced and you've gone from 80% manual work to 20% on a hundred sites, it gives you a very nice business case for the operator to then say, if we roll this out across a thousand or 5,000 or 10,000 of our sites, we should expect to see the same. And then all of those people that we're doing those manual processes can be redeployed or they can focus on more critical needs and solve these easier problems.

Now of course here, and in pretty much any conversation in this industry, AI is a really hot topic. How do you think AI can transform the telecom sector?

So I personally think that the telecoms industry will be one of the biggest industries to benefit from ai. And we've already started to see this in our Rakuten mobile deployment. So maybe two examples that I would share using AI to predict and identify potential faults that might arise in the network and preventing them before they happen. I think we would all agree that this is a great saving of time, but also then the impact it has on a customer, fewer outages, fewer disruptions within the network. Then on the other side, I would think about how we are using AI to predict churn. For example, if there is an unhappy customer, maybe they've complained maybe about a specific area or they're not happy about a service, they're coming towards the end of their contract and they're at high risk of churning. Maybe they don't take multiple products from you.

We can see this. We can identify this potential risk of churn in advance, approach the customer to address maybe some of their concerns that they've had, turn them back into a green light, a happy customer again, and avoid that churning customer. So these are two areas that we see as two particularly big impacts that AI is helping and then this insight full data that we see and gather in our network. We can then use AI to offer personalized experience that are unique for that customer based on their own algorithms that they're generating products that they might be specifically interested in. So it's not a general blanket promotion across all of the subscriber blade. They're getting bespoke promotions specifically for them for their own interests. If they're a coffee drinker, they're getting a promotion for coffee. If they're a wine drinker, it's maybe something for wine. And we've seen that this personalization can really, really help improve customer loyalty and customer stickiness.

I mean, at a bigger, broader level, what can the rest of the industry learn from what Rakuten Mobile has done in the past four years and how it has operated and behaved and built itself out in a different way.

So it's not lost on us that we started this journey into telecoms as a greenfield operator. And I think when you're starting off with a blank piece of paper, of course it makes sense to choose the latest technology and the technology that is being used more and more in the future. And this is technology that is built around automation, the cloud and AI of course, but for the vast majority of the industry, this isn't a luxury that they might have. However, the journey that we took and this rapid speed that we achieved to build a network, we did gain a lot. And it wasn't easy. It was a great challenge and we overcame many challenges during that journey. And we want to share these experiences with the operators as they start their journey layering into this transformation, which they've all now, I think openly accepted, this is what needs to be done. What we often see as it comes up in the discussion is not necessarily an agreement of yes, that we have to do something, but it's where should we start that's going to have the biggest impact. And that's where we try to lend our experience to help the operators as the software vendor, as Rakuten Symphony where you can start, we'll identify where the biggest impact on this journey towards automation, a beneficial impact it's going to have for them. And we'll try and prove the model works in a very small, low impactful way.

Well, I mean, there's no doubt that the rest of the industry is always very interested in what Rakuten Mobile has done, what it's doing, and how it's operating. It's a company that a lot of people talk about in the industry. So I'm sure you'll have plenty of conversations here at DTW and other industry events in the future. Nastasi, thanks so much for joining us. Great to see you.

Thank you.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

How OSS is becoming the AI-enabled telco automation platform | TelecomTV

So we're in the delightfully warm and sunny Copenhagen in Denmark for DT w Ignite 2024, the annual TM Forum event. And I'm here with Rahul Atri, who is the president of Rakuten Symphonies OSS Business Unit. Rahul, great to see you. Thanks so much for joining us.

Now, obviously at this event, the big talk here is about how the industry can transform and transform mainly through the use of software systems as the telcos transform to become digital service providers. What are the technology and business drivers behind the recent transformations of OSS

Ray? I think one, Rakuten always been an internet services company and that's how we landed up into telecom. Now, one thing which we were already clear about is in the end, the user case about the use cases and the services they get, and we carried the same DNA into OSS and automation platform. I think OSS is the automation platform, which enables the autonomous networks of what we've been talking about, especially in DTW where things are around monetization or autonomous networks. I think keeping that into mind OSS is equal to solving use cases via automation.

And what would you say are the main requirements for a next generation OSS?

I think how we want to run the autonomous networks is how soon you are able to get the information. Is it real time, near real time? Are we able to pick it up from multiple southbound systems? How do you aggregate that and plot it across to generate insights out of it? Telco doesn't have a data problem. Telco has value out of that data. How soon you can depict those value because the sooner you get the data, the sooner you analyze the data and then you take the close to actions is what we're looking at. We've been able to do a lot of things internally, especially in Rakuten Mobile. And then taking this technology globally. We have created our own observability platform which collected data from every part of the network, whether it is infrastructure, cloud, application services, correlate them into one vertical integrator information available, then generate insights.

The insights could be dashboards, the insights could be alerts, the insights could be service assurance. And based on that you can even structure your teams. Do you want to still formulate that L one, L two, L three, L four triaging teams or you want to check out into more IT way of servicing your customers and say, yeah, I will look at our service assurance. Is my voltage running successfully? Is my handover successfully are my high speed train movement? Customers are feeling any challenges. All those things are possible once you have the insights available into the OSS systems.

And how do you think these changes in OSS as automation and AI have an impact, how that would change the customer experience management?

There are multiple things to think about before customer experience as well. And it depends on for OSS system, actually everyone is customer, internal teams are customers, and then external customer of course. And it starts with what is the success? For us, the success is what are the customer using which services customers are using. So for example, in our OS systems, you can not only visualize the coverage holds, but also experience holds which kind of service is your customer experience, at what location, what amount of time, and then all the contributing systems can be correlated. So we have a platform where we correlate the coverage which was planned, the coverage which customers are feeling and the experience they're getting on every application because in the end, consumers are consumer are using applications. We just talked about before this interview started that the networks are so important and always cursed.

If a streaming platform is buffering, nobody will blame the streaming platform. They'll say, okay, my network is not good. And that's how we focus on the customer experience as well. And obviously internally automation is a journey never ends, but how do you define the automation? How do you define the success criteria is how we focus on, and automation is not a plug and play. It doesn't happen that I do automation in one network, take it in second network. Every OEM partner is different, every cloud is different, every application is different. But how do you create common tool set so that you can do it much more effectively, much more efficiently and much more agile is what we focus on our platforms.

Now, how should a network operator think about modernizing its support systems and sort of replacing its legacy systems and bringing in the new platforms it needs?

I'll say something which is cliche. It's always a people platform technology kind of thing. I think we have reached to an age where technology is not the problem. AI can write the code now. So technology open source, there is so much opportunities and features and capabilities available. I think what is missing, what do we see the future mode of operations would be? What do we see the future of telecom industry would be? How do you see the customer interact with network? Would you still be selling data SIM cards or would you be selling use cases? Start from there. Define what the future customer would want and how are you going to achieve those services runtime? How can they buy drone as a service? How can they buy connectivity as a service going beyond? And that's what people do talk about when they say open network as api APIs network as a service.

But when you define that, then you come back and say, how do I enable technology to make this happen? Would this be a OSS plus BSS problem? Would this be orchestration problem? Would this be all problems at once? Solving together? I think what we want to achieve is what needs to be defined technology stack to enable that and also how do we change the culture and people to understand that this is where the industry is going, this is where the user is going, this is what they want. And that's why we are changing the technology shift. What we do with our customers is work on the use cases, work on understanding how the organizations are currently doing the job. If we convert that into digital workflows, for example, how would the same organization now adapt to the same tools? The successes, doing more work in less, doing less errors, doing let's say multiple rollouts at once, solving the meantime to resolution faster. I think it's very important that we define the use cases, the success criteria and how people would adapt that. I've been a product manager all my life. The basic success criteria my boss told me once is how many customers use your tool every day?

Now one of the things when people have really get into the conversations here at this event these days, they're often talking about intent driven end-to-end orchestration and other processes. Can you give us some examples of real world use cases of that kind of setup?

Telco industry, my God is so good at creating new ves every day. I think we talk about the same thing again and again, but in different ways. I keep it simple things very simple because I said I'm a product manager. I work very close to development and engineering teams. They need to understand things so that they can code. So intent for me is what are we looking at as end results? For example, things have been moving. So earlier we used to see KPIs and say, my handover success rate is dipping or my accessibility is dipping, or my downlink rate is dipping, or my customer experience is dipping. We used to see that from KPIs. We used to see them from dashboards. Then we started creating alerts on top of it to say, give me an alert if my KPI DI by 1% or 0.5% and something.

And then we started creating tools like SAW and other application which will keep on monitoring this and sometimes maybe predict and tell us that this is what the problem is happening, probably this is the closed loop you have to achieve. I think if we combine all of that and say there will be a genie, there will be a tool where you can say, I want to improve my customer downlink throughput rate by two MVPs or five MVPs or 10 MVPs. Please reconfigure the network accordingly. That is what actually the intent driven network means. Do we achieve that? Is it simple? No, because the moment you say improve down link, it might impact your footprint or the coverage and other things. So it's journey towards there. I keep it very simple and think about it as a virus scanner every day if I'm a cluster head, I'm a knock head and say, please tell me my network is doing. The scanner should go around and say, okay, everything looks usual, or this is where your golden parameter template or your golden parameter audit has failed. Can you correct it? Yes, I'm correcting it right now. And the tool should be able to do that. Do I want to do it with the Gen I? Of course. Do I want it to be doing by dashboards? Doesn't matter.

Another thing, and some of the operators here at this event are talking very proudly about how they are going from having thousands of systems to just hundreds or even dozens in some instances, and they're bringing together what used to be thousands of disparate O-S-S-B-S-S and other IT systems into a converged platform. And that's seen as a real enabler of how they're going to behave in the future. Is there going to be a unified layer that can support all of that functionality in the future that's going to enable the cloud native digital service provider?

Actually it should have been always like this. So when we started in 2018, we took a call, very simple calls to say we want to minimize the number of layers. First time I landed in Tokyo, I saw the Etsy man stack. There were like seven layers from infrastructure from VM and vm, also guest and host images, then applications, then, oh, sorry, VMs, then vfs, then applications, then VNFM, then NFVO and then os, my god, how many management systems. It's like having less people and more managers, right? So we thought, okay, how do we make it simplify how many layers we can converge? The first step was, okay, we're going to have one OSS and NFVO converge them. They can be one, the orchestrator can be the same thing. Then we went and said, why do we need VNFM? Thankfully the job was done easier by Kubernetes from OpenStax.

So they merged the Kubernetes architecture into the cloud platform CAS as a service itself. Then we thought about do we need EMS? Can we not replace that and make it a part of OS S itself and move FNPM up and have only telemetry agents coming in? And we did that for entire stack horizontally from ran transport core, anything application, 200 plus integrations which are running right now. So we did that unified layer and then now I think the world is shifting towards more and more. Sometimes I laugh about it. I said, we used to say that in 2018, 2019, people have started to realize, which is great for us, great for industry. It's not unification. It's actually the right thing to do for the operation because now you need less people. You don't need 200 different kind of skillset to manage each of the EMS and have the capabilities.

The tools are smart enough to say, okay, I'm going to converge all 200 together and give you alerts in case something goes on. You can even define services together to say this is voice as a service, this is data as a service. Also, you can have less tools and less implications because somewhere or the other you will reach out to the point of scaling as well. Resources, cloud, everything is cost. We also believe that it also led to simplification. You can spend more energy, more time. The operations would be much more faster because if something breaks, you need to have 20 people on the call. 20 people will do their regular stuff to optimize and see, okay, this is what is breaking, this is not, it becomes a lot more simpler on day two if not day zero and day one because when you're building day zero, you have inertia.

People would not like to move what they're doing. People would still like to see EMS screens. People would still like to see multiple screens and they want to have more number of people reporting to them. But that's how you will, and that is the only possibility where you can support the future use cases like AI because the data needs to be, knowledge needs to be collected. That's the only way you can even tomorrow do slice assurance because the slice is end to end. It won't require rancor transport to work silo only then is end-to-end slice possible. So great if this is happening and thankfully we were doing it always and we are ready for that.

Well, it's good that as an example for the industry to look to and it's clear that there are other operas, operators moving in that direction and starting to see the benefits of that as well. So Rahul, thanks so much for joining us today and giving us your insights from the Rakuten perspective. Thanks very much.

So we're in Sunny Copenhagen for DTW Ignite. It's the annual TM Forum Conference. I'm here with Campbell McLean, he's chief architect at BT Digital Campbell. Thanks very much for joining us. Good to see you here

Today. Thanks for having me. I'm really looking forward to this.

So you've been around the industry for a while, but you are just coming sort of back to BT in a way. Can you just tell us what your role is as chief architect at BT Digital?

Yeah, so I'm Chief architect BT Digital. My role is I kind of think we have a well articulated strategy, well articulated in the market and we're kind of halfway through that. I think my role is to really accelerate that, do the common things once, expose them as highly consumable, get our data lined up correctly so that when we land everything we've done, we've done once and really used our investment well.

So in 2024 then, as you come into this role, what is it that you are looking to achieve this year? What's keeping you busy right now in terms of the trajectory of what BT Digital is doing?

So the key foundational stuff that we're well on the way to is a single data fabric. So how do we see everything related to a customer or product? Everything we see is in real time. So we can become highly predictive and really understand the customer experience at that point in time. I think that that's one of the key foundations. The second piece is a really composable architecture. So we can bring AI in to bear at any point on any journey to really maximize all of that return and investment and use AI really gear what we do. Small input, big output and we're thinking that through. But I think the building blocks put in place by my predecessor and the strategy we're there, we just need to double down on the execution, really focus on the execution of the common things.

So I mean composable, it sort of blocks is something that this industry, in particularly at the TM Forum conference has been talked about for years. Is that a reality now where you can start to build stacks and what does that mean for the data and how you can use and collect the, because there's lots of different types of data you have to bring together

Huge amounts of data with tructure structured, unstructured static dynamic. So I think the pivot that TM forum took driven by Nick and George Glass to ODA, I think has really underpinned as an industry what the challenges are, but also how we fix them. And I think the ODA canvas, it really gives us a great landing zone. As for what we want to do in the future, the composable microservice and how that's done will be everybody's flavor. So what we do, others will do differently. So which Databus choice do you make? Postgres, Oracle, whatever that is, the code base, the swagger file, how that's described or the yam, however that is described. That will be for individuals. But for me to have a landing zone to target everything we want to do, I think is invaluable. Taking the very spaghetti like legacy we have and understanding where we want to get it to is a huge aid in driving great architecture and great engineering. I think engineering has become so much more important for us to do what we need to do.

And that sort of data management, I mean is that going to be a very long journey that doesn't sound something that you can fix as quickly as maybe as some of the other bits because it must be really, really difficult to get that sort of common view of all that data?

It's not easy. I think we have really struggled, telco has really struggled to understand the data picture so large and it's so diverse. That particular challenge I think is exactly what AI is. Spectacularly good at very high volume, very high speed drive insight. If we take SID and we take ODA and we take the capabilities and have that structure, I think that will really allow AI to bring an understanding that we gain insight from and we are on that journey. I think having a single fabric for a telco is very important so that whatever you do with whatever hyperscaler on-prem or SaaS with your partners now, I think that single fabric is going to become very important.

And just to clarify, ODA, that's the open digital architecture and BT is like a big supporter of this, right? I think

It's hard to find anybody in telco that's not a big supporter of it. I think it crystallizes where we want to get to and it gives us a structure that enables us to have a target. So if I want to look at legacy and I want to take 14 things, I can understand where they will end up in the future and how we get there I think will be different for each telco, but I think it will help us all end in the same place.

So how does a company like BT adapt to working with composable IT and platforms like ODA and ai? Because that's a big shift in operations and way of working.

So I don't think it's as big a shift as we could have expected it to be. So when I look at the BT digital population, a lot of really great engineering skills, like great engineering skills and how you build new things. I think that, and guys not all quite as old as I am, but the telco guys of this is what we do with the engineering of this is how we could do it. I think those foundations are in place, particularly in BT and they're strong. I think the kind of wave of AI that's coming in, understanding how an LLM works is very important. Being able to build, one's a different thing, but understanding the right LLM or right small language model or visual model, I think we're learning very fast, but they're very easy to consume, understand the output from within the context of engineering and architecture. I think we're getting good at that and we're learning that. And the insights are relatively available and are very consumable. It has become much more consumable for everybody. And I think the basic skills, knowledge and experience within the BT community is readily accepts this stuff, right? We've been moving at pace for years. We just got to put another two inches in our step and just move that a little bit faster and we are moving to do that.

Okay. Now of course, as in all organizations, things need to be driven and led from above and within telcos there's always been a CTO and A CIO and very often there was A CSO in charge of security. What does that mean for those management levels? Are they all coming together? Is the role of the CIO changing?

I think the role of the CIO has changed. I think it's much more engineering led. When I look at the next generation coming through, they almost all have a pretty strong engineering background. I think our network colleagues have always had that, a different kind of engineering, but absolutely applicable. I think the conversations we have today, and there's always kind of been the running gag about the gap between network and it, but I think today talking about the engineering, understanding the challenges, it's much more of a mathematical conversation than it is kind of an OD conversation. And the challenge is that I have in providing an engineering platform for digital to deploy great services exactly the same as my network colleagues have in an engineering platform for them to deploy great services. And I think the world's evolving. I think if we look at 5G and making that consumable really consumable to our customer, I think in the old days you would've kind of seen customer IT network in the old terms. I think it brings the network very close to the customer and makes us all much more relevant together. Security has to be embedded in everything. I think it's making the conversations more productive closer and maths engineering based.

So great discussions about the industry and where BT is going, but getting to the most critical question now for you today, Campbell, what is your favorite film of all time? I need to know this.

So thankfully you've given a little bit of warning about this, but I think the third man encapsulates everything. A great movie should be. Just great story, great acting, great dialogue, wonderful location, and the atmosphere within the movie. I could watch that movie just on the tr. I love it. Great

Movie. And there's a little tune we can take around with us for the rest of the day. Now that is the,

I have the zither playing in the back of my head for the rest, thank you for my Earworm

Real pleasure. Thank you very much.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

We are in Copenhagen for DTW 24 Ignite. That's the annual TM Forum event. I'm here with Amol Phadke, he's the group CTO at Telenor. Amol, thanks very much for joining us today and your very busy schedule. Really appreciate it.

So here during the show on the first day of the show, you made a pretty big announcement with AWS about the sovereign cloud strategy that Telenor has. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Yeah, absolutely. So yesterday marked really a big change for us because as you remember a few months ago I had talked about becoming an AI first telco as tel, and of course, cloud and AI are two sides of the same coin. So we also wanted to take a very disruptive position when it comes to cloud first. And so that announcement yesterday with our partner AWS is really about moving towards a cloud first telco. And if I can elaborate on that a little bit, there's really two dimensions to that. One is around building a sovereign cloud solution. And this is where of course, as I talked about in the announcement yesterday, we are going to invest with AWS in our C Guard data center that we are currently rolling out. And as part of that, we will be in a position where we can create a set of infrastructures that are designed for the sovereign cloud market in the Nordics.

Now, why do we think we can do that? Well, there are three things. One, we are by definition building the cleanest greenest data center right in the middle of Norwalk. That itself is quite a big achievement. Second, that data center is sovereign by definition. We are a state-owned enterprise, and so is a joint venture on the data center side, which means together with us and the joint venture, we are very good in terms of understanding the sovereign needs and operating on those sovereign needs. And then thirdly, this data center really becomes a co-creation facility where a lot of partners will come and innovate. And that's a key point. So the announcement with a WS is also very significant for us, but so was what we did with N Media a few months ago because we are going to need a basket of partners that can do this with us for sovereign club.

And then the second part of the announcement is really more focused on us as Telenor looking at our own needs and looking at how we transform our own organization so that we sort of are in a position where we can say to the external market, look, we are doing this with ourselves as well, and then we are looking at you as well. And so that's why the Sweden and the Finland part comes in because we are going to partner with AWS there to radically transform how we look at our IT and our infrastructure and take their help in terms of moving towards a cloud driven infrastructure.

So that expansion of this strategy into Sweden and Finland, is that the exact same model or slightly different?

It is not the same model as such, but basically what we are trying to do is to say, look, we are a large multi-country operator and therefore each market has a slightly different and a slightly different way of handling the transformation journey. And so AWS is really a strong partner with us in these two markets where we can drive this. Now would that be exactly the same in all of our markets? We are still analyzing that, but the point is we are going to work with the ecosystem to give us whatever is needed for our customer needs.

Now there's a lot of talk at this event and all industry events through the telecom sector about the importance of finding new business opportunities, new revenue streams. Is this an example of that, A way of kind of going beyond the normal telco boundaries and finding something new, but something that's right in your wheelhouse?

That's exactly right. Because a lot of what you hear in this event is about growth opportunities. And you can go after pretty much anything you want, but at the end of the day, if it's near to what you do as your core and it's adjacent to your core, you have a higher chance of success. So for instance, the sovereign cloud is about, we feel quite strong that we are a very strong player in this particular market segment. And so it makes sense to partner with cloud players in this and really jointly try and address that need. But that doesn't mean I'm going to start looking at cloud services for everything because then that would be not close to our core competence. And the same thing goes with ai. You have heard a lot about AI in this event, about the promise of the opportunities and the growth, but you have to be very targeted and focused on what this particular industry can do as opposed to everything else that AI can offer.

So you're really picking your battles, finding out what works for you and what can work with Telenor as a business and for your customers. So Telenor is definitely moving things along, but there's a sense here of people I've spoken to at this event that while there's a lot of talk about the need for change and so on so forth, that there's still a lot of inertia and not enough change in this industry. Do you think that's fair?

I think that's fair. And the reason for that is two things. One, at the TM Forum event here, we also discussed as a TM forum board how we can create a catalyst for change. Because yes, AI is a great technology and yes, there's a lot of other things happening around cloud, but ultimately it requires the telcos to do different things. So you probably have seen yesterday the TM Forum also looked at the three new missions that we have as a board. And of course the compostable IT systems is something that the TM forum has a leadership for many years. But the other two motions around looking at AI and then looking at autonomous network, is there an attempt for the operator community to say, let us wake up and do something in these two forums as a way to get out of that inertia? Because otherwise what happens is you sort of sit back as you say, and you let these technologies come to you, and then either somebody else takes it or you're too slow, and then we know what happens. So it's really our view as a TM forum to look at these two mission boards, for example, and say, is that going to be a catalyst for change? That will wake us up as an industry from the ownership.

Okay, well, I mean, let's hope so. That's what we can say, but it's up to the industry to do that itself. It can only help itself. So this event is only three days in total. We're in the second day now. But I'm sure you've spoken to a lot of people, you've had a lot of meetings. Are there any other trends or developments that have stuck in your mind as something that's either new or innovative or exciting

At first? There's a lot of AI innovations I've seen here. This is by definition something that you would expect. I have seen an innovation where people are talking about using AI inside laptop computers. So instead of having a film on top or glasses on top, you just look at the camera and you get to see 3D, and then when you step away from it, it's 2D. And this kind of things is something that is really only powered by ai. So there's a lot of innovations there. But I also get a sense for the first time, there's a lot of humility at this event because people are starting to realize that two years ago we also talked about 5G monetization quite a bit. Where is that? And I think people are starting to understand now in the industry as a whole that, okay, perhaps we have to be more concrete. Perhaps we have to be more grounded, and maybe we have to be a bit more pragmatic. And really we have to start looking at innovation as a step by step approach as opposed to really looking at a big bank thing saying, 5G will change the world, or AI will change the world. Looking at really a benefits view of it. I think that's something that I have picked up here in the last couple of weeks, which is refreshing to see.

Right. Well, let's hope that combination of humility and catalyst for innovation can help to change things. So next year, I can ask you perhaps a little bit more of a positive question. Yes. And great speak to you as ever. Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to telecom tv.

Thank you so much for having me today. Thank you.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

So we're at DTW 24 Ignite in Copenhagen. It's the TM Forum's annual show. I'm here with Fabio Cerone. He is the head of telco for EMEA at Amazon Web Services, AWS. Fabio. Great to meet you. Thanks very much for joining us today. Thank

So the show has been going on for a couple of days here. You have a great presence here up on the balcony at this event. The biggest space I think for any company at the show, and obviously a lot of visitors and a lot of partners here as well. Now, what are the key trends that you've heard about that people are talking about at this show and what is AWS offering to the people that are coming to see you? Yeah,

You see, I think DTW is here is another great opportunity, great moment to acknowledge the compelling moment we are in as an industry. And not a surprise, everything is about generative ai. And so what I really felt in this days is the acknowledgement that actually this technology is putting us in a place where the pace innovation is even higher than what we can absorb. And so the key thing that I hear about is the need to partner to succeed. If you want to solve real customer problems, there is a clear willingness and commitment from different customers and partners to partner together. I will make some examples. So this morning I was with Amdocs and they delivered an amazing demonstration about how a coding body enabled by generative ai, we call it Amazon queue, can help them to reduce the cost and lead time to modernize applications to move to cloud.

And this is not new, just in continuation with the clear trend. We started with British Telecom a couple of months ago. You might have seen the announcement and if you look at the numbers, essentially it's amazing. So British Telecom, in three months, they onboarded 1200 software engineers. They produced 100,000 lines of code automatically through Amazon queue with a 37% of accepted code. First time, kind of 12% increase in productivity. There are some demos there, then we can go together. But this is a first concrete example about what kind of content generative AI can deliver to telco players. To do what? To do automation in software coding. Amazing. There are other examples that you can see around with Ericsson, for instance, where they're building a telco LM train on us on AWS. And your story is to train that LLM on the huge information base that they have from their network to make network troubleshooting and resolution automatic through a simple chat box. And the other example that I would call out is with T-Mobile and in this case about run optimization radio access network optimization. Again through generative AI that in this case the content that is produced is optimization of radio access network. Again, it's a strong improvement in terms of productivity, but again, the key theme that I see around is let's partner together. The problems are pretty clear, the solution is pretty clear. The technology underlying technology can be fairly complex and that's why super important to cooperate.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, partnerships and collaboration have been talked about for years, but now you can clearly see evidence of this happening and the results of that as well. So in the industry, so you mentioned a couple of instances there of how Genai is sort of helping to shape and change the market and improve productivity, but it seems that there's a lot of potential use cases. Are there a lot that are specific to the telecom sector, would you say?

I would say there is some specificity to the Teleco domain and then there is a huge potential which is just transversal to different industries. We can make some examples, right? One typical example is about how do we reinvent the customer interaction, the customer experience, the customer care. And so if you think about the legacy contact center where you call, Hey, I have a problem, they are telco, my line doesn't work so well. And then you need to go through six or seven iterations to the IVR and after 10 minutes, no one is answering yourself. Now the way a generative AI contact center can revolutionize the end customer experience is just mind blowing. So you need to think about the new general based contact center, like a navigator for you. So imagine if you're driving in the streets of Rome, you would love to have a navigator that drives you into your end direction.

Now the gene AI based contact center for an agent who need to answer question is exactly like a navigator because essentially provides all the good answers based on a huge information base that the content that the content center, the made content center made, makes available to the agent. Just an example. And we have done some massive projects, couple of examples in the telco dish, US and VMO two in uk. I think that's a great example of that. The other example that I would put forward is you have heard about the gene AI global Telco alliance, so SKT, DOS telecom, Isla, they're building a telco LM for a simple reason that they see a huge advantage in building an LLM, which takes telco specific information to build a number of use cases. And again, it's all about automation of the network, network configuration, network troubleshooting, and the end game will be autonomous network.

We have been doing many steps towards autonomous driving. Genetic AI will be a fundamental enabled for autonomous networks. And then you can think about players like the Erickson, the Nokia, the Samsung of the world. All of them are in a path where they want to infuse generative AI to make DUR software more usable and more efficient to make sure that their r and d is more productive. And again, the example that I made before about Amazon queue is just an example about how generic AI can deliver a content that in that case is software coding, helping the network, the developers, software developers focusing on something else with higher value. So again, it's a mix of industry specific use cases and lemme say horizontal use cases that are about improving the customer experience, improving the employee efficiency, and making the industry more innovative overall. Okay.

So obviously a great deal of chat about AI and gen AI specifically at this event, but are there any other industry trends that you've been hearing about or that people have been talking about with AWS?

Sure. I would call out a couple of cases. Yeah. The first one is about the announcement that Teleo went out yesterday morning, which is a kind of really mind blowing. So Teleo announced that they will partner with us with AWS to improve their digital sovereign posture in the Nordics, leveraging AWS digital sovereign Cloud by design. What does this mean essentially is that we will deploy AWS cloud infrastructure in a state-of-the-art data center that they're building out of Oslo, and they will position themselves as the key player to fulfill the regulatory requirements on digital sovereignty. That is one piece that is absolutely in line with our strategy to play a key role helping Europe to modernize digital transformation, being compliant with the regulations ready to digital sovereignty. You might have heard that we will invest 7.8 billion in the next few years in Germany to build the European Sovereign Cloud, which is a total independent partition of cloud, and this will generate 2,800 jobs in Germany to build and operate this brand new nature.

Lenor will leverage this value proposition and this is one clear trend. The other clear trend is about cloudification of the network. So one month and a half ago we announced with Telefonica, Germany that they will deploy 5G core standalone on AWS based on a mix of AWS region in Frankfurt and outpost deployment in their data centers. Now, the problem that they wanted to solve is pretty clear. They wanted to have a much higher automation in the way they develop, they deploy and they operate the network with a clear CICD pipeline where we inject our technology in this case together with Nokia to make sure that the level automation is much higher and they use the elasticity of the cloud at base. If you look at the journey, it took more than two years of intense validation and testing and failure and success. But the moment that you go live with 5G core in the cloud in accounting like Germany, I think this is an historic milestone much more to come. The plan there is to deploy the 5G core for initial phase, for a standalone part for 1 million subscribers and then take it forward. I think there is an economic example about how after the massive IT migration in the cloud, now we are starting the journey for network cloudification on AWS cloud.

I think it's also an example and it was talked about here today, about how the telecom operators need to be bold in their choices and their decisions. And I think Malik Rao at Telefonica Deutschland is one of those people who's prepared to take the next step and be a leader. So it's, it's

Absolutely true. I'm used to say that you need to identify and work with key change agents, people who want to play the insurgent role. Now, Malik Kra, as you said, has been my partner in crime for almost five years now, and he has been bold since the very beginning. He was used to say, if we move web application into the cloud, this is not where we will gain. We need to move our core business into the cloud. And he did it with this step. Essentially, he showed the work as a change agent can really play the role to invent the way you build something that for years has been built in a very legacy way and really leverage the advantages that the cloud can bring to you. To your point, change agents make history and start new trends. Malik, for sure is one of those.

Absolutely. Okay. Fantastic to hear the trends in the industry and what AWS is doing. So Fabio, thanks so much for joining us today. Great to talk to you.

Thank you so much. Pleasure to be with you.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

We are in Copenhagen for DTW 24 Ignite the TM Forum's annual event. I'm here with Danielle Rios Royston, better known as TelcoDR. But she's also the acting CEO of to Totogi. Danielle, here we are on the swings

That's why, you know Copenhagen's famous for Legos, right? Denmark, the home of Legos. And what a better place to meet than on the swings.

Absolutely. So it's the first day here at the show and already there's a big focus on the TM forum's, ODA, the open digital architecture and the associated open APIs. Now Toto is one of the companies that's on the leaderboard for having certified open APIs and has been for a while. What do you think of ODA in general? How is that adoption going? How good is it for the industry?

Yeah, I think we're still early days. We've seen a big uptick in adoption I think over the last probably three or four years, which is amazing. And the industry needs that interoperability. I mean, most telcos don't have one single vendor in their environment. DR think Lester Thomas was on a podcast a few years ago saying in the 24 opcos, each OPCO has 180 BSS systems installed, right? And I mean, that's like 4,000 that they're managing across their entire ecosystem. So absolutely these systems need to work together. They need to be interchangeable. And I think the ODA work and the open APIs are super key to that. But as you mentioned, we're on the leader board with 44. We feel like we jumped, started the revolution in the openness, but when we started to get into it, we realized that there was a little bit of a problem.

And that's because of computer science Underlying in all of these vendor systems is a data structure. And every data structure is a little bit different. And even though the open APIs really abstract the data structure and let the any coder make two systems work together, there's some semantical meaning in each of the data structures, each of the data types that even when we do switch out vendors, you still have to make sure everything still works together. And so while I think the ODA is a really, really great start and a necessary start, we still have some work to do to make this all work together and build a dream and the vision that TM Forum is trying to do.

So what you're saying is that ODA is a good start, but this industry needs a common data language and platform and that's something it doesn't have

Right now. Yeah, I really do think that, and that's a little bit about what Totos BSS Magic is all about. We start by harmonizing data structures.

So BSS magic, this is something that we've talked about before in which you showed at M WC 24 and you are showing again here now.

Yeah, we're up in the AWS stand. We have a partner kiosk there where people can see how we've been advancing BSS magic. You're right, I debuted at MWC 24. We had that really awesome avatar, which is really showing the beginning of where I think user interfaces are going over the next five to 10 years, which is zero ui. Apple just announced their Apple intelligence swinging on ai, which is really going to change how subscribers are interacting with the mobile phone, right? It's the beginning of that interface becoming invisible. And I think the same thing's going to happen at Enterprise Software and AI is really going to enable that. And so it begins with harmonizing the data structures so that now there is a system that AI that has a common language across Bill Lester Thomas at Vodafone Common language across your 180 vendors. And now there's one place where you have access to all the data and you can do whatever you want.

You can add a screen, you can add a field, you can add functionality, you can talk to it to solve a ticket. You can talk to it as a business executive and say, Hey, how do I make my business better? What are my best plans? How do I grow my subscribers? And that's what the true business value of A BSS is all about, is really extracting that business. It's not really about the data entry, that's an important part, but really getting those key business value insights so you can make your business grow and be better.

So I mean, how big do you think generative AI can be for the telecom sector? And also when people think of gen ai, they think of the public systems where you go on and ask a question prompt and the result might be a little old or a little dated or a little mixed up. But what can gen AI tools do for telecom? Well

Just look at what's happened in the last 18 months, right? GPT-4 came out then 4.0, we've had clogged two and ANTHROPICS three come out. We expect five to come out in the summer. These systems are not getting incrementally better. They're getting a hundred times better with each evolution. So it's really just going to go vertical. And so yes, we're struggling with hallucinations or bad answers, but things like Perplexity Pro, which is this great new search tool that will give you the sources, right? I mean it's just massively improving. And so togi, Wayne Gretzky, the hockey great used to say skate to where the puck is going to be. And so that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to skate to where it's going to be and we're building our tools in a way where they are LLM agnostic. We can switch out the LLM if a new one comes out, or even Elon Musk's new version, I think he's calling X AI comes out that's cheaper and faster and better.

We have the ability to switch out the LLM and keep going. The code generation capability of the AI is really the key here because we spend billions of dollars in the industry on CRS that take time. You have to have a good idea six months in advance in Telco to roll it out and get the service activated. But with the code generation capabilities of AI now we'll be able, I mean business people will be able to generate the functionality that they need and experiment much more rapidly. And I think that's what the ODA is really promoting that agility. I think when you go to MWC, it's all about getting things to market much more quickly. The biggest problem we have in the industry is generating more revenue. And so I think that rapid experimentation and smaller trucks so that we can get the data, does this work, and then keep going or toss it and try again, that we need to get to the speed of the tech industry, not Telco.

Now. So Togi was in the news recently. You won a deal at Zane Sudan and you replaced an existing system in a very short amount of time, just 18 days, I believe 18 days. Tell us a little bit about that. That's quite phenomenal. No,

No. We were actually late. The team asked us to do it in two weeks, and this was in the middle of MWC. Literally we talked at MWC and my cool super futuristic booth. And in the back I had people literally coding and trying to get Zane up and running. There's been a lot of humanitarian crisises in the news. Sedan kind of gets lost. I think it's regarded as one of the biggest humanitarian crises in the world. And so electricity was cut to their two data centers just dead. No activity happened at MTN as well. And so, I mean this is the way people send money. This is the way people communicate safe passage, keep in touch with loved ones. And so it was very important to restore connectivity to that country. So I think Zane was very open-minded in terms of, Hey, let's cut the list short on what we need to move.

There was no electricity, so it was very difficult to migrate the latest state of the incumbents charger. But yeah, we got it up in 18 days. They wanted it in two weeks. They needed a couple extra days, but 18 days, I mean typically a charger of this size that's supporting 20 plus million subs, you're looking at at least, I mean six months would be considered fast and a year is about normal. And so I think the only vendor that could have done this was a public cloud vendor, a public cloud charger, like to Toki. And so they've just been amazed that team, the Zane team, amazing people, just so resilient, so positive. And now they're starting to see the capabilities that the to Toki charger has the ability to roll in features without a blip, adding AI capabilities for hyper-personalization. And so they were losing about 10 to 12 million a week and now they are growing again and they're so happy and we're so happy to partner with them. And it's been amazing.

And just very quickly, so it's not running in Zane's own data centers, it's running in a

Popul WS region. Okay. Legit, right? I mean just it's like a plug your network into to Togi and we're up and running and so it's not running old school. My dream. It's everything I've been talking about. Well,

You have been talking about public cloud for quite some time and of course recently as well. So Zane Sudan, that's in Africa, but in Europe, in Germany, Telefonica, Deutschland, Telefonica, Germany, they announced that they were going to run their 5G core, at least part of it, working with Nokia on AWS. Is this the shape of things to come, do you think?

I think it is. I've been talking about this for years and I mean, sure we had the dish story, but I think people were like, oh, that's Greenfield, whatever. This is a Brownfield tier one in a major market. I think Malik Rao, CTO of Telefonica, Germany, it's going big here. I think all eyes are on this. I think what you're going to see here is lower cost and more agility. I saw that Erickson's not going down with the fight. They signed a contract extension as they would. They're like, Hey, just a second. Not so fast. And so it's going to be a really interesting fight developments. But yes, this is the dream. This is what I've been talking.

Tanon is hedging. Its bets basically isn't to see how it goes. Yeah,

I mean I think they're moving a few million onto the cloud. Malik's obviously going to be cautious to start, but this is big. I mean, this is exactly what I've been talking about. I think this is the future of networks. I think the friend or faux debate is ending. They're for enemies. You need them. I think the telcos just, they need that capability, they need that scale. So many other things that we need to focus on that we just need to give up the infrastructure fight and just say, Hey, we're not any less of a carrier if we're not managing the infrastructure, let's go build a great network, have a great experience, focus on our subscribers and actually grow our revenue. So there is a six G.

Yeah. Danielle, great to towards you again. Have a good show. Enjoy the swings and everything else that DTW 24 offers, and we'll talk again soon, I'm sure.

Yeah, it's always great to see you. Thanks so much.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

Extra Shot - part 8 featuring Guy Daniels, and Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV | TelecomTV

Welcome back to Extra Shot for the last broadcast live from Windsor at the DSP Leaders World Forum. I bet you two are very tired after the past two days because you were on stage. Of course moderating many, many very rich discussions with our telco leaders and it's thank to wrap up two exceptional days, but I want to talk about the very last session before we move on to highlights and key takeaways from the past two days. The last session was dedicated to focusing on the customer. Do you think that amid discussions around network automation, ai, hybrid cloud, et cetera, with somehow losing track of what the customer is really after what they need and want? Great.

And I think that this industry is quite guilty of that in general. And what we tried to do this year was make a conscious effort while having those discussions to always try and swing it back to the customer and remind everybody that we were going to have a session at the end that was devoted to the customer needs and customer requirements. So we did try to keep that in mind. Why are we introducing ai? Why do we need to make things automated? At the end of the day, nobody's doing this just because they can anymore. It's all for a reason and it's usually around money, but there's also the customer aspect as well. Can we make the experience better or are we able to create new services? I think what was really interesting in that last panel was the poll result because we asked what would make customers' lives better essentially.

And one of the three options was lower prices. And I was sure that that was going to be the most popular answer and it was by far the least popular answer. Having personalized services and a better interaction, a better engagement with the service provider, far out, shun, far out, shunned, the lower prices. So it just goes to show that if you want to retain customers and be able to do more business with them, treating them better and delivering to them what they actually need, that is the answer. This industry knows that, but it very rarely acts on it. And I think that is the problem the industry faces, right?

Yeah, absolutely. And I was very surprised at that result, but I wonder if we'd only asked consumers, people outside of the industry, I wonder if they would've said, yeah, lower prices. But the reality is no, it's a better experience and we hear about this so often, but you feel that not a lot's been done for it. So as Ray said, we made sure we tried to get the customer the focus on the customer throughout the sessions for both days. It was very important.

I was not surprised by the result from the survey because you've actually mentioned the word experience, and let's face it, we are moving towards an experience-based economy aren't for you. And I think that especially among the younger generation, I'm the mother of teenage boys, so I know that today would be ready to pay more for that personalized experience. And of course for always greater, better connectivity. Of course. So let's go back to the discussions we've been having here for the past two days. What really sticks with you in terms of the key messaging? How much have they changed compared to last year or the previous years Last year, for instance, I remember we talked a lot to rent on topics linked to sustainability and skills. For instance, still did this year of course, but maybe not so much. We talked about ai of course, a lot because everyone's talking about ai. Let's face it. So share your key takeaways and the highlights from your perspective.

Okay. You'll always have topics of the day and there there'll always be trends. And every year it'd be a new trend. I'm pleased that it felt to me there was more in depth and open discussion and a willingness to really tell as close to the truth as these guys are probably going to go. And that was really refreshing. I mean, we tagged this event, unleashing the digital services opportunity. There's been a few jokes about unleashing, but the message is very clear that it's about services because that's what the customers want to, that's what they're after, the services, the customers need the services, so everything's got to tie back in. So I was very pleased that all the discussions focused in on that to a greater extent than perhaps we've seen before.

Yeah, we did ask the speakers, the co-hosts and the panelists to bring a reality check and not just be coming with corporate messages. And it helps that we at this event that we don't have just pure slideware and vendor presentations, not to do the vendors down, but people see that as other events. They just want to hear what's really going on in the industry. And actually I think more than ever before the speakers and the co-hosts did bring that to, and I think that was really shown in the first session today on network APIs and Lauren led Boucher from Orange was the co-host, and he steamed straight in with essentially, he said, we bug it up in the past and we need to make sure we don't do it again. We don't know how this is going to play out. How often do we hear people saying that, but we're going to give it a go, okay, yeah, this is really what's happening, not somebody going, this is definitely going to work. Everybody wants it and we're going to make a whole load of money out of it. So I think it's that to build from that realistic viewpoint was really encouraging. It got a few backs up, but that meant that people were really on their metal and had to be on their best game. Nobody here could get away with them, throw away or flimsy comments because they were going to get picked up for sure by the other speakers.

And I think you've touched upon something very important here. In order to succeed, the transformation the industry's undertaking or undergoing at the moment, being humble is important, isn't it? Admitting that you need to be realistic. What does

But I thought that our telco leaders here were very realistic and humble, weren't they? To admit that you don't really know where some aspects of technological developments are taking us. Yeah. Isn't admission that they lack clarity. Everyone lacks clarity, let's face it. But what's going to make the difference then in this context, leadership, collaboration, experimentation. We've heard

This a few times about the need for leadership in the teams, especially the cloud native software teams conversation, for example. You can't just parachute in a couple of experts and hope it changes everything. You've got to have that leadership throughout the organization. So mindset, there was another one. It's a bit of a culture of telecom. Bingo here. These are important. It's very important to do that.

Yeah, and you mentioned that wasn't a particular focus, but that cropped up organically as did energy efficiency. So these things and security does as well. So we didn't have particular sessions on those topics, but they cropped up time and time again, I think to show that it's not all about ai. That these topics that were really high profile last year, they haven't gone away. They're now becoming part of every conversation. So I think that was good. That really played out.

So I know you're both probably very tired. I'm going to challenge you a little bit to finish this conversation and maybe to list at the top three main challenges the telco industry should be addressing right now in order of priority. There you go. Little challenge to finish the day, keep you on your toes.

Good. So the top three challenges, I think number one, engaging better with the B2B market, the enterprise users. I've been banging on about this for ages. The industry, the service providers have been trying to do this and talking about trying to do it for 30 years and they still haven't successfully done it. But if they don't do it, then they really do face an existential crisis because that's where a lot of the money that currently isn't coming in, that's where it sits. So they have to deal with that. They have to come up.

0.1. So Ray gambled on going first for the easy one, but that means it's going to go last for hard one. So I really,

Yeah. Number two is don't innovate for technology's sake. Don't just follow the technology. Think about the product, the services, the need of the customer.

Think about giving a solution to an existing problem, I guess. I think a lot of the leaders on stage actually mentioned that starting from a solution rather than just trying something fun for the sake of it.

And that comes back to that enterprise thing. And I think thirdly then, and this, as you already pointed out, cropped up last year, it's about the skills thing. And it cropped up again this year about how does this industry present itself potentially to the people that might come and work in it. And I can't remember who it was earlier said, if you said to somebody coming out of university or even school, we've got this problem of massive amount of streaming data that we need to deal with, come and help us make it better and improve streaming experiences. People would jump at that. But if you said to them, do you want to come and work for a telecom company? They wouldn't even give you the time of day. So I think repositioning and representing the industry to the kind of people that are looking for jobs in AI and still at the hyperscalers and still at the big tech companies to attract them into the industry that is like, it's a big challenge, but ultra important.

No more challenges, but maybe as a final word, a conclusion. Why do you want the forum to retain its intimacy? It's quite a small gathering, isn't it? And it's important, isn't it, to create that safe space for people to have real open conversations. Because you mentioned that a lot of people were watching us online, but that doesn't mean that you're necessarily going to open the doors to absolutely everyone to join us or will you in the future. How do you think the forum is going to evolve going forward?

I think they have the best of both worlds here. We can reach a global audience from the live streaming and they can listen and take in what's been said on the sessions. But if you really want to participate or quiz the guests here and participate fully, you've got to be here. But by keeping it small, as you say, it's intimate, it's a nicer feeling. You don't feel lost. You feel your voice is important and you are going to be heard. And it's a difficult balance. You don't want to go too big in person, otherwise it's a completely different field to the event.

But we can go bigger and we should do, because there are still important elements, parts of the jigsaw puzzle of this industry that we don't have in this room. We don't have developers. We had hyperscalers this year, which is great, but we don't necessarily have big enterprises, so we can bring in more people, but not the thousands. I think that the small number in one setting, in one room, breaking out into streams, no, thank you. No. This is all about making sure that everybody is focused. And I think the fact that we got to the end of two really intensive days, and there's still a lot of people here, some people are still playing pimble. That's fantastic. This is what it's all about. This means that people are really engaged with what we're doing here, and we do actually hear it. People like the format and they come back. So that's a vote of confidence.

Very much so. There's a great, very friendly atmosphere here. You wanted to say I would.

Can I just say thank you for all what you do here with extra shots and talking to all the guests and the team here, Louise and Phil, behind the scenes who are making all this work. It's appreciated.

Yeah, I think that's very important. Indeed. Thank you to all the people at telecom TV helping us, all the sponsors and partners. Of course, without home, this just wouldn't be happening. Of course. Well, many thanks. You must be so tired after two days of intense conversations. But congratulations, I'm

Dropped. You have my blessing for sure. I mean, you've done a fantastic job here on Stato. Well done to both of you, guy Daniels and from TelecomTV. That's it from us. An extra shot. Thank you for watching and I wish you all the very best. Of course.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

Welcome to Extra Shot Live from Windsor at the DSP Leaders World Forum where I'm delighted to be joined by a very special guest. He was on stage actually a few minutes ago. It's Diego Lopez. Diego, your senior technology expert at Telefonica, and an ETSI fellow as well. Thanks for joining us today.

So you are on stage, like I have said to discuss network automation. So could you maybe share the key takeaways actually the key messaging you were sharing with the audience today?

Basically have been two. One is that automation has been around for a long, long time. We haven't been applying some degrees of automation since network started, but the important thing right now is that we have the possibility of doing or smarter automation that we may use something that is able to adapt to the changes, et cetera. And that for this, what we need is continuous and trustworthy flow of data. And this is maintaining those flows of data and quarantining those data are useful. Is the key for making automation realize its potential.

Data management is important, but it's also very challenging, isn't it? You've got security issues, you've got storage issues, you've got use issue. And of course we are overflowing with data, aren't we? Definitely. And with the eyes, it's only going to get worse. So how do we go about managing data efficiently For network automation,

What we're trying to do is to build what they call a data infrastructures is mechanisms to take advantage of the distributed nature of the networks so the data can be made available where and when they are required and be processed. Because the point is, what is important is not about the raw data by itself is important, but what's important is the features and the characteristics of the knowledge that you can derive from it. And this how we can move data around so we can take advantage of the knowledge that is associated with it.

And Diego, of course, this year at the forum, we've had many conversations around AI because there's been a step change with gen AI in particular. How much of a game changer is it when it comes to network automation?

Well, no, it is essential. We were discussing during the session about the idea of how we were trying to identify early symptoms of disruptions in the network. And we are relying very much on AI the same way. The same way. We use very often the same example, the same way that we rely, for example, on dogs to detect things that we cannot detect because our sensors are not well trained for that or are not suited for detecting. This is the same way, relying on these additional tools that we are starting to have to detect those conditions that are related to disruptions and detect them before they have a serious impact.

And of course one of the greatest fears related to AI is the possibility that it could replace humans. So what place remains for human operatives in the well in network operations? I mean, will they play any role at all? Would they be augmented by ai? Would they be replaced by ai? What's your take on it?

I believe that it is going to be another tool, a powerful tool, but the tool that would require humans to be around, think about one thing, and this is something iist very much when talking about with colleagues about this. An AI is a system that we program is no more than a computer program. But the difference is that we are programming it in a different way. We are training it, we say we are training it, but we are doing is feeding data to make it behave in a particular way. And this is basically just programming. It's like when I was young, we tend to use assembler that it was a very, very primitive language. Then we see and then we have to learn Java and then we have to learn Python. And right now we will have to learn prompting or whatever they call it to train the ai.

And finally, Diego, to wrap up our conversation before we move on to the last session of the day, I was wondering if you could maybe share your thoughts on where the sector is at currently. What's the state of play? What would you say are the key challenges and maybe opportunities

In general for the sector? I would say that is about embracing all the possibilities that what, well, at least in my team, we commonly refer to this as network transformation. Something that started probably 10, 12 years ago with the advent of SDN network virtualization, all the like is to find all the full possibilities that this is offered to make the network something that is much more flexible and much more able to adapt to the needs of their users and well in general associates.

A way of being. Absolutely. Well thank you so much Jacob. Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us. Thank you on extra shot. We are back in one hour to give you more thoughts on the floor here at DSP Leaders World Forum live from Windsor. Thank you.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

Extra Shot - part 6 featuring Appledore Research and Dell Technologies | TelecomTV

Welcome back to Extra Shot with me, Charlotte Kan We are live from Windsor and it's day two of the DSP Leaders World Forum. Many rich discussions that happened here this morning. And we're going to talk about session number six, which was all about how to leverage Telco Cloud for advanced operations and of course the benefits of adopting a hybrid model, which was actually before I introduce you to my lovely guests here. Well, we conducted the survey, didn't we? To find out what the best way to go about the cloud is. So let me introduce you to my lovely guest. We've got Martyn Warwick, who's co-founder and editor in chief at TelecomTV. Alex Foster, DSP Leaders Councillor, thank you for joining us. Was a pleasure to see you here. And Francis, we had you on extra shot yesterday, but it's also always a pleasure to welcome you back. Okay. Francis has principal analyst at Appledore Research. Welcome to all of you. So yes, Martyn, we conducted this survey, a bit of a rhetorical question around which cloud is best for telco operators. The overwhelming result was hybrid.

It was, and not really surprising, although it surprised Ray that it was more than he expected, but the practical reason why it is, it is the best current solution that you could possibly have to the problem.

I really liked one of the comments that came from one of the panelists and they said, you don't buy cloud, you do cloud. And I think that really brought it to life that actually in the doing it's an action and therefore it is a choice, which is why I think it has come out as hybrid. So the right solution for the right user case and therefore the action in the do.

My observation I think with the cloud is the cloud means a lot of things to a lot of people. And these terms of hybrid cloud or public cloud or private cloud are kind of abstractions really. The honest thing is there are really only three things in this model. There's hardware, putting hardware somewhere, there's putting software on top of it and there's connecting that all up. But most importantly, there's commercial models that are on top of it. When we are making the story about our choices of hybrid cloud and public cloud or private cloud, actually most of the time we're not really talking about what the underlying technology is. We're talking about commercial models and how that is played. On top of that one, I think that's why you are seeing the reaction in terms of hybrid cloud. Public cloud is great for some things. Jeff in the said, it's great for that kind of scalability, that ability to start small and scale up. It's probably not a great opportunity for many of the telco loads, which we know already plan and deploy with sort of five-year timescales if you know what the capacity's going to be in five years time. There's very little, there's very little agility and scale in that one. So I think the important thing is actually to recognize these three fundamentals and most of it is about the commercial model that supports in what's best for the application that Telco wants to deliver.

What's key here by the stand of it is having that flexibility. It's very important. Nevertheless, some operators may not have the resources to build and run a private cloud and have this option of be switching to a hybrid cloud model if they would like to. So I'm wondering is the public cloud sufficient to meet their needs? Do they have to go for private and hybrid and have that range of options?

I would say that the answer is private clouds have a very specific purpose and there are reasons for that security generally others as well, but they're very specialized to a particular purpose or set of purposes. Public cloud is not quite like that and so there is room for both and there has to be room for both, certainly for now, and I can't see that being any different in the next decade.

Yes, I mean it depends on who the customers are that you are supporting in certain circumstances. As we heard from the panel, actually there are certain industries where actually you've got to have that data containerization from a regulatory point of view, and so therefore it has to be private in that instance. However, we know working with some of the public clouds, they're absolutely working on regulatory compliant clouds that would then drive that efficiency, that would drive that scalability would drive the flexibility that would also be needed.

I'll come back to the, I think it's the commercial model. There's a lot of examples where the public cloud providers, the hyperscalers are actually delivering in-country, secured, allocated, separated capability. Some are finding that is to all intents and purposes, that is a private cloud, but it's run and delivered by a public, what we term a public cloud provider. So I think again, I would emphasize it's really down to the commercial model, both of the cloud do you want to deliver the infrastructure you want to deliver and how you are intending to monetize it. Regulation is a means of determining that monetization. If you're a small provider though, maybe the larger providers providing you a private cloud is actually the better way because they take the operational, the scaling problem away from you, but at the same time give you that kind of security and geolocation.

So we're going to take a break, a long break for lunch. There's a lot of hospitality and entertainment going on here at the Fairmont in Windsor. But before we go and before we resume our conversation around hybrid cloud and which solution is best for telcos, I just wanted you all to maybe take turns to share the content, the takeaways, the sessions, what you've heard here so far that has really resonated with you on data of the forum.

Well, I was going to say the AI session, but seeing as we've moved on from that, I would say probably the last session that we just did that we're talking about now was the most relevant to what I've been writing about and discussing a lot in TelecomTV and therefore I think that was the hardest hitting and it's very, very more than interesting. It's fascinating to hear the different approaches by people who are really doing it.

I love the AI and API sessions that we've had. We've had some very, very big numbers thrown out. Was it this morning GSMA saying it's between 103 billion in terms of the opportunity. And we heard on the last panel that the telco cloud opportunity was a 23 billion opportunity for vendors. So hopefully all of the sessions are given something for all of the ecosystem here today. But one thing on one sentence really stood out today was when one of the panelists said, slow is the new down.

And when we start to think about APIs, when we start to think about applications and latency, and that sentence about actually slow actually is down and the data that we then discussed on the panel about, well actually what did that mean in terms of loss of customers actually then starts to move towards that inference at the edge, looking at edge and edge compute and being able to do real time decision making at the edge. So I think that as we talk about APIs, as we talk about Cloudification, actually that next leap is absolutely into inference. Cloud decision making at the edge.

Slow is the new down. Good one, isn't it? Killer quote of the farm. Definitely Francis,

Actually it was another quote that resonated with me. It was from Jeff Hollingworth, the Rakuten Symphony. He said, we need to be asking why are we doing this? If we are not very clear why we're doing this, all of the problems that we've been generally discussing throughout the two days are a consequence of we don't quite know why we're doing this one. And he made the emphasis at the end of the day, Rakuten Mobile particularly did this because it was a commercial imperative to do cloud. It's not that they're choosing cloud because it's the next tick box on the CV or something like that. They're choosing it because it's necessary for the business model that they want to be as a fourth operator in Rakuten. So I'll come back to that. I think that's the big thing that resonated with me. Ask yourself the question why and if it doesn't have a commercial imperative to it, question yourself further.

Why always a good one to ask yourselves whatever you undertake. Thank you very much to our wonderful guests. I hope to see some of you after the lunch break, hopefully to discuss cloud and APIs, ai, all the challenges and opportunities of the telco industry right now. So stay with us. We're back in one hour for extra shot and in the meantime, well happy lunch. I guess. Welcome back to Extra Shot with me, Charlotte Kane. I'm delighted to have you joining us on day two of the DSP Leaders World Forum here in Windsor where I'm joined by Francis who was with us before the lunch break. Thank you for sticking with us, Francis, for more analysis of course on some of the sessions we've had here at the forum. And a special guest, Cormick Willan, head of the telecom systems business for Europe, middle East and Africa and Dell Technologies. Thank you for being with us. Thanks your

So you were here last year, I remember it because we had various chats around the telco sector and the various challenges it's facing. So I'd like you to maybe tell us how you think conversations have evolved since last year.

I think it's been a very interesting year on a couple of different fronts. I think from a macroeconomic point of view, unfortunately we still feel that the market is a little depressed, which for our industry requires innovation, requires investment, and so sometimes it's difficult against a macroeconomic depressed background. So that's a challenge everybody in the industry is facing. We've seen a massive obviously sudden interest over the last year in particular in ai. I think everyone has been talking this week about AI and it get into a little bit later in sort of some detail, but that's one massive change from last year. Interestingly, I'm not seeing as much this year in the conversation around things like sustainability and the ESG agenda, not because it's gone away just because I think we're in danger maybe of some of the AI hype overtaking the conversation and the sound bites.

So I think that's a thing we need to keep an eye on, but fundamentally it's still a very positive industry on the forward looking nature that communications and critical infrastructure requires and brings to the world. We've all seen from the covid years now as we've come out of this that the need for constant ongoing improvement in communication and availability is more important than ever and will continue to be even more so as we go forward. So I think directionally still going in the same way bit of an economic challenge, but some new exciting things happening in the area, sort of AI

Francis, and I should remind the audience that your principal analyst at Appledore Research, Francis, going back to the point that Cormack was making on those shifting conversations that the telco sectors having, it is true that there's possibly less emphasis on sustainability and skills. We talked about skills and upskilling the workforce as well last year. That's because there's been the switch to ai. I guess it's hard to escape conversations across any industry from AI since obviously Gen AI appeared and that's really been a massive step change for the industry. And I know you enjoyed that session, didn't you, Francis, the AI session. Could you share some of the key takeaways for us?

Yeah, for me, the AI session, I concur with the point which is I think we're getting a little bit more realistic about a lot of the things that we've been discussing over the last few years. And I think some of that is actually driven by this kind AI bombshell that we've had over the last year through decades explosion,

Explosion would be a better word. And I think what it is doing is it is making Telco actually focus on two things. One of which is being rather than taking Gen AI as a kind of general thing is what do I want it to do? I think I mentioned in the earlier session, Jeff made a really key point on just about everything we discuss here, which is ask yourself the question, why are you doing that one? So I think there's the opportunity for AI to drive why conversations within the existing business of that one. I think the other thing that was coming out in the session, which is this opportunity of how do we support that AI explosion within our networks, it requires networks. Andrew Coward in the last session made one very key thing. A lot of these AI use cases are going to require edge capability, otherwise just the time latency does time latency work. And I think that's the key thing to focus on is not that we are trying to be AI companies or LLM providers, but rather that what is AI going to require of the network and the capacity of the network to deliver that. One great conversations. I think beginning here, it's a very early stage,

In terms of what we're doing, but I think there's both the opportunity, how do we apply AI into our business? How do we leverage what AI requires of the network

Cormac, the industry is currently facing many challenges with the need to automate, need to integrate ai. Of course, like I've said, the need to upskill its workforce, we've got opportunities as well. Of course we talked about APIs, clarification, et cetera. So I was wondering if you could tell us a bit more about the role Dell technologies is playing currently to help the sector transform and grab those opportunities or face those challenges.

Yeah, of course. So we've actually created about four years ago a dedicated telecom business unit within Dell Technologies specifically to address what we saw happening in the areas of edge computing, edge networking, AI, and open ramp. Because fundamentally, all of those are going to run or require increased compute power. They're going to require much more open platforms than maybe some of the traditional network, particularly radio stacks we've seen in the past. And this is all understood and well known. The question is how does that transition get made to a more open X 86 generic compute platform going forward? Not that I think anything in the telco world is ever generic because by the very nature of the business it is rather specific and then by very nature of each telco, they're rather unique in some way, shape or form. So what Dell has done is created a telecom business unit to address that transition from telcos from the traditional proprietary stacks into an open X 86 compute environments, which is going to come in at the hardware level and then work its way up through a CAS layer level and up into an application level going forward, as I think more and more of the traditional vendors move maybe out of unique hardware into software defined networks into software applications and RAM becoming a software capability on a network that requires the growth of more standard technology.

And we are one of the largest standard X 86 based technology companies. So it seemed like a natural intersection point for us to play in that space. And thankfully it's all sort of moving in that same intersection trajectory at the moment. So that's why we're here.

Okay. Well thank you so much for your thoughts today. We need to wrap up because the next session is about two commences. It's around improving network optimization through automation, so it's very topical indeed. Many thanks to both of you for your insights and for your feedback. And stay tuned for more extra shots where we'll discuss, dissect the conversations happening on the main stage here. So stay with us. We are back in one hour. Once again, Cormack Francis. Thank you. Thank you.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

Extra Shot – part 5 featuring Appledore Research and Pliant.io (IBM) | TelecomTV

Welcome to Extra Shot with me, Charlotte Kan. We are live from Windsor for day two of the DSP Leaders World Forum and we just had a very interesting and very content rich session here on unlocking platform opportunities with network APIs. So to discuss it, I am delighted to welcome Vess Bakalov, love president at Pliant.io an IBM company and Robert Curran. Robert is consulting analyst at Appledore Research. Welcome to both of you.

Know what, it was great to see the difference perspectives. Obviously we had a wide panoply of different stakeholders on the stage. Obviously GSMA who is doing an amazing job trying to bring together the community, organize it, have that single interface, which we all think is so critical to foster adoption. Having Ishwar on the stage representing AWS was great because it's such a different viewpoint from everyone else. And honestly, having the different telcos, I have some thoughts about that and some of their opinions, but it was just good to see their different focus, geolocation, QOS, geofencing, all of those were amazing use cases and we'd love to dig in.

Yeah, key takeaways. So I'd echo the ecosystem part. That's kind of what we saw on stage today. De facto ecosystem all discussing the same topic. Think for me two key takeaways. The first is the confirmation. Everybody understands this is about money. At the end of the day, there's the whole value chain. We're looking as far up and as far down as we can to figure out the different areas of value. The second thing, which again is fundamental, which I think the industry the health industry is getting is this is all about developers. The developer as customers is a completely new idea for telco. And I think the references to some of the historical attempts to do work in this area I think is very important. It shows the industry can learn. It is prepared to look back at a little bit of history and say, actually you know what, we don't always get it right and when we don't, let's learn from it. But that point about this being developers as customers, which again, I think Ishwar from a s reinforced that he was the one guy on the stage who's got millions of developer customers. So that's a really important perspective. So that has to be in the room, it has to be at the table and that's who the telco industry is trying to reach to. That's really important. My takeaway,

Robert, you've mentioned the money opportunity while in fact if Telcos opened their exposed their networks, the opportunity is valued at 34 billion US dollars. It's too good not to seize, isn't it?

There's certainly upside opportunity here. I think again, even on today's panel, you heard a range of responses to some of the numbers that are being banded around the people who are at the front line doing it saying, we're not so sure about that number, but we're still doing it anyway. I think this whole thing is to some extent an experiment. I think when we talk about exposing networks, there are ways in which that can sound like a risky thing to do. That's not really the point. The point is exposing some of the value that's held within the network as an asset. Sometimes that value is connectivity. That's what we've been talking about for network APIs for a long time. Sometimes the value isn't something else, it's in things like the location data or some other information that's mediated via the network but comes somewhere else.

Yeah, no, look, that was a constant echo since yesterday, right? It's how do we take the sector, the telecom sector and evolve it and go from a net reduction in stock value sector, which was addressed yesterday to one that's actually growing. And the fact is our modern life relies on telcos. It's a shame that we haven't been able to monetize the network. And coming from a bit of a more enterprise world myself, one of the things that's always been frustrating about telcos is the fact that network is so closed, the fact there are no APIs, there is no devolution of control of an application to the enterprise. So taking that aspect of it, some of what we're working on right now within my unit in IBM is how can we extract the policies of an application from its deployment? So looking at, and I'm going a little bit into the enterprise line, but looking at your Kubernetes deployment, Ansible deployment, other factors figuring out what are the policies, what is the bandwidth requirement, what are the latency requirements of an application?

And then we provision the enterprise network to support those. The application controls the network, but that stops at the edge. I cannot extend those policies into the telco. And with these APIs now that is now a possibility we can now begin to work with. And again, some of the work I'm working on right now would enable them very easily to set up these APIs and abstract the network from the independent of what the network behind the APIs. We can provide a consistent set of services to the enterprise that will enable them with confidence to start pushing some of the same use cases, quality of service latency requirements, and pay premium for that. An enterprise often would pay premium. I think someone mentioned pay premium, differentiated premium for undifferentiated services. So latency in bid fine and at the right time, at the right place, at the right quality, people will pay a lot of money and it's just sitting on the table right now monetized.

Right. Well, I mean I don't want to be, obviously what has been achieved by telecom, it's tremendous, right? Again, I mean I am in awe of what my phone can do every given day, but a lot of someone else mentioned that oftentimes product managers in telcos are tariff managers. And I think telcos are addicted to that business model. And I think it's time for them to look at what AWS is doing with the 200 services they have deployed on top of very commodity server and disgruntled as actually Ishwar mentioned, the telcos getting into the mindset of innovating and providing these additional services on top of the bids and latency that they provide over their pipes. That innovation jump and sort of taking the leap of faith in a way and it will let them get to that 34 billion pot of goat to the end of the rainbow. I mean, I'm a big believer,

I think that point about experimentation is quite important. I think a lot of the technologies that we're seeing come through, obviously with cloud, other things, APIs, part of their end result is to make it much cheaper to experiment. And I think that's part of, again, that comment yesterday about of our product managers being just kind of bundle managers, something else, the next generation if you like, of telecom product managers will be and need to be much more creative and much more willing to get engaged in end customer problems and their context. Again, that was coming out in the panel a lot today. We've got to understand the end use case because we're right at the bottom of this chain. And that's again, it's a change in position for telcos. Telcos are used to getting most of a large medium-sized pie. This new world at global scale hyperscale so on is all about getting a small piece of a much, much larger pie. And that's where Epic APIs really fit in. So that ability to get close to customers, understand their business context business problem, understand where developers play and what's your part in it, that's really key. But reducing that cost of experimentation, increasing the velocity, reduce the cost, learn fast and make products that we actually want to use.

Yeah, we're going to take a short break, just five minutes and we are going to be back to discuss the session on APIs and maybe all the sessions you've attended yesterday that you want to share your feedback on. So stay tuned. We are back in five minutes live from with for the DSP leaders World Forum.

No, no, collaboration is great because as quite a few people on the stage mentioned, every country has multiple telcos. So developers engaging with these new APIs would have to, if every telco does their own thing, well every application would have to have massive amounts of work to support the different services from each telco. And that's obviously not sustainable, not something that the developer community would easily buy into. Now at the same time, the GSMA forum has done amazing things, creating standardization, which now the telcos need to adopt. It's on them a little bit and I think that as the initial use cases grow and some initial success comes in, that will be an easier and easier sell inside the company. Now I think the telcos also short sell themselves because they aren't that many telcos in each country. From the US there is essentially three, right? I mean there is more, but really three. And in every other region it's more or less the same. So I think telcos a bit more power than they giving us US credit for, especially with the power of the services they can offer. But nonetheless, I would definitely encourage the whole industry to focus on collaboration. I think that is immensely important. It can stupid differentiation, but as long as we have a standardized way to access those services that would make the developer community much more willing to engage.

It. Yeah, we're just publishing some research on ecosystems in open ran for example. And what's happening there is we're seeing the formation of more or less stable ecosystems. So not just the idea of disaggregating and abstracting from a technical perspective, but understanding how do you reassemble things back together again. We're certainly seeing increasing examples of real collaboration company to company operator to hyperscaler to network equipment vendor to ISV forming in the industry to do what works. And I think that it's part of the byproduct of desegregation and openness is you say, well actually we're going to be a specialist in our own area. And so when you look at what's happening, for example in the silicon market, that's becoming a more complex market. So now telcos are having to think, well, what's our silicon strategy going to be? Rather than just handing that out and making that somebody else's problem. So that means you've got to get in deep in your collaboration to understand who are you working with, what is their expertise? And also as a telco, what's your business and what are you expert in and what are you not expert in? We're seeing some shifting of the tectonic plates, I think, around what telcos and even what their suppliers believe they're best equipped to solve. It's really interesting. Collaboration is absolutely integral to that.

And what do you make of the various industry wide initiatives in place in order to open up networks? I'm thinking of the GSMA open gateway for instance. Surely that's the step in the right direction.

From my perspective. It's one of those things that, as Robert said earlier, experimentation is such a big important part of this and open gateway, other similar products, foster experimentation by making that initial investment easier. And as long as that is not something that would take a lot of upfront resources, can show some return of the investment, that can then foster repeated investment. And obviously every telcos look at projects at scale, and that's always the fact. So I think in this case, allowing them to look at some of these services and see that initial success would justify the further investment.

I think Robert made a great point with the success of hyperscalers. It's undeniable. And to what I said earlier, in many ways they have shown that yes, you can sell a fairly commodity service as long as you make it frictionless to developers. It's okay to give up some control. Now, telcos have challenges around regulation and other things that hyperscalers may not necessarily be facing, and we should be cognizant of that and not be that hard on telcos because they do have governments in other things that Amazon, Azure, et cetera don't necessarily have to deal with. But nonetheless, I think this has proven that adding a good set of new services in a rapid cadence with an engaged community can be extremely lucrative and maybe 34 is actually a low number.

I think what's also changing the macro trend I the connectedness of things, I don't want to get all iot about the whole thing, but the reality is that more and more things are being connected and we're getting more used to it and we're becoming more expectant of it. Your watch, your trainers, your car, anything that's moving around your Amazon package or any other delivery company that you can track where it is and it stops away or whatever. I mean, that's just part of our rising expectation for knowing exactly what's going on, whether it's a person that's connected or a device that's connected or it's a prediction or it's a measure in time. I think that's part of a background thing and I think we underestimate just how far we've come even the last few years. So I think that's adding to the accelerating expectation for the kind of things that can be done with APIs and the role of telcos in that process. So I wouldn't want to underestimate that. It seems so intuitive now because we're used to it all the time, but it's happening just gradually increasing, gradually rising. We take it for granted.

You know what, the one thing that I did not expect to hear as much about was honestly the green energy transition impact on telcos. The zero bit zero watts message I heard yesterday, honestly left me a little stunned in my chair. I did not expect to hear that, and I certainly didn't expect to hear telcos taking it quite so seriously. This definitely going to affect the way I think about how in my own work we're going to be helping telcos provide visibility into this and then also provide control such that they would make the network even more responsive to its load and whether it it's hvac, whether it's power consumption or power mix. So that is something that I did not expect to hear and certainly I was happy to hear.

Yeah, this is such an interesting event because you talk about lots of different topics that come up. We've been from Silicon and GPUs right up to leadership and recruitment and retention. I think that's part of what makes this event so interesting and so different is you're going to get all of that range. I think something that I take away is that telcos are maybe even a little less further forward than we normally hear. We're used to hearing at the big set piece events, the NWC and so on. How great we're doing, I think is a little more honesty here, that there's so much more still to go in terms of automation, ai, autonomy, energy efficiency. We really are just at the start of this. What we do know is that we pretty much got the tool sets. We pretty much have the capability now. We have to put it together and we have to fix some of the underlying data issues and complexities that are there. So we know the direction we're headed in. We kind of got the kit. We just need to take the first steps along the path.

So more visibility and now we need the delivery to happen. Indeed. Well, many thanks to both of you for an equally rich discussion and conversation compared to the panels we've had here at the forum. Many thanks to you S and Robert and stay tuned. We'll be back in around arms time for more discussions and feedback on some of the sessions happening here in Windsor and the DSP Leaders World Forum. And just a few more notes before we go. You can catch up actually with all the content produced here. It's all available for you on demand on the telecom TV website. You can also take part in some of our surveys. And finally, you can send in your questions. You can participate remotely. So please do send your questions for our leaders here in Windsor. Stay tuned back in an nice time for more extra shots with me. Charlotte KanPlease note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

Welcome back to Extra Shot with Your Live, just about end of day one, nearly the end of day one. Live from Windsor, of course, for the DSB Leaders World Forum, where I'm delighted to be joined by Chris Lewis, managing director at Lewis Insight, and Martyn Warwick, who's co-founder and editor in chief of TelecomTV. Welcome to you both. Thank you. Many rich discussions happened here today. We've talked about how to drive growth in the telco sector, AI and network automation, cloud native teams, how to create them or encourage them. Not that easy based on the conversations I've heard and building infrastructure, digital infrastructure from core to edge. So Martin says, we've heard from Chris already who's graced this stage, if I can call it a stage earlier today. We've seen you on stage actually earlier. We haven't heard from you yet, so I was wondering if you could share your key takeaways of the sessions we've heard here on day one of the

Forum. Yes. Okay, then, well, to begin with, I think it was a particularly good day, not least because the balance between the number of telcos here and the number of vendors and other interested parties are very close, 50 50. So we didn't hear a lot of pitches as it were from vendors. We heard questions to and from telcos talking about what they want and what they need, and Bender responding and saying, this is how it might be done. I think that's very important, very unusual to be able to get that kind of balance. From my point of view as a journalist, I think that interests me most with the first two sessions this morning, innovation, which is, oh, they've been banging out drum since Noah was a boy, and also the ai, which I'm particularly exercised about because it gets a bad press. So those are the two things that interested me the most this afternoon on a personal level, a little less, but very important nonetheless, but not my bag particularly.

I'm going to take it straight to the end of the day then, because I thought the last session on infrastructure and getting the infrastructure out to the edge absolutely summarizes the challenge the industry has, which is that we have been a very centralized industry and we've tried to dictate the way things are done and the way products are developed for the customers, and actually by the emphasis moving towards the edge, it emphasizes the fact that what is required at the edge is not just connectivity, but security analytics, all the things that go to make up the services, the digital services in the DSP that we all need. And that's a big shift from an investment point of view, from a management point of view, from an operations point of view. And I think that fundamentally is the change in direction that the telco industry has got to embrace because AI will contribute to that.

By the way, I don't think it's a totally bad press. I think it is been overhyped, and I think it is talked about in too many areas rather than the practical application of ai. And I think innovation similarly, that telcos can't do it all. They're no longer their own ecosystem. They're part of a broad ecosystem. And if innovation will come in from other parties, whether it's from the people designing the chips or the people even delivering the security and platforms, in fact, one interesting thing that it did occur to me during the last session, Charlotte, was that the way in which the other parties in the ecosystem, so the people building their own platforms, whether it's a Salesforce or a Cisco or many others, it's about telcos adapting their way of behaving to embrace those things rather than try and compete with them. And I think previously they've tried to compete and try to control, and I think that mood to the edge sort of democratizes telecoms a lot, and hopefully we'll get it thinking a bit more broadly about its role in that broader ecosystem.

So it's empowering. Martin, I just want to go back to what you've just mentioned actually around innovation. The industry was at the forefront of innovation for many decades until obviously tech companies started to come up with new solutions, new products, et cetera. But what we've seen today is lots of discussions around the convergence of many different technologies. And since Chris also mentioned mindset, it seems that what's important is to work on the culture and create the right environment for innovation to thrive. So how do you go about that? Well,

I think Neil McCray hid it on the head really by saying these were, it wasn't Neil, sorry, whoever sat next to Neil who said, these were all in the past sort of monolithic state owned enterprises. And that still to this day prevails a mindset can prevail in many of these organizations at telcos that is a reflection and from the ancestor that they came from. And that's something that's been very, very difficult to shift, tried very hard in many ways, and it's succeeding, but it's succeeding more slowly than might've been anticipated considering the bt, for example, was privatized back in 1984, so are looking at 40 years and it's taking a long time.

That was the year I came into the industry, by the way, 1984, was it? Yeah, just 40 years. But I think there's a big, and the geopolitical point is really important because the Chinese and Co have taken a market and restructured it to do the best for delivering 5G and fiber. The Americans have got sheer scale with their major players. They've done it through the capital market, if you like, and Europe sort of been caught somewhere in between the two by regulation trying to control it or guide it a little bit. But actually it stifled it too much competition. And in fact, the point made by I think Francesca and Co at the end there about actually we need to have some more form of sharing between the participants. We shouldn't all be building separate networks. I know the vendors might not like that. They obviously can sell to separate people, but actually the ultimate economics of this industry will end up with much more sharing. I don't think it'll go back to the monopoly that we had pre 84, but I think we will get a lot more sharing, a lot more structure in the market.

But the sovereignty issue is an important one, important consideration indeed. Now, in terms of the challenges faced by the sector, we know that there are plenty of them, indeed. And last year I remember lots of conversations around skills. We talked about them obviously during the sessions we've had today, but maybe not as much as last year, I'd say. Why do you think that is? And also, I mean, surely, I mean, skills upskilling and finding the right skills and attracting new talent is a big challenge for the

Industry. It is. And I'm not sure about increasingly so, but still. So because to recruit people or to have people in your organization that you can reskill, you can see where the talent is to be able to do that. It's quite a long-term process. You have to know what's going on. They have to understand it, then they have to be trained and educated to reach that point. And it takes a while. And as in most of these things, you can't turn it around in 12 months.

No, and I think that point was made in one of this morning's discussions that actually it's more important the long-term goal. And let's face it, most telecoms investment is long-term. We get sucked into the quarter by quarter discussion, and that's just not really appropriate for our industry. But the long-term is actually getting the education systems right in countries. So kids coming through school actually want to get involved in this, and they find interesting to be involved in coding, to be involved in developing digital services. And I think that's one of the long-term pushes. The other point I'd like to touch upon Charlotte is that in all of the discussion that we have, and this is the way this industry tends to deal with it, I didn't hear very much about the actual changing product that we deliver to the customers. Now, I know we've got a session at the end of play tomorrow, which be a nice way of wrapping it up, but all the way through as we move all these pieces around from the center to the Asian, distributed and so on and disaggregated, does it change the product that you and I use Martin or that are business users?

I'm not sure it does. So I'm very interested in tomorrow's session and seeing how we might think about really shifting the emphasis to the customer rather than the tokenism, let's say, of customer experience in the past.

You came into this back in 84. I came in 91. What about the emphasis on the customer then? And surely it was the same. We deliver this, the customers central to everything we do, certainly became more and more of that in recent years.

Co and you paid by distance, and we used to have a lock on the dial on the telephone. I

Distance. So I mean, so much has changed, but we haven't really shifted over to the emphasis being on the customer and what the customer's doing. And I think Nick Willis mentioned this notion of shifting from an inside out model where it is defined by the technology to an outside in one we're defined by what people and customers and businesses and society are doing with the technology and with the service. And that's where we've got to get to. And that will redi dimension the whole industry and change the way we think of telcos and IT companies and digital service providers.

Well, Martin, if I was an analyst focusing that sort of thing, then Oh yes, I am precisely. It is such a long-term business, and I think we touched upon it this morning in some of the geopolitical discussion that the global players, the hyperscalers, the equipment players, they have the global capacity, they have the CapEx, they have the ability to lock jobs off as well as create new jobs all the time. And the problem with AKAs is ultimately they are tied down to a national footprint, admittedly sometimes with multiple national footprints, which has some relevance to government activity. And I think the government did come up on a couple of occasions thinking about how government should be responsible. And I just think this is at least a 10 year journey. It's not a five year journey. It's at least a 10 year journey.

Okay. I'd like to wrap up and conclude our conversation on a high note, if possible. Have you heard anything particularly exciting today? Any exciting developments that you'd like to share with our audience?

I think what I did like about the discussions is that it's much more practical. And as an analyst, we get presented with so many new technologies, new pictures, and people trying to make you excited about it. I think what you heard from all the telcos on stage today was a much more pragmatic view as to where their investment is, where they're going, and not getting too overly excited because I don't think the end product changes that much. And I think accepting the relative role of the telco in that broader ecosystem is really important. Some, and I think we had a discussion about some pockets of innovation, some pockets of really pushing that into other markets are happening, but it's very much contextualized within individual telcos in individual countries. So I think summarizing on a global level is dangerous. I think that's why we often get quite down about the state of the market. There's no major growth, but we are seeing movement in shifts in the investment cycle, shifts in the way the investment community looks at telecoms, this stratification looking at towers and infrastructure. And I think we are seeing a much more practical view the way telcos will evolve into whatever we call it in the future, the XSP, I think rather than the DSP.

Nothing earth shattering as far as innovation is concerned, but a steady progress, I think, I mean, 5G has been around for five years now, still not where it should be except perhaps in some private networks. Six G has been hyped so much in the past year, and the hype cycle can't get much higher. It'll disappear around the moon summer. It's just crazy. And so that needs to calm down, and we're seeing it calm down, I hope and think. But it is an incremental process. And as Chris says, what we're talking about with this industry has always been 10 years, 15 years, always to make these major changes, long

And one last comment, if I may, Charlotte. The way the stock market, the way the financial, the investment community, look at telecoms, they considered it a commodity stock 20 years ago. So we've kept on this myth that it's this fast growing, changing industry, whereas actually, once again, reemphasize the point. So yes, Nvidia and co chasing quickly the Cisco's in this world, the rack, but they'll chase things quickly. But actually the fundamental telecom industry does not change that dramatically. And even setting down towards that fixed and mobile convergence that we talked about how many years ago, Martin? God, A long time, at least 20, 30 years ago. So I think it is a more, it's a more measured approach, a more sensible approach. And that's what you see. Obviously, the stock market don't get overexcited because there isn't anything to be overexcited about in terms of growth, but it will keep on delivering, keep on supporting. In fact, in a recent piece I wrote thinking about 40 years in telecoms, I said that telcos always want to be the superstars, the stars in the film, actually, they're a supporting actor. They're playing a supporting role, supporting this new adventure, this new film that's being created, the new content that's being created. But it's a supporting role. It's not the glitz and glam, it's not the limelight role that they might've thought they had in the past.

Okay. Well, thanks to both of you for your insights. Hopefully we'll talk to you tomorrow. There's more to come here from the DSP Leaders World Forum live from Windsor. Of course. Join us again from 9:00 AM UK time. Of course, we'll have more co-host, small CSP LED discussions, and of course, more extra shots. So don't miss it. See you tomorrow.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

How Dell is helping telcos to ease their way into the disaggregated networking era | TelecomTV

Thanks for joining us here in Windsor for the DSP Leaders World Forum where I'm delighted to be joined by Dennis Hoffman. Dennis is senior vice president and general manager for the telecom systems business at Dell Technologies. Dell being an industry partner of the forum. Dennis, thank you so much for joining us.

So Dennis, how are you finding the forum so far and tell us about some of the takeaways based on the conversations you've had today.

Today was a very good day. I very much enjoyed myself. It's my first time here, but I think it's a very interesting mix of people. People that are decision makers and influencers, both on the network operations side and the vendor side. The technologists that are in many cases trying to partner with and build an ecosystem with them. A lot of interesting insights. I think it helps us all to understand one another, both the structured events and as well as the side networking. So it's been very good so far.

Dennis, considering that digital transformation is now an imperative for the telecom sector, what do you believe are the main challenges that are delaying actions from CSPs?

Digital transformation is hard at a headline level. It's just a lot of work. It has three major components. There's an architectural change required, there is a new commercial model required, and in any change program, there's a great deal of people change for certain and it's, I think an effort we've seen happen in multiple vertical markets. Telecom is simply the latest. It's absolutely achievable, but it is a meaningful organization wide commitment to change from the top down.

So at Dell Technologies, how are you helping the industry overcome the hurdles you've mentioned and what is the clear path to growth?

The clear path to growth, let's take that one second. What we're trying to do is make it easy to consume open, easy to consume disaggregation. The industry is in a transition from one architectural model that is very dependent on a handful of very important suppliers to one that is made up of all of those suppliers, plus many more of us from the technology industry more broadly, and assembling all of that into solutions that you can bet a business on that you can trust. A national network too is complex. So one of the big things we're trying to do is make that process easier through partnerships, through integration of various parts of products into solutions, through advice where we can help and bring some of our expertise from the technology space, working with many different markets to the telecoms industry and in general, just trying to lend our weight and our energy to the effort.

Forward. Ah, you wanted me to still do the growth part? Yes. On the growth side, I think the key is we need to find the killer applications and the pursuit of growth is something that we can't snap our fingers and make happen instantaneously. There are applications that must run ultimately in the telecoms network, not in the enterprise data center, not in the public cloud, but in the network. When we find these applications, and I think AI is going to act as a catalyst for finding many of these, then I think we will begin to have growth growth that requires this modern network that we were talking about. But until then, it's going to be hard and it has been hard for years, partly because we haven't found the compelling value proposition for the end buyer. Once we do, we have to build it and we have to build it in a way that actually leverages and makes relevant all of the investments in networks. And then we have to find a way to actually reach the customer and tell the story and do the delivery. So it's an end-to-end business problem, but it will absolutely be facilitated by applications that make the telecoms network more valuable when we find them.

Well, Dennis thank you very much for sharing your insights with us today.

That was Dennis Hoffman of Dell Technologies. Thank you for joining us here in Windsor for the DSP Leaders World Forum.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

Extra Shot - part 3 featuring Colt Technology, NGMN Alliance and Wind River | TelecomTV

Good afternoon, evening, morning, wherever you are and watching us right now. Welcome to your Extra Shot. I'm Charlotte Khan. We are live from Windsor at the DSB Leaders World Forum and I am joined by guests, very prestigious guests of course, like all our guests on the forum today. So please welcome Nico Marziliano who, VP of International Telco sales at Wind River. Thank you for joining us. Marco,

Anita Döhler CEO at NGMN Alliance. Thank you for being with us. Hello. And Miko Voltolini his VP of innovation at Colt Technology. So thanks for being with us this afternoon. Thank you. We have just been attending and following a session on cloud native. Anita, you were on stage. What was your key message? Well,

Representing an organization which is operator driven, my main message is of course that we need more industry collaboration when it comes to achieve a true cloud nativeness. We see first implementations, first successful implementations, but at the same time our members experience that actually there is still a long way to go to achieve openness, compatibility and interoperability when it comes to cloud nativeness and this is actually where we will also continue our efforts on.

Thank you very much. And can I ask the other guests about their key takeaways from the conversation we've just heard on Teleco native, cloud native? Sorry.

Well, as I like to connect topics, listening, the cloud native conversation now in the previous session about AI makes me thinking about how the two connect and I think on the AI automation side, one of the key message was makes the AI a buddy, a friend of our engineer to automate routinely things in an easy way error free. Now cloud native, if you put that in conjunction, that can be a way the AI may automate the cloud native development because at the end of the day I see the complexity and skillset on the cloud Native engineers, you may use the AI to generate codes at a cloud native in a faster speed so they fail fast. That concept can be surpassed by NNI Gen I kind of technology and vice versa because then with the cloud native you accelerate the AI creation. My real consideration, the second consideration challenge is that we talk a lot about the innovation, but do we need to innovate only or to invent something? And sometimes we get in the trap that the innovation is just an incremental change but not a significant disruption change. So is it AI the right tool to create the invention or it's just an innovation tools? That's just my maybe philosophical question

Mecca, what sticks with you after the conversation we had on stage about cloud native?

So my key takeaways, if you look at the telecom industry over the last years and there were talks on the panel about the fact that total shareholder returns has been negative. And so how do we change that? How do we move from a model that we have today where we have traditional operations, developmental operations, which has led to stagnating revenues to a model where we have open cloud native development, DevOps, let's put it that way. It is a massive shift for the industry. It requires us to change technology, it requires us to change the skills and the mindset to the people requires us to change the commercial model. So it's a massive change across these three dimensions.

And I guess we should have started this conversation with a definition around what we mean by cloud native and maybe separated from cloud. What's your take on this, Nico?

Well, yeah, I think there was a great analogy in the furniture. I don't remember the name the other, the presenter. She was giving a great example in the difference. I mean the flexibility of the cloud native gives is completely as just related to the AI is a difference between gen AI and AI eventually where the gen AI is really creating not automated routine, but is really try to being able to create istic in the solution which are not necessarily routinely and cloud native open up completely different kind of opportunity in software development that can be completely different from what the Austin solution, which is capacity in computing was already probably available in the industry since the case I would say.

So how do we define cloud nativeness? I think it's, so NGMN issued a cloud native manifesto just in autumn last year. It is an operated driven document, but I think it's really reflecting what the industry understands. I'm a cloud native and it's a good summary like APIs first or declarative and intent based automation, DevOps processes, a meaningful end gen certification so that Kubernetes our like reconciliation patterns. So all that should support that. It's easy to add applications to let applications talk to each other, to compose services, to react on customer demand and to enable security in a fast deployment and of course total cost of ownerships and efficiency. And I think that's something which is going beyond the concept of cloud hosting.

To add on top of that, the transition from the current way of operating networks to a model where the roles of engineers, architects, project managers, analysts is expanded and changed and increased. If you think about how today we operate and develop networks and network engineers is working on his own portion of the stack, the model changes to expand the role from an automation engineer to test and quality assurance engineer to a DevOps engineer. And again, also on the governance side, you can think about the changing role of managing projects. How do you control the development moving from that model to a model? We have s SCM masters, so you have agile, agile control of the process. So that's the other angle I would add on top of it,

On that while you were talking, thinking about another analogy of what the clown native is, it's like in the language. So the clown native is a kind of a grammar that will create a kind of new parental language compared to the dialect or the local language because now we are vertically, I mean you develop a software which is vertically integrated and it's just not for the German, the Italian, the French, the English. It's just very proprietary and then you go to parental language, which is going to be a grammar that everybody can't just combine and recombine and contribute at the end of the day. So everybody talk the same language,

But Ika has two Europeans. I think we can agree that experiment was not exactly a very successful European project was it?

I know after I say that, but just not to say the common language.

Common language language, of course. Yes, indeed. I'd like to ask you all one more question before we take a very short break and we talk about how we go about implementing cloud native. Of course it's the fact that we need to do more or the industry needs to do more to create sector-wide definitions of cloud native, which is what we've attempted to do here and cloud native capabilities for software and hardware in order to give DSPs confidence to invest in new products that will really be cloud native. So how do we create that environment of trust and confidence?

I can start. So I was thinking again about that massive transition was the fact that today we're operating in a certain manner, traditional manner, and it's a massive change across the three dimensions, technology, people and commercial. How do we go about that? Typically what we have done is that we build islands, we start with the team, you build the initial technology, you build the factory on top of it and then you build the commercials. And I think that's a way to prove how this model can work and what benefit it can bring from both the efficiency standpoint from both and the commercial standpoint. How can we take services to market faster, how we can reduce the cost of what we build? And I think the challenge is expanding from that small initial development, initial deployment of the capability across the board to take over the rest because it's easy enough to build this initial portion of the stack and then need to expand. I think for that you need to be able to run programs that for instance, take the technology and move them across the board, take the people investment you made and move that also alongside to other technologies to the part of the stack.

Yeah. I believe that we need to achieve that operators or anyone, every party in the value chain don't need to retest stuff again and again. So we really need to achieve a common understanding of what does it mean to have a containerized application and for being able to substitute and to really compose services without having the risk of non-working services there. And I think that's something where industry initiatives play a role. So it's also something where when it comes to the technology basics, the operators don't really differentiate anyway. So we differentiate the operators differentiate when it comes to the services to the customer experience and therefore it's about to really agree on specific schemes and requirements when it comes to how we assess the cloud nativeness of platforms and applications.

Anita Ko and Nico, thank you very much. Stay tuned. We're back in five minutes for more discussions around cloud native. Stay with us

And we are back at extra shots live from Windsor, from the DSP Leaders World Forum where I'm delighted to be joined by Nico Ano. Nico is Vice president of International Telco sales at Wind River. Hello again, Nico and Tamir Ker Vol who's vice president of innovation at Colt Technology. So thanks for sticking with us. Okay. Before the break we were talking about how we create cloud native software engineering teams and let's talk about the challenges to do that and the various obstacles and hurdles you are facing. What are they? Is it lack of interoperability of end-to-end integration moot, would you say are the key challenges?

I can start. Yes. So let's define what I think the problem we need to solve. So I think we need a cloud native platform, which is technology related. We need a cloud native factory, which is more people and process related. How do we shift from the current model to the future model? I think for the platform, some obstacle we have today, we need to rethink about our existing stack. I think it's impossible to build a cloud native capability sticking to the current technology stack we have think about our O-S-S-B-S-S that needs to be rethought from up from the ground because it's impossible to build on top of that and change. So that's on the platform side, on the factory side. So people and skills and mindset we need to rethink about the roles moving engineers and architects to the new model, which is about upskilling. It is about also bringing in new talents and it is about changing the way we operate with those teams. So moving away from waterfall to agile capital development. Okay,

Nico, before hearing from you, I feel I have to apologize to the audience for the noise, the racket happening in the background. It's the pinball tournament, isn't it? One of the attractions of course of the forum and obviously we've got very keen players this afternoon, given the noise they making good luck to them anyway, Nico, go for it. Yeah,

Yeah, thank you. I have to say we are, at least from Wind River perspective, we have an advantage as our company is completely focused on the Kubernetes cloud native. I mean we are cloud native first, so we are actively on a cloud native. Sorry for the jar for the J, the joke for the party. Yeah. So the challenge we face is not internally, I mean from an engineer perspective, our team is a cloud native by definition, and we are the one believing and pushing for that. Our challenge is on the country is and is helping the client to go toward the client native. So our challenges is slightly different. So it's how to educate, how to help the client, how to enable the client native world to be enabled. That is not always easy because as you have heard in the panel, cultural change, skillset mindset are still there and then you have a lot of legacy to be maintained because also from a business perspective, I think one other topic that was mentioned but not completely attached is the legacy has to be there because still it is attached to a return on investment for which you cannot just simply wipe out and say, okay, I will replace with a cloud native.

So you need to keep the transition not only because of the legacy of the technology and the skillset, but also because you have a business to maintain operator they need to maintain today ongoing activities, so they cannot just simply change over the night.

Being successful is also a matter of mindset and culture, isn't it? The telco industry is not exactly known for its fail fast attitude or concept as loved by big tech for instance. How can we encourage that a bit more within the sector?

Well, if I can follow what I was just saying before and it comes across various conversations in the different panels, definitely maybe starts more MVP product but stick on it. There was a message this morning from one probably from Hoffman, he was saying that do small stick on it and keep going until he scale up and the same here. So we need to have an opportunity to prove it. In telco, there has been a very good moment in the last decades in term of the business model was pretty easy, the connectivity, you got a customer subscriber grow, boom, boom, boom. You grow the business just by expanding connectivity. Then of course when the maturity level of the technology and the market is rigid, then how you go to the next level. That is exactly the challenge that telco has been facing and is now facing today.

Yeah, I think it's a massive shift. We need to rethink how we've been operating. So significant transition, we have a model, so I come from a fixed network operator where we've been used to work in a certain manner for the last 20, 30 years. So it's a significant change. So it requires a lot of leadership first of all, and I think again, that needs to come from the top. You cannot expect that the company will change. Companies will change automatically without that top level leadership. The second angle is about, I think we need to supposedly set money, time and people aside to actually work in that fail safe model. If you don't, then there is always the risk that we think that we're going to lose money. So if you set aside certain amount of money that you're going to invest into some informed be, but with the ability to actually lose some of that investment, that will change the picture and icontinue to start somewhere, actually set something up to do that.

Last year at the DSP leaders World Forum, there were loads of conversations around skills upskilling teams in particular, and do you feel that the sector currently has the skills, the workforce at its disposal to become cloud native? I mean, and how do you go about it? Internal efforts, external efforts, contractors, partners, how do you address that skills issue?

Well, as I said before, we do have the right skillset and mindset if you wish on our company. But listening to partners, listening to client generally, there is a general sentiment, not only specifically on the cloud native skillset, but in general in that sector. In our sector there is a lack of engineering people, people that want to embrace that unit. So how do we make the new generation, how do we make the younger at the university getting excited, oh, I want to be in the telco, I want to be in the cloud, I want to be in that industry. We need to make it more sexy if you allow me to say you need more attractive, more really, and the way of being attractive can be multiple, can be career. It can be having the freedom having in a kind of startup mentality, the possibility to get them. If you look at the younger, do you want to be in that kind of sector? I dunno, we are facing a huge problem. A lot of people say, Hey Nico, do you have names to suggest me? I want to hire 10 engineers or five engineers, two engineers. They are really out of the university. There are only few people that are getting out as an engineer. It's

True. Yeah. Reality is that it's impossible to find enough people on the market. So I think it's a combination of upscaling, rescaling, the existing workforce, and I think there is a good amount of people in engineering or operations that are willing and able to do that. So that's an element. Then there is also the help we can get from partners and vendors. So I a hundred percent agree that and then is the internal influx from the outside, how you make it attractive as Nico was just saying, how do we make the industry much more appealing than what it is today to attract young talent. I think there are lots of recipes for that.

One more question before I let you go and attend the last leg of the forum, how have you found the conversation so far? What have you heard in particular that really resonated with you?

Yeah, well from my side is what I just before, the connection between it makes me thinking a lot about this AI and the cloud native. So how AI and gen AI will be transforming and how that goes between innovation and invention. For me, that is a critical ask and question that is not easy to be answered. So innovation comes from a stepwise changes we need sometimes to invent something new. Honestly, I feel like we need to have a significant radical change,

So there is a general thread across, as Nico was saying, across this panel so far, innovation, ai, cloud native. I think I expect greater from the rest of the event as we continue to talk about important topics. So across the board.

Fantastic. Many thanks to both of you and enjoy the rest of the forum. Indeed. We're back for morning hour's time. Stay tuned.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

Extra Shot - part 2 featuring Intel, Appledore Research and AWS | TelecomTV

Welcome back to Extra Shot, and we are live from the DSP Leaders World Forum in Windsor. I'm Charlotte Khan. I'm delighted to welcome you back for more discussions around the sessions happening here today. So we together for about 10 minutes before we break away for lunch for about an hour. So let's keep it quite general To start with, I am delighted to welcome Robert Prince. Robert is Director Network and telecommunications group at Intel Corporation. Thank you for joining us. Our pleasure.

We've got Dafna Yanay, who's head of marketing at AWS. Thanks for being with us.

And we have, Francis has principal analyst at Appledore Research. Thank you for coming. Great to be here.

So the second session of the forum was dedicated to, was constantly hitting the headlines for good and bad reasons, actually generating an equal amount of fear and excitement. It's ai of course. So can I ask you about the key takeaways of the session according to you?

Yeah, I think first of all it was a fantastic session that the discussions were really interesting. I think for me, having been here last year there clearly there's quite a lot of progress. I think in terms of the clarity, at least as it relates to the what relating to ai. I think the couple of open questions for me was what about how we moving from, we understand the areas in which we can focus ai, but specifically how do we actually go and action that into the organizations? And I think for me, the whole people process piece was also a fairly significant topic that really came out very, very strongly. Where many of us, of course are technology led or technology companies, but some of the key issues that obviously we face as an industry is really that culture, the ability to think differently and approach these kind challenges and opportunities really through a kind of ground zero lens versus looking through a legacy lens, if you will. So I think for me, obviously the particular use cases that were called out, and maybe I'm sure we'll talk about some of those we're interested in, but it's that people aspect, it's the ability for the industry to actually galvanize its capabilities in a way that turns it from a, Hey, we understand what we need to do to how do we actually go and make that happen.

So a few very interesting points from you here, Robert. First of all, you mentioned the fact that last year it was all about use cases, the potential of ai, and now we're thinking about how we're going to deliver all the benefits of ai. Do you want to follow up on this actually? What really resonated with you during this previous session on ai? Yeah,

Absolutely. So I actually wanted to say the same because I think what I was really picking up from the session was the fact that it's very, very clear that AI is here to stay, right? Generative ai. After one year of POCs and different experimentation and checking the technology and using many, many things now everyone realized that it's about how to move this stuff to production. And it's not anymore just about the shiny use cases and the chatbots, it's really more about how we set up the right data foundation, how we reskill the people, how we take care of security and governance topics. Cost is a very big power. So it's really about how we take things to the next level. We talked a lot about maturity right on day. We are on day one in a s, we use a lot the day one, but how we are evolving, how we are building it around foundation, how we tackling people, processes and the technology. But definitely it's not just about the technologies and how we are getting better and trying to see what are the right use cases that really drive the right value for the organization. So definitely I really enjoyed the panel, really enjoyed the discussion, really enjoyed your question and it's spot on about moving things from experimentation to production.

That's right. Francis, you were very engaged during the session and you asked this big question around the value of human input and decision making in particular.

Yeah, I really enjoyed the panel, Mike. My observation from it was that we've clearly come off what I would term as the hype. We're slightly off the hype cycle. We discovered the easy use cases that work. We've also discovered the subtle horrors, the hallucinations that gen AI can deliver. It's good and it's bad. So I think we're now at that sort of realism stage. I'm very conscious, we've just done some research which we describe as kind of the autonomy chasm and there's a fundamental change in thinking that needs to happen between what we term mechanization of what you do at the moment versus how do you fully autonomize automate a network. And I think the reason for my question was that quite often I think we put tools like AI in a kind of, it has to be perfect bucket rather than comparing it with the reality of how we actually run networks.

Where quite often we can make crazy decisions in the network, but they appear to have no, well they do, they have big consequences, but they do not have a big consequence in terms of the way we rethink the whole process. So for me, I think what we are seeing is still degree of met in the panel was a lot of discussion about really still mechanizing what we do at the moment. I was really pleased to see the gentleman from Deutsche Telecom who was sort of saying that there are three phases. My only worry in that one is that if we only get to phase one, I think we will only see the limited opportunities from AI and we really need to be thinking about that. How could we do this completely differently at the same time? But it was a great panel and I think a degree more realism in this panel than last year's

Realism. But we're talking about hallucinations, nightmares, horrors. Doesn't sound that good. We're going to take a break. So you're going to be back with us after the lunch break to explore how AI can help automate networks. Obviously that was the crux of our conversations here earlier today. So do stay tuned, stay with us. Okay. And hear more from Robert Prince at Intel, Francis Hasham at Apple Door Research and Dafta y at AWS. Thank you for watching. Welcome back to Extra Short. I'm Charlotte Khan. We are live from Windsor at the DSP Leaders World Forum where I'm delighted to be with Robert Prince. Robert is director network and telecommunications group at Intel Corporation. Thanks for joining us again, Robert. My

Here. So before the launch break, we started to talk about all the benefits of AI and the fact that we've entered a second phase. I'm tended to say initially we're talking about the potential benefits, of course the power of ai and now we're talking about how to harness the power of AI and how to go about to delivering all its benefits. So let's go back to it a little bit. What's the best way to implement ai, explore or plan?

I think explore is important and I think reflecting on the panel earlier on, that was a key part of the discussion. Clearly there are parts where you have to test it, make sure it works to deploy in critical areas. But I think one of the areas that came out quite strongly, at least for me was the need for experimentation. The opportunity to work probably much, much more closely with the value chain, the ecosystem, which is obviously continuing to develop so that organizations collectively we can build our skill sets and capabilities so that we can move much, much faster in this particular space. Clearly it is got massive implications across a number of different areas and I think part of for the industry is we dunno what we don't know. So that experimentation is going to be super important.

We've been talking about network automation for years and of course now things have changed since Genai of course. How is that a game changer and how much is AI going to be a big accelerator when it comes to network automation?

Yeah, I think again, it was mentioned on the panel, wasn't it? The hype of course this year after the Gen AI announcements, we see it in the press. But at the same time I think more clarity coming out of the panel in terms of where to focus. I think that the other piece that came out for me as well was that there's a difference in companies that have a tops down approach to AI where you have the CEOs basically promoting that as their lead cheerleader if you will. And I think that's important because the board, the CEO, all the way down the organization needs to be driving the agenda because it is a paradigm shift. Of course there's a lot of hype, but at the same time there's a real requirement not just as it relates to the technology, which of course is super important, but the whole process changes required, the new skill sets required to actually go and make it happen in the market. And the other piece of course is that it needs to be outcome-based. So what problems are we trying to solve in the industry? What's the financial business case behind it? There's a whole bunch of things behind the technology, if you will, that I think we've got a long way to go. It's early days, but the potential of course is enormous.

So you've mentioned this top down approach. It's a tough one, isn't it, for CEOs out there because often the benefits from their perspective are to do with efficiency, not necessarily creating new services per se. So tell me more about your take on this. And it's also a hard one to sell to the workforce, isn't it? Given that many people fear that AI will replace down

And I think that's why it's important that it is a tops down where you have almost like thematic goals where the organization can rally around a common set of goals. So you break down some of the silos that often can inhibit an organization to transform. And I think in that transformation, companies will look very different in the future compared to potentially what they look like today. And I think bringing workforces along that journey and also developing the skillset so that new opportunities develop for the business, but equally for hopefully all of us that work in these companies as well is going to be important. And that again, I think is why you see organizations, and it was mentioned on the panel where you have very collaborative leadership teams that are very cohesive in their approach versus pushing some of these key transformation areas down the organization, which obviously makes it extremely hard to turn into reality.

You've just used a keyword here, haven't you? Collaboration, it's important to implement AI within the enterprise space to have this ecosystem of various stakeholders. So how do you go about enhancing that collaboration?

Again on the panel, one of the topics that was discussed was to what extent do the DSPs work together on a common area where the industry wants to move forward? And you collaborate in those areas of course. And of course there are other areas where you would want to differentiate and I think that was an open question, at least the one that I took away from that. And that's going to be quite interesting I think in terms of how that develops over time. The other kind of vector is working very closely with the ecosystem and the partnerships and they will be evolving. And part of that is how do I get closer to my customer? So of course Enterprise was called out, wasn't it, as one of the key business opportunities and there are many different verticals out there that we potentially could address. So which ones do you start with? What keeps those businesses up at night? How do we align around those industry KPIs in the first instance so that we can then bring solutions and propositions to the market that helps our customers. So I think the collaboration piece is essential. It's a team sport, nobody's going to be able to do it on their own. And yeah, that's again why these forums and this particular event is very helpful.

So during the second session of the forum on ai, guy and Ray shared the results of the survey conducted within the audience and it was all about probing the audience to find out when they expect AI to enable telcos to be truly touch zero from a human perspective, very mixed results there, but they don't expect any benefits until after 2030. Some expect none at all. So how did you vote?

Well, I voted after 2030, right? Because again, it's a very broad question, isn't it? Right? So I always believe that there's going to be new opportunities of course, where hopefully we are going to be as employees engaged in that, but clearly the opportunity are on automating the network is enormous and it's going to be very, very, very quickly. I think the other thing that struck me as part of the survey is that the number one practical application that many spoke about was around the energy reduction, the sustainability aspects. And I think there's a lot of work that's been going on. We are engaged a lot in that space as well around the core network and the radio access network and other areas too in terms of simplifying those infrastructures, virtualizing them, and making our customer lives easier so that they have the flexibility to build these new capabilities moving forward. So I voted after 2030. I guess we'll wait and see.

One last question, maybe Robert is to do with the concerns around an ethical responsible development of AI and notably concerns around security. How can we ensure that we don't do this trade off between security and innovation when we automate networks?

Yeah, I mean security is non-negotiable. And I think again, that was discussed wasn't it on the panel as it relates to making sure we've got strong governance and regulation coming in whilst at the same time making sure that there's always a balance in terms of moving quickly whilst also not being incumbent by those things. But clearly we are dealing with data, customer data and security has to of course be paramount around that.

So you've been here, the DSP World Leaders Forum before, it's your second time I believe. Is there, I mean other than ai, the session we've just obviously attended before the lunch break, any other sessions you are interested in?

Yeah, I mean the first session was very good as well, right around the digital services. I thought that was fascinating. That was a good debate and quite a few different perspectives that we got from that. Looking forward to the customer first kind of approach, I think that's going to be more tomorrow, isn't it? Where we can discuss again, what keeps our customers up at night, how do we become much more customer centric as an industry and how do we acquire the skill sets to enable us to ask the right questions and hopefully respond to that. So yeah, looking forward to that.

Fantastic. Robert, thank you very much for your insights. My pleasure today. Thank you.

Stay tuned. We are back for more in around an hour's time.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

Extra Shot - part 1 featuring Lewis Insight, ConnectiviTree (Europe), and American Tower | TelecomTV

Good morning and welcome to Extra Shots with me. Charlotte can live from the DSP Leaders Forum in Windsor in a beautiful setting of the Fairmont. I'm delighted to be joined by very prestigious first guests. This morning we have Chris Lewis, managing director at Louis Insight. We've got Susan James, vice President of Innovation and Mobile Connectivity at American Tower and Mark Gilmer, his chief technology Officer at Connectivity three. Welcome to all of you. Thank you for joining us.

So we kicked off the forum this morning with a very rich first session. We had an opening address, Matt Yago, 10 Norio of Vodafone. Then Guy and Ray went through the state of play within the sector. So I was wondering if you could maybe share the key highlights of what really resonated with you to start with and since the event the firm is a yearly gathering, maybe reflect, especially you Chris, because we're here last year on how the conversations have evolved over the last year.

Well, conversations continually evolve because the moving parts in the industry are continually changing. If you break it down to supply and demand, the demand from the outside is enormous, is growing, exploding the supply side in terms of the industry and how we put together those services that people ultimately consume. Actually the consumers don't really care that much about it and I think that's becoming even more evident in some ways connectivity is becoming more distanced from the technology that we talk about all the time. So I think finding the right place for the connectivity in the telco role in emerging into whatever the future is is the important question. And I thought Gabriela, her comment about working with the ecosystem and getting involved with the ecosystem was what really resonated for me from the opening session that we as telecoms, we do not dictate things end to end anymore.

We did in the past, it was a monopoly and regulated, but we don't dictate the end parts. We contribute to the ecosystem and therefore the relative role of what telcos provide has to be seen in that context. So it's a gradual change in that sense, but it's an education of the telecom industry that we are part of a much broader ecosystem now and we shouldn't spend all of our time thinking about the inner workings of the network. We should think about how we build relationships with the other parties in the ecosystem and following the money. I mean, you talk about the market ultimately, it's about where investment goes, how telecoms relates the return on that investment. And I think we often lose sight of the fact that we are selling a product to consumers and businesses that they into other parts of their activities. So I don't think much has changed from last year, although I suspect we'll come into AI later on as a topic of conversation.

Absolutely. Well the next session of extra shots, so let's keep it for that one. Susan, what's your take on the state of play currently in a telecom sector? Challenges and opportunities?

Well, I think the lineup on stage that you participated in was quite an interesting starting point. I think overall the industry is not doing well. So optimistically I put it at a four. But I think the conversation shows that there is a lot of hope in terms of yes, there is a business potential there, particularly in the enterprise segment. Yes, we do think that the telcos can actually play a role in tapping into that, but I think it's how do you innovate in a large company? How do you stop tripping over yourself or how do you stick to your knitting long enough to actually see the results? So I think that's sort of the direction things are going. I do think that there's so many industries out there that are really in need of still digitizing and we saw a big wave during Covid where everyone had to get online that was sort of the front of house interactions if you like, with customers, all the back of house, how you automate things.

There's still a large challenge with logistics in many factories. The volumes of products that need to be done, the understanding, the analytics of all these things and putting those analytics into actions, all of those things need to happen. So I think there is still a huge opportunity and now is the right time really for the telcos working with that larger ecosystem of players to solve those business problems because it's not a connectivity problem. Connectivity is the plumbing that provides the ability to solve the problem. So I think it is going to require the systems integrators, it's going to require those specific applications or number of applications. One application is not going to be enough to create enough value to finance in a private 5G network, for example. So I think there are so many parts that need to come into play and you do start to see the telcos really understanding that this is a broader play. We can't do this alone. We need to have a large varied ecosystem of partners and cloud providers working together to solve these problems.

Thank you very much, Susan. A few very valid points here. The fact that we're talking about GAI, we're talking about network automation, we're talking about innovation and yet some sectors, some very traditional sectors. I'm thinking of construction for instance. So healthcare or government are yet to be fully digitalized. And you've talked about collaboration well, which is another valid point. Maybe we can talk about it because we're going to take a very short break just after I speak to Mark, but that's a very important factor. It's all about ecosystems, isn't it? So Mark, going back to the point that Susan made, are you an optimist when it comes to the state of play within the telecom sector right now?

I am, yes, just because this industry has been my life, my career, and I love it. But we did joke at the time that, because we both said four, and then Susan went, well, that's an optimistic four from her. But the question was about the industry. And I agree, I think as an industry we are down in that place, but there's pockets that are really much closer to you, Charlotte, on that spectrum. And that's where I think we need to see more industry-wide innovation. And we spoke in the panel that innovation is much broader than just technology development, r and d, it's a much broader topic. We didn't really even have the time to go into that in too greater detail, but business models, approaches, that's as much a part of the innovation cycle that needs to take place as the conversation about ran, which is innovating in the network probably more. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think, and we did dwell on that, innovating on the network rather than in the network. We need to continue to innovate in the network. Our bread and butter as telco, that's what we do. But now on the network is vitally important,

But also the issue about how the industry takes its product to market, because if connectivity is part of the solution that an enterprise is using, they need to think of it from the enterprise point of view. How do they want to purchase and consume those services and they'll be part of it. I think you mentioned on stage, Susan, the integrators, and you mentioned it many times in the past, mark, but actually let's think about how the customers want to consume things rather than how we can't impose it on them anymore. A change in ecosystem.

Okay, so we're going to take a break. I think that was part of the plan. Anyway, we're going to carry on talking about innovation and how you go about it. So stay tuned and see minutes.

Welcome back to Extra Shot. We are live at the DSP Leaders Forum in Windsor, and I'm delighted to be joined by Chris Lewis, Susan James and Mark Gilmer. Thank you for joining us and thank you for staying with us actually because we were here before the break and we were discussing innovation. Innovation. Telcos used to be at the forefront of innovation and then they lost the race to the actual tech sector. And it seems harder for the sector to innovate these days. What are the key challenges? Why is it so much harder than it used to be to innovate?

I think one of the biggest challenges is that telecoms used to be very much national level and the innovation was done within the labs, within the telcos. And that spawned a whole industry group of vendors that, but those vendors have now gone global. So they do the innovation globally and then the IT innovation we know is being done by the cloud vendors and the broader IT community. And so in a sense, it is partly a scale question that telcos have been left behind because they don't have scale. They've retrenched back to be national or multinational operators, whereas the hype scales of this world are global players. So they have the scale that we know, especially from the recent introduction of ai, the scale requirement of power of investment is enormous. I think it's a geopolitical issue partly because on the one hand we have it dictated by some governments in some parts of the world, other places totally open to the open market and the middle ground. It's regulated by let's say market environments that perhaps slow down innovation.

Susan, Chris alluded to the fact that innovation tends to happen within the r and d framework. Isn't that what the problem is? I mean, is innovation the same as investing in r and d?

I don't think so. I mean, you can r and d in r and d and still never achieve anything. Fantastic. So it's more than that. And I think we were discussing where is the success happening? And every organization has pockets of success and usually it's tied to people of vision. So I think that is one of the areas where you need to find those people of vision. You need to attract them, you need to enable them for success. So I think that's part of it. I do think that innovation is global. So I think it's very difficult for the individual MNOs to be able to innovate because they are bound to a large extent by national boundaries where if they are able to go beyond that, they have the ability to address a much larger audience. And the reality is that every single week, we never talk to just people within our own country every single day.

I'm talking to people internationally. So from a business perspective, you need to be able to address that international side of things. So I think that is a challenge for MNOs to look at. And I think that a lot of the things that we've been talking on a network perspective, we're really just tinkering in innovation. Yes, they're coming out with great new ways to make it better, but we're not really solving new problems. And I think that's why I really am very excited to be working on things like direct to device from satellite. We're solving new problems that have never been solved there. So it's a different energy level when you're working on that type of innovation than incremental innovation. So I think there's lots of different things going on there. And I think it's really easy to see why the industry is so excited about things like direct to device because you're literally solving stuff that has never been solved before. And then you can start to work incrementally on top of that.

But I think there's also another point, Charlotte, which is that the layering of the industry from the physical infrastructure through to the software, there's innovation happening at all those levels. Some of it will be done behind the scenes and some of it'll be done very publicly. And I think part of the problem is where does the telecom entry sit on that, doing things behind the scenes and then wanting to be seen to be advancing. And I think that's the problem.

Yeah, and that's a fair point actually. We tend to focus on a more spectacular aspect of innovation. I guess. Mark, what's your take on this? And going back to the point that Susan made, should innovation be a bit more solutions oriented rather than just being about innovation per se?

Absolutely. We spoke in the panel about outcome. I raised it a couple of times that it's the outcome that is of interest either to the end end user, the customer, et cetera. And I think to Chris's point about how r and d has changed over time, the r and d that telcos that we did in the past was in that has now been taken over at a global level. So therefore the innovation and the development that telcos can do now is more solution based and localized based to those local, when I say local, I mean local can be the whole of Europe type of thing, but is more focused in on that use case or that particular business problem that your customers are coming to you about. That's where the innovation can focus. And it's not just on the technology infrastructure anymore, it's on how do you approach that, how is that consumed?

What are the ecosystem or the partners or the alliances that need to be brought into that? And then the consumption piece is really interesting because where the automation, we've done a lot of automation in the network or that can be exposed to then allow the automation of services and automation of solutions. But yeah, I think Susan, you made an interesting point and as we were walking across, we were talking about, oh no, you made it on the panel about websites, about our telco websites. And they follow how our services, they are product led, not solution led.

And I think it's that issue you've mentioned several times, Susan, about what problem are we solving And in the interesting, the split in the industry, by the way, enterprise is about 20% of global revenue. Consumer is 70% with 10% other. So actually when we are changing it, and I thought the point made on stage was very important that for consumer, it's sort of one size fits all. I think you made the point mark, didn't you? Well actually you've got to customize it. And telcos in the past couldn't customize it because the technology didn't allow an MPLS network or even going farther back, the older networks just weren't customizable, weren't flexible, weren't dynamic enough, but now the technology is flexible enough. So listening to what the customer wants, and I think that's the biggest shift that I see, which is that we used to be an inside out industry where we create a technology in those r and d labs and we eventually expose it to the customer. We now need to listen to what's happening outside. So what consumers are trying to do, and we know that's satellite connection for example, or gaming or whatever. All these things coming into shape to demand things of the network and pulling services out of the network rather than, so we're not dictating the way people use the service anymore, the people, the demand is finally, they really are.

They really are. If you go to a website and look at, you can choose this bucket, this bucket, this bucket, this bucket. It's not really that personalized. And I think that is something we certainly could look at doing and saying, well, what suits me and my family, I can have a six line packet from whatever, but why don't we put in, this is what my family consists of, these are my needs. And then I get a personalized packet.

Exactly. So I think we can look at these sorts of things to really say, well, why don't we personalize it? Because if we can do that, surely then we're lifting the value that we're providing

In the past. BSS systems just couldn't cope with cope, cope with that.

I know they couldn't, but they've been selling this for years that they can. So this is the time to do it, I think. Absolutely.

Susan, we've got one minute left. To go back to the point you were making just before we took a break. It was around collaboration. How can we collaborate further to spur more innovation? What's your take

On this? But I think it is happening. I mean the focus has really pivoted to working with systems integrators. I think most telcos have realized they can't solve an end-to-end problem and they need help. And you've seen announcements from Verizon and at t and a number of other telcos in the last few weeks where they started to work more closely with systems integrators that can provide the end-to-end solution to a business problem. So I think we start to see that already.

Fantastic. One more thing from you dear guests actually to maybe find the one word that according to you, describes or is more aligned with the need to innovate in the telecom sector. What do we need to do more of to innovate one word?

Okay. But listening, indeed, that's the keyword of the conversation we've just been having. Thank you so much for joining us, Chris, Susan and Mark, stay with us. We're back at 12 30, 35. In fact, for more extra shots with me, Charlotte can to discuss and dissect the conversations happening on stage here at the DSD Leaders Forum live from Windsor. Thank you for watching.<br>Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

The invisible network era: Enhancing connectivity and performance in telecom | TelecomTV

The era of the Invisible Network is coming promising to revolutionize how we experience connectivity by making networks seamlessly disappear from our daily interactions to delve deeper into this transformative shift, joy King, vice President of Go to Market strategy at Optiva joins us to explore what the invisible network era means for the telecom industry. Joy, thank you for being with us today.

It's a pleasure to be here to talk about one of my favorite and exciting topics,

And I read your article. So can you explain the concept of the Invisible Network and why it's so pivotal for the future of connectivity?

Well, one of the best ways to see the future is to learn from the past. So let's take a few decades back, and I won't give you the exact number, but when I began my career in the telecommunications industry, I was so impressed by how the telecom companies made everything so simple for all of us as consumers. You picked up your device phone handset, you dialed a set of numbers, whether they were seven numbers or nine numbers or 10 numbers, and then it rang, or it was a busy signal, and somebody answered at the other end without any visibility. To me, knowing whether or not this was a local call, a national call, an international call covered by my plan, or actually charged in addition to my plan and sending the ringtone back so I could hear that it was ringing, interacting with other carriers around the country or the world.

All of that complexity was completely hidden from me. It was the definition not only of scale, but of simplicity at a global scale. But then as an industry, we got a bit distracted probably due to the massive amount of capital investment that all the carriers made in 3G four, G five, G five, G plus, and the industry started talking about infrastructure and backend complexity and network bandwidth, and all of us as consumers, we didn't understand, and frankly we didn't care. Now as connectivity becomes as important to us as oxygen, the next level of simplicity is beginning. That's what I call the invisible network era. The everything connected without me having to know anything about how, that's where I see the future and I see the future has already begun.

Well, simplicity definitely has a lot of upside for consumers, but what are the primary benefits of adopting invisible network technologies for network operators?

Well, to be honest, for network operators, there's an enormous opportunity. We've all been reading, hearing, talking about the stagnant set situation of revenue in the industry. But new market entrants see an opportunity, particularly when we're talking about embedded mobile connectivity. This could be any number of different companies. And one recently that I have been working with is a company that many of you have heard of called Humane. They have the humane AI pin. Well, what is that? It is a device that embeds mobile connectivity that also uses AI to be my personal assistant. Now imagine, I say, I want to know what's the weather tonight? Oh, I've got to be sure to pay my bill for the mortgage. Oh, and also I'm craving Chinese food. Could you order some takeout for me? Imagine a world where a device powered by AI connected to the mobile network without me having to pair it to my local wifi or figure out any of that, can handle all of that without me knowing which app is doing what. And for an operator who sees the opportunity here for these new market entrants with embedded mobile connectivity devices, whether it be the humane AI pin or its smart homes, or its healthcare, the opportunity to open the door to simplicity to ensure that they have the simplified backend billing, charging, onboarding, digital productized infrastructure that allows these new innovative market entrants to do what they do without having to worry about the underlying network complexity. That means that that operator is going to make a lot more money.

So joy, what challenges do operators and enterprises face in deploying invisible networks, and how can they overcome those challenges?

There are a number of challenges. Let's be clear now. The first one is very important to both me as a consumer and also to the operator providing the underlying invisible network, and that is security and privacy. The reality is all of our data, all of this is a major issue around the world today. But as mobile connectivity becomes more and more ubiquitous with everything that we have connected to everything else, security and privacy are real issues. This is something that the operators must work closely with. Cybersecurity specialists, with the mobile device manufacturers, the new market entrance, the MVNOs, all of this is a collaborative effort. The reality is the good will outweigh the bad, but we can never forget the risk. That's the first thing, and that's the top of mind for everybody. But there's more. I do think that in order to attract these new market entrants, these new companies who don't want to be labeled Telco in any way, we need to stop talking about acronyms like MVNO and MNO and BSS and OSS and arpu.

They don't care about that stuff. What they want is to see a digital customer-centric, rapid go-to market strategy and infrastructure software, a powered infrastructure that can make their lives easy and allow them to do what they want to do. That's another challenge because some of the larger tier one operators and tier twos as well are pretty stuck on some legacy infrastructure that's got to change. So I'd say those three things. Ensuring security and privacy never are anything but first and foremost, followed by the need to simplify the underlying infrastructure and to stop using acronyms that make everybody think, oh, this telco industry, I don't know about this. That's what I'd say.

In your article, you mentioned that eim technology gives us a look into a component of invisible networks that's already in play. How are eims a good thing for our industry and what are the benefits and risks?

Well, again, simplicity is everything. And if you think about how most of us, not Apple customers anymore with the newest device, but most of us have to activate our devices. You decide to get a new phone like I recently did with my Samsung X 24 Ultra. Well, to do that, I had to go to the carrier's office. I had to get a new SIM card. They then took that SIM card into the back room and activated it, aligned it with my phone number, the usual stuff. My husband and I were only in that office for about 90 minutes to two and a half hours. Can't exactly remember. Now, think about eim technology. I get my device, whether it's a phone or an embedded mobile connectivity device, it's a smart home device. It's a healthcare device. The fact that there's an SEM in there doesn't mean anything to me.

It just means it works. And from a carrier's point of view, it is also a lower cost. It allows for automated remote activation. Does it mean that there's a higher risk that I could jump from one carrier to another with EIM that could then be easily converted? Yep. Are there regulations, especially in countries where eim technology is a little bit ahead of the governments and the regulatory bodies, but eim technology is the future, and I have a great amount of respect for Apple, having known and seen it define this next generation that we're living in today, and the latest Apple iPhone 15 is only available with eim. No more physical SIM cards. I see that as the future.

That just makes sense for sure. And looking ahead, joy, what advancements do you anticipate in the invisible network landscape over the next five or 10 years, particularly concerning privacy and security?

I do believe that this is a major, major area of responsibility. We are going to be moving into blockchain into new levels of encryption, into using artificial intelligence and gen ai specifically to proactively identify and squash cyber attacks, data breaches and all of those things. They're never going to go away. That's a reality. But we can and we will focus on controlling them, and as an industry, as a global population, we can do that. That is the greatest risk that I see and the greatest area of investment that we all need to make. But when you think about the potential, especially in healthcare, the simplicity of knowing that your devices are monitoring your health proactively, identifying that there's a risk engaging you with the right medical professional or the right tools. These things combined with home smart home devices and everything else that we do in a digital world today, education is another one that's very exciting. For me. I see all of these as powered by the Invisible Network era, and personally, I'm very excited that in the not too distant future, I won't have to say, oh, there's an app for that. Right? No, I won't have to know what an app is. I just know what I want to do, what I need to do, and in the backend, just like in the old days of making that phone call to my grandma up in New York City, it'll happen without me knowing how.

Well, joy, thank you so much for your insights and for a glimpse into the future. We appreciate you.

It was a pleasure. Thank you.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

Intel’s transformation roadmap: Sustainability, AI, and ecosystem collaboration | TelecomTV

Sustainability and AI are poised to drive significant changes in the telecom industry, reshaping how networks operate and evolve. To address these pivotal topics, we are joined by Cristina Rodriguez, vice President of the Network and Edge Group, and General manager of the Wireless Access Network Division at Intel Corporation. Cristina, welcome. Before we dive into what to expect at this year's World Forum, I want to circle back to February where both at MWC and in our DSP Leaders Council Vision Report, we saw a key focus on sustainability. Specifically in the report, sustainability was key to respondents with 98% ranking it as either quiet or of the utmost importance. Can you tell us about what you're hearing in regard to sustainability and the work that Intel is doing to make networks more sustainable?

Clarence, definitely sustainability is top mind for all operators and really for the entire telco industry. We know that today telecom is one of the most powering dense industries on the planet. Operators are eager for solutions that will help them and help our industry reduce energy consumption, and this is essential for both reducing environmental impact but also reducing total cost of ownership. We have to deliver high performance, highly efficient networks, and one of the ways to do that is by having an end-to-end virtualized network. All the way to layer one. Operators need both the right architecture and the right silicone. Underpinning that architecture and focusing on solving this paradigm for our customers has guided Intel's vRAN roadmap investments and focus our collaboration with our partners. If you remember at NWC 2023, we introduced our fourth generation of Intel Cion SP called code name SFA Rapid EE with Intel VRA Boost, we call it Intel VRA Boost, fully integrated Acceleration, a first to market innovation.

This processor delivers twice the capacity with an additionally 20% power saving, and now these CPUs available and it's being deployed this year. And of course, we didn't stop there. We're committed to continue driving down vRAN cost and power and that this year, if you remember NWC 2024, we introduced the Future Gen Intel platform called named Cite Rapid D, and now this platform will deliver significant gains in performance and power efficiency, again, utilizing v REM boost acceleration and other architectural and feature enhancement, including built in AI acceleration. These platforms are built to deliver the right combination of performance, sustainability, TCO reliability. They're built basically for high performance, highly efficient AI optimized network. And just to give you an example, recently Verizon completed their first data call on our fourth generation C on SP with Intel V Boost, rapid E, and they highlighted, they say the following, they said they talk about the meaningful power efficiency gains, the ability to manage higher workloads and ability to manage higher throughput performance.

You mentioned artificial intelligence and another key focus in that report was AI, where about 80% of respondents believe that AI will drive a seismic shift in how telcos operate in the next five years. What do you think are the biggest opportunities with AI and ran?

Yeah, we know AI will be everywhere from client to edge to our network and cloud, and it will be accessible across all our loads, including CORE and ran. The potential uses for RAN AI are virtually unlimited locally. We have the network capabilities today to support AI in the RAN through software defined networks end to end, and we have CPUs that can run AI workload without requiring any external component, any additional power requirements like for example, the fourth generation, Intel four generation of C on scalable processor with Intel v Rambus. With that, you don't need anything else as far as opportunities. You were asking Clance, there are two major opportunities in Grant. One is about optimizing the ran, meaning optimizing performance and cost savings through AI and enhance automation, energy efficiency, dynamic orchestration. And the second major opportunity I'm going to say is creating new value added services that generate incremental revenue for operators.

For example, use cases that operators are more interested in today with immediate significant TCO benefits through performance and power improvements. Could be dynamic network configuration, traffic steering, optimize spectrum allocation, obviously energy efficiency in the infrastructure, predictive analytics and control automation in general. And then I believe that for revenue generation network slicing will play a key role and will be a major opportunities so far. Again, I'll give you some examples. We have multiple run AI demos with leading operators. We have a demo with SK Telecom that demonstrated AI assisting power savings. We have collaborated with Vodafone to demonstrate again, AI assisting network slicing. We have Deutsche Telecom, again, AI assisting B management, and we have worked with at and t again to demonstrate energies savings. So quite a bit happening already. We're just starting on this, but it has an enormous potential for both network efficiency and to enable new service models. And we have, again, we have the network capabilities and the CPU to start making happen that today.

So Cristina, as an emerging innovation, what is your advice to operators who want to streamline AI development and integration into their current network operations?

Yeah, as I said, we're just starting this journey, so it's not going to happen overnight. Operators will want to make sure the algorithm works. They can deploy safely that they're not going to have any compromise. It's just going to get better and better, and that's what they're doing. There is already elements of AI being incorporated in today's network. I think again, we start by having a software defined network. We embrace the new architecture software defined network end-to-end virtualize where innovation can happen at the pace of software, and you choose an architecture with capabilities that can make it easy and practical to deploy. Having that architecture silicon underpinning that architecture that allows you to deploy AI without adding additional components and without adding power consumption, reducing the complexity and that reducing the cost, that is key. Every single AI use case inference use case that can be applied to the virtual DU can be run on Intel C processes, and that is huge when not in the data center or at the border of the tower or a building, TCO is essential performance per what still drives architecture and business decisions, and we have to take that to keep that in mind when we choose the solutions.

Also, another thing to keep in mind is software migration, right? That we get when you architecture is running on a Intel C on server architecture, you get software migration, you get full compatibility generation over generation, and that protects the investment, the software investment that you will be doing today. I want to mention this, another intel contribution to help operators early in their AI journey is what we just announced again at the WC 2024, the early availability of the Intel vRAN AI development kit. It enables operators and developers to build models to build, to train, to optimize and deploy AI models for vRAN use cases built on top of Intel AI optimized libraries, frameworks and tools. So really a very, very useful tool.

Excellent. And I'd like to transition now to the world forum where our theme this year represents what's at the top of people's mind here in this telecom industry. How can we unleash the digital services opportunity? That's the question that we asked, and from your point of view, Cristina, how can we accelerate network evolution?

We're seeing what is happening in the telco world. We're seeing a massive industry transformation toward a software defined end-to-end virtualized network, all the way to layer one in the entire stack. We're seeing major operators across the entire world either already deploying at a scale, starting to deploy, or definitely announcing their intention to deploy in both Greenfield and Brownfield. We're seeing Vodafone, we're seeing Verizon, we're seeing the recent announcements from at and t. We're seeing Tes Telefonica Dish, Rakuten in Japan, so many others. We have reached the point of not return. That's just a fact, and we can do this. We know now that we can do this transformation without compromising the KPIs. We have seen the reports from Verizon, from Vodafone, from Rakuten on their KPIs on their success with their deployment, the deployment of the network. The industry has embraced an open virtualized network that can bring scalability, flexibility, innovation in multiple areas, including AI handstand without again, compromising KPIs. I'm very proud that today nearly every virtual open brand deployment in the world runs on Intel Xeon. We led virtualization at the core, if you remember that, and our leading virtualization at the brand. From our viewpoint, we're continuing to focus on advancing the technology, investing our silicon platform and software roadmaps to simplify and accelerate operator deployment. Yet unleashing the full opportunity of the virtual open network will require collective innovation and collaboration across the industry, which is why efforts like the DSP Council are so critical to transforming our network.

And earlier you mentioned the critical role of ecosystem collaboration and the success of 5G and beyond. At MWC, we saw the wide breadth of Intel's partnerships in the industry. Can you tell us how these collaborations contribute to advancing network innovation and scalability in the years to come?

Absolutely. This is a task for the whole industry. No one can do this alone as an ecosystem. We need to work together to simplify and accelerate virtual open run deployments and bring innovation at the pace of software. We'll continue to work with our partners to optimize the hardware and the software together, and we're lucky and thankful for the amazing and rich ecosystem. At anos. We'll continue to provide ecosystem with solutions that give the operators the best results. Scalability, flexibility, innovation, including AI workloads, power reduction automation, workload consolidation. It's unlimited. The more we can collaborate upfront together, for example, aligning our roadmaps, optimizing and validating our solutions upfront, the more we can simplify operators, virtual, open, run deployments, and the faster we can scale and give operators the best results.

Thank you, Clarence. Always great talking to you.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

The AWS vision for telecom: Network innovation and new revenue streams | TelecomTV

What role will network APIs play in creating new revenue streams for telcos? Chivas Nambiar, General Manager of Telco Business at AWS is here to share his insights on AWS's role in accelerating network innovation, 5G deployments and generative AI in telecom. Chivas, thank you for being with us today,

Clarence. Thank you for having me on. It's exciting to be part of this conversation and I'm looking forward to this discussion.

AWS recently announced a major cloud migration deal with Telefonica Germany. Can you share more details on what this Brownfield operator migration entails and why it's significant for the telecom industry?

Yeah, we're very excited about this journey. If you think about Telefonica Germany, they have had for a little while now a vision of what the network of the future needs to look like, and we've been partnering with them and their key ISV, in this case Nokia, to envision what the future looks like and to get that deployed. So in this particular case, we've got a deployment with Nokia's Cloud Native Core 5G core architecture, which is a completely software based packet core, right? It's running on top of AWS's cloud in our AWS regions and our availability zones, which are think both them as data centers that run in our regions. And we've built it in such a way that it's actually supports the stringent requirements of a commercial telephony operator. Now, in terms of what we ended up building with Telefonica and Nokia, they're using critical AWS capabilities including things like AWS Elastic Kubernetes service, which is a container orchestration service that we provide, which is a fully managed service.

It takes all of the container functions, the containerized functions that Nokia has. You run it on EKS, and then you use Amazon's Elastic Cloud compute, which our compute infrastructure to support different workloads associated with it. All of this running in a way that Telefonica has figured out how to run it with the right kind of resiliency to operate a commercial network. And it's the first time we've seen a brownfield operator work with an ISV and AWS to deploy something like this at scale. One of the key things that we think long-term this also allows Telefonica to do is they look at the infrastructure that is built and some of the key capabilities around security in this public cloud, which uses AWS's lightweight, secure hypervisor called Nitro, and they've figured out how to use it to protect this workload and now can figure out how to take that and run it in regions, run it closer to the edge where they need to. So we're excited about what the long-term model of this network of the future looks like with Telefonica.

As you know, 5G networks and services are currently a key focus for a telecom providers. How is AWS enabling telcos to accelerate their 5G innovation and deployment through its cloud services and partner ecosystem?

Clarence, that telcos run some of the world's largest, most complex networks. They're critical national infrastructure in most cases. So as telcos have kind of worked through their 5G deployment, it has been rewarding for us at AWS in particular to work with some of the most innovative telcos I mentioned Telefonica. If you look at Japan and N tt doomo, which is one of the largest carriers there, dish in the United States, which is a brand new network that's spun up. All these folks have really spent time with us to look at concepts that were developed in the cloud and then figure out how to take those concepts and deploy it in the telco ecosystem. And that helps them really start to envision what the telco of the future looks like. This includes everything from speeding up deployments, simplifying operations, taking all the data that is generated in these networks, and then using AI and recently gen AI capabilities to optimize the running of these networks.

As folks who have lived in the industry for a while know most of the complexity and the cost really lies in the long-term. Running of these networks and automation and data-driven but safe kind of mediation are two areas that the telcos we work with are mostly excited about. The second part of this is that a lot of the innovation in telcos really comes from the ISV ecosystem, right? So the ISVs and the NEPs and telcos are very interested in figuring out how to drive ever short cycles between a feature being envisioned with these ISVs and partners that they have, and then being able to take that and bring it in front of their customers as fast as they can, but with the right kind of controls and guardrails that automation provides. And if you look at public cloud providers and AWS in particular, we with our largest partner ecosystem of more than 130,000 partners really have figured out how to do this at scale. And that's what we're working with telcos on.

Generative AI is becoming tremendously important across industries. What specific generative AI services and solutions is AWS providing to help telecom companies unlock new capabilities and business models

Models? I haven't had a customer conversation where we haven't touched on gene AI in I think about a year and a half. So it is top of mind for everybody that we talk to with Gene ai, though we're finding that our telcos really want to think about in different buckets. So we kind of think about it in three buckets. The first one is for telcos that have the skillset and the capability and the desire to go build models or really control all the knobs of the gen AI ecosystem that they want to build. AWS provides a deep set of capabilities around things like SageMaker, which is our way for you to take models or build models to train models and then tune them with your own data in your own environments in a safe and protected fashion. Underneath it, we provide access to GPU and other accelerated infrastructure, including ability for you to use AWS custom silicon to drive down the cost of your training through training and chip sets and cost of your inference through in friendship sets that we're continuing to work on.

So overall, that underlying ability to take and build models and really touch the hardware infrastructure, we think there's a bucket of telcos that really want to spend time there. For the majority of telcos that I work with though, what they really want to see is in a world where all of these models and the evolution of the models is really fast and you cannot make decisions today that last for two to five years out, which has been the traditional model. When we pick ISVs vendors and partners in the past, they want a fully managed environment where they can build one set of guardrails, one set of protections for their data, and then be able to bring in models that are unique for each use case, fine tune them with their data in a safe fashion. And then over time, if they find that other models are better or they find smaller models that are better or find better models, they can go swap 'em out without actually having to rebuild everything.

And so the Amazon's bedrock service is what they've been using for it. It's built in a way that is a fully managed experience. You can use and choose a number of different models for your use cases. You can fine tune with your data, you can put the right set of guardrails around it. So that's really resonating with our customers who want to use genai. Then finally, for some particular use cases, there are GENAI enabled applications, and recently we talked about British Telecom enabling their developer audience to go out and use what is now Q for developers, which is a ability for them to infuse gen AI into the ID as they're building their products. And that has proven to be very useful for British Telecom. They have found success to the point that they've decided to roll it out across a large group of their engineering teams and in the first few months of usage, and it generated about a hundred thousand lines of code all by itself, and this takes away a lot of the undifferentiated heavy lifting. So we think there are a few of those use cases where they will look to AWS to provide that kind of applications that are on top. And in some cases those applications will come from us and some cases they'll come from partners. And partners are obviously using all of the same capabilities that I mentioned, that our customers are using lots happening in this space.

I see that AWS is also participating in the network, API panel discussion, and there's a growing momentum around exposing network APIs to unlock new revenue streams. Can you share more about the role AWS and other hyperscalers are playing in enabling this and how can AWS's services help telcos deliver on the monetization promise of this API driven approach?

Yeah, for decades, we've been talking about how do we take some of the capabilities we have in these large complex networks we run and then be able to provide that as an API to end users, ISVs and customers. And we've struggled a little bit, and I think the struggle has been that if you think about how these APIs are created and deployed in these networks, then you have in every country, let's say two to four operators to get broad enough coverage across the country. All of them have their own implementations based on whatever ISVs and partners they're using. And then how do you aggregate all of that together to provide one single seamless developer experience? That's been really hard to do, but over the last few years now, especially with some of the industry work around things like kamara, we are starting to see standardization of these APIs.

And now you have an opportunity to take these standardized APIs, expose 'em, provide access to all the network functions we're talking about, and then start to provide that to a large level of audience. And so if you look at AWS, we have the largest developer and ISV ecosystem that has worked with APIs. And so developers really want that frictionless and a compelling experience that allows them to access not just the telco APIs, but in parallel also all of the cloud capabilities, the storage, the compute, the AI capabilities to then take advantage of the network APIs. And I think that's what we're most excited about. So we've been working with a number of our customers, and we wrote a blog about this actually that we surfaced at NWC this year where we talked to folks like Orang and T-Mobile and Liberty Global and said, Hey, what could we do in terms of building this experience for our developers? So Derek, they're partnering with us and we're excited about how this is coming together. We will likely have more to talk about over the course of the year as we build it.

Chivas, this is your first time attending the DSP Leaders World Forum. What are your expectations coming into this event, and is there any particular topic, area or potential collaboration that you're most excited to explore with the attendees?

I'm excited to be part of the forum, just the opportunity for us all to sit down together, learn as a community with some hard earned lessons that we will all share, and also having a venue where we can mull over the future of the telecom industry gets excited about it. I think that's super important. These are the type of venues that build communities of leaders and practitioners that really help shift and change the industry and define where we need to go. We've long elaborated on things like standards, but I think what's different now in this wave of transformation is it's no longer about what we're going to do, which is what the standards used to define, but how you do it and how fast you do it. We were just talking about APIs and when we talk about things like how do you translate from APIs being something you standardize and you have it as an offering to how does it actually effectively become useful for the telcos, which is monetization?

Then you start to have conversations with folks like AWS who built large marketplaces where we have the models and the mechanisms that allow you to monetize these APIs, right? So I think that that conversation with a good group of people that have operated across telcos, across hyperscalers, across some of the key ISV partners will get us to a place where we come out of this with some exciting new things to go figure out how to build. We come out of this hopefully with a sense of possibility about what we can build, and in the end, I think it's a question of how do we go out and build away for us to take all the undifferentiated heavy lifting out of building these complex ecosystems and help translate it into deeply personal experiences for our customers. Personally, for me, I think as I meet with the folks in the DSP forum, I am excited about connecting with some change agents that we can work with because a lot of this is fun about working in the industry and fun about working with people who are forward looking and willing to take some risks and go build some things together.

So that's probably for me personally, the biggest thing I'm excited about.

Chivas, it's great to talk to you today and thank you for your insights,

Clarence. Thank you for having me on. I look forward to seeing you there.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

Unveiling the power of hybrid cloud automation in telecom | TelecomTV

Hello, you are watching our special program on the power of hybrid cloud automation in telecoms networks. I'm Guy Daniels and in today's discussion we are going to look at how to reduce the complexities of implementing cloud-based networks through automation in order to improve operational efficiency and accelerate digital transformation. And I'm pleased to say that joining me on the program are Manish Mangal, who is CTO Telecom and Global Business Head Network Services for Tech Mahindra Harkirit Singh, who is CEO of Ascend Digital Solutions Limited, and Azhar Sayeed senior director, TME Technology and Strategy at Red Hat. Hello everyone. It's good to see you all. Now let me start by asking how can this idea of a hybrid and multi-cloud automation help improve network scalability for CSPs and Azhar, let me come across and get your thoughts on this first,

Absolutely thank you guy for the opportunity. But if you look at the challenges some of these talk hosts, CSPs are facing, they want capacity expansion, they want on demand capability. Now if you take the multi companion cloud, what it is about multim Companion Cloud is about actually creating additional capacity for scale and performance through a hybrid cloud footprint across multiple public clouds. So how it's done is it's actually orchestrated together, it's managed together in terms of workload deployment is flexible across your private environment as well as the public cloud environment. So in terms of scalability specifically, imagine you want to be able to burst into the public cloud for capacity where you're running into some challenges with respect to capacity and you want to be able to scale there. You can immediately light up the cloud platform within the public cloud and move workloads across, use that additional capacity for scale and then tear it down the moment your workload, actually the traffic load or the network load declines.

So it's an easy way to light up capacity on a click button. It's highly automated in terms of this whole multi-cloud companion capability. And this is actually the partnership we've done with Tech Mahindra to use components from Red Hat like a CM OpenShift to manage those clusters and then NetOps AI from Tech M to be able to actually orchestrate those workloads across diverse environments, create the network connectivity across and so on. So that's how you're able to actually scale and that's really how you're able to address that question of scalability in terms of how multi mode cloud companion helps.

Great. Thanks very much Azhar and we'll be hearing more about that during our discussion. But for now, let me go across to Manish. What are your thoughts of how this approach can help with scalability?

No, absolutely. I think the world that we are living in and the way we are thinking about designing and operating the network of the future, the cloud is a fundamental infrastructure to that, right? We are now at a stage in the industry where every pretty much every technology, whether it's a network or the IT systems, they're all cloud native. So the foundational element of the cloud is absolutely important to really create a common infrastructure on which variety of different applications can sit. And the benefit of having a multi mode companion cloud architecture is that it basically gives a great combination of a public-private hybrid cloud, and you can add on capacity, modify delete on an on-demand basis through the combination of the cloud infrastructure and the kind of scalability that our customers need today is absolutely important. The part that I will also add along with the scalability is the fact that we need that level of dynamic cloud environment availability for the reliability.

Also our customers, customer's customer, whether it's a B2C or a B2B are expecting a 24 by seven more than five nine available infrastructure and a hundred percent availability of the service. So for that kind of an environment to be able to fully support it, a multi-port cloud environment is great, but that's not just enough. I think automation is very important and as I said that one of the reasons why we actually created NetOps or AI is to really automate the entire lifecycle of how the different workloads can reside from the plan design all the way to the operations lifecycle for this network and IT workloads on the multi world cloud. So we believe that this is a fantastic architecture to give the ability for our customers to scale up and down the capacity and the capability through the multi-cloud approach, multi companion cloud.

Thanks very much, Manish. Well, let's expand that now. And Harkirit, let me ask this next question to you. How has the telecoms industry leveraged hybrid cloud automation and overcome the challenges? And what tangible business benefits do you think have emerged from this approach based on your own expertise and experience?

Yeah, thanks guy. I think as Manish said, so this is an error of clouds and cloud native technologies that are transforming the way we consume services applications, and building a hybrid cloud environment provides that elasticity and on demand capabilities to actually create, what do you call as instances to deliver those content services and application. From a CSP perspective, from our side of the things we are in the market in Ghana, we are providing cloud services to both private sector and the public sector. What we have seen is the requirements on both the sites are same in terms of availability of the services, in terms of on demand, in terms of utilization or capacity, in terms of ensuring that the services can be scaled as and when the demand increases and utilization and creating efficiencies and building that economies of scale is critical to actually deliver the services in the telecom sector as of today.

Whereas on the public sector side, the demand is predominantly on securing the services, which means that the instances to be on premise and to leave as much as capacity as required, as minimum, I would say on the public cloud side of things. But the architecture itself, like the multi-mode cloud that we are talking about and building up the instances to deliver business critical services around disaster recovery are also very critical. So from a business standpoint of view, the cloud technologies are delivering efficiencies to CSPs, to the telecom market and building an infrastructure that can be actually shared and utilized across multi-tenants and also provide the level of availability of services and the delivery of content at speed and at scale that is needed to drive revenue growth and also the profitability.

Yeah, absolutely. Very interesting. Thank you Harkirit. Manish, let's ask that one to you as well. What benefits are you seeing here?

Yeah, I think it's, and Harkirit said it extremely well, and I'll just add maybe one comment to that, which is really the on demand nature of it. The customer expectations are always there, which are varying. So you have an environment and a situation where you have a traffic surge. Let's say you have a certain event that has happened. And to accommodate for situations like that, traditionally we could not design the network for that kind of a peak capacity. And as a result, what we had done was that the customer experience suffers at that time. And during those time is one when actually the needs are even higher. So an environment like that can very easily be accommodated with a hybrid cloud environment where you can add on capacity very quickly. I mean, that's a very tangible, immediate business benefit. But the other things that we are also watching is that the networks are also getting more complex.

So there are more likely scenarios where we will see certain segments of the network facing outage or certain specific platform having certain outages because of whatever issues of complexity during those times is when you need the ability to actually hand the traffic over to alternate platform and being able to sustain and continue that one. And of course, you don't want to build the capacity of 50%, 70% additional capacity to cover up for those kinds of scenarios, which is why a dynamic environment can be an extremely, extremely important for the customer to use it. And this is just more of a how do you use the dynamic nature of add, modified, delete capacity on demand, but the benefit of the cloud native architecture and the automation of how do you manage the network that's now proven, the total cost of ownership for that kind of a network architecture is absolutely given, and I don't expect any network or even the IT systems to be built in the future that are not going to be cloud native anymore.

Absolutely. Thank you Manish for that. And Azhar, what are you seeing here?

So if you look at the sizes of networks that are being deployed today, our sizes of infras cloud infrastructure, private cloud infrastructure that's being deployed today, it's already getting to thousands and thousands of devices, servers, both at the core data centers and as well as edge and far edge with respect to ran and some of the other new services like iot, how gateways are being deployed Now, those are all servers off the shelf, commercial, off the shelf servers. Now, in order to manage that size of a network and infrastructure, you'd absolutely need scale, but you also need to look at things like what are the overall cost of optimizations? What does my security posture applied? How do I lifecycle manage these applications across my entire footprint? Now, this is just on the private side. The moment you add a public cloud component to this through the multi more cloud companion cloud, now you're talking about, again, multiplying those set of connections and now you need to maintain the security posture, the cost modeling and optimization and lifecycle management across that entire infrastructure.

So by doing this multi more companion cloud, what you can do is you can, A, as Manish said, and our also said earlier, is you can create these on the fly. So which means you only use it when you need it and then you actually back away from it when you don't. That's one, two, you can create a consistent posture across all of that environments with respect to security and security management because every public cloud environment is different through this specific architecture, you are actually abstracting those public cloud environments to create a common automation environment and a common security posture across their entire infrastructure, which is extremely critical because that's exactly where products like Red Hat OpenShift and products like NetOps AI really help in bringing that value together. So from a business value perspective, you have now a consistent infrastructure that's highly scalable and flexible, and you now have a highly cost optimized and a most efficient infrastructure to be able to use and utilize. That's really where the business value shines through in terms of how you can build this.

Thank you, Azhar. This is really fascinating. And Harkirit, I'd like to ask you now, what use cases are you considering for cloud-based networks, including hybrid cloud scenarios?

I think some of the use cases that we're looking at is, what do you call e go services? So building GCloud, which is like a government cloud on an E go net infrastructure that actually provides the level of scalability, security, and automation to bring lots of EO services on a cloud-based infrastructure and have that capability of a hybrid cloud environment, multi cloud environment to bring up the level of scalability that is needed when the demand for those services increases. So the use cases could be e passport services, eHealth services, education services, and we are using this whole infrastructure cloud native infrastructure to build a lot of digital use cases and rank a lot of people out of the digital divide and deliver the services on demand, what we call as twenty four seven services where the citizens can actually log into any applications and connect to these cloud services to get their their passports, get their licenses, get them registered for any birth.

So I think that is one of the main use cases that we are implementing as we go along. And also with that kind of infrastructure besides availability comes all the disaster recovery and the ease and the flexibility of actually switching when any such event that happens that allows us to actually start building up on the business continuity and disaster recovery centers. So that is one of the key use cases we are helping to get the government digitally enabled to deliver citizen-centric services in Ghana. The second, and the other key model that we're bringing up is on the level of the telecom network. We are building up a cloud native infrastructure for what you call as a network, as a service that allows us to onboard any ISPs, anys and deliver them capacity on demand and share a piece of the network to deliver to their end customers the capacity and services they need on voice data, specifically in any content and application that needs to be driven through a cloud multi-channel environment and have that ability to scale. So we are working on both the use cases, one on the digitization of the government and delivering the services that the citizens need. And the second thing on the infrastructure level, working with the ISPs and MNOs to deliver them capacity on demand.

Great. Thanks Harkirit for going through those examples with us. Very interesting. I'd like to expand now about how Red Hat and Tech Mahindra's latest innovation, the multi-mode companion cloud automation contributes to CSPs overall digital transformation strategies around hybrid cloud networks. Now, we've mentioned this earlier in our conversation, but Manish, perhaps we could go into this in more detail.

Yeah, no, absolutely. I think there are three fundamental category of the problems that we are seeing to be addressed by the telecom service providers for their businesses. Number one is that how do you use your capital most efficiently, which is the new introduction of a new technology like hybrid cloud. What is the best way to spend that money? And I think what we discussed really the ability to build capacity on demand that actually helps a very effective use of the CapEx. You don't have to sink in capital upfront and that allows you to really build the capacity as you need it and a huge benefit. The second thing is really around how do you most effectively utilize your opex or how do you use the automation? And now with more and more of the AI where you can do predictive things, how do you drive the operating cost lower of an infrastructure, which really gives you a total cost of ownership advantages.

And that's where the NetApps AI work that we have done, the platform that we have created and its ability to automate and orchestrate the end-to-end life cycle with AI enabled into that or embedded into that is a very great approach of driving that overall operating cost lower for the CSPs. And the third is really driving the customer experience, and that's where the use cases like disaster recovery comes into the picture very prominently for the service provider where they have certain outage situations, then the on-demand disaster recovery can be created and support all the network traffic without impacting the customer experience. So I think when we look at the value of what we have been working together with Red Hat in creating this multi mode cloud companion and enabling at the end of the day how it helps CapEx, opex and the customer experience for the customer, we believe it's a great alternative, great opportunity to the traditional architectures while keeping in mind the primary three concerns that we are addressing for the customers.

Great. Thanks Manish and Azhar, can you add some further insights here for us?

Yeah, if I take a step back and look at that overall architecture, I mean I think Manish was describing this a little bit, but I may, let me just double click on a few things. There is the physical infrastructure on which it could be on-prem or public cloud. There is a CAS layer that actually manages deployment of those nodes and clusters. And then there is a management layer, which is what actually manages this part of the CAS component. And then there's the orchestration of all of those different applications that need to go across these infrastructures. So if we actually take these components, you need to integrate them together and do full stack automation to be really benefit from this type of a complete hybrid deployment model. That full stack automation comes through with this joint solution between Red Hat and Tech Mahindra with NetOps AI being the main orchestrator, a CM being the cluster manager, and then the infrastructure components that are using Kubernetes to manage those nodes and those clusters across private or public.

Now if you take, what this will allow you to do is really automate or hyper automate things to do what? To deploy any kind of workloads to even look into the future. In terms of today you're deploying as said, e-government type of services, which is it potentially to your clients. Now tomorrow you want to be able to deploy some AI workloads and model training. Model training requires extensive compute capability where you need to be able to be flexible in terms of using that compute wherever it resides, whether it is in public cloud or private cloud. How can you elastically expand and do that with modern training? How can you then take that model that you've developed and go deploy it towards the edge of far edge to do model inferencing for the actual service or the workload that you're designing? So those are some things that are really now possible in a seamless manner without the end user or the CSP having to worry about how do I build these type of capability in each one of those siloed environments. That's really where this shines in terms of providing a common environment, common operational model, common automation model, and easy to deploy services in terms of point click across the board.

Thanks very much. This are some very interesting possibilities emerging here. Harkirit, let me come back to you because earlier you covered a couple of interesting use cases there, but can you now elaborate on specific examples or case studies where hybrid cloud automation has directly contributed to improving telco's business outcomes such as reducing operational costs or accelerating time to market or enhancing the customer experience? Have you got any further insights for us please?

So we had an issue with one of our, you can say large infrastructure company that is delivering energy to the market and they had a big security issue on their own IT infrastructure last year and they reached out to us and said, guys, you have a cloud platform. We have certain applications which we are running on the public, and there are certain data, user data that we are actually hosting on, basically on our own servers. Can you guys help us and take all of these instances, which included smart meters, six different applications, and actually delivering services to more than almost, I would say four to 5 million homes in the country. And it was a very critical state because being one of the biggest grid electricity providers in the country, that would have to be, you can say, migrated from where they were into first into the data center, host them, basically manage hosting, and then actually porting all of their applications on the cloud and help them to actually deliver services back to their customers, which includes both the businesses and the consumers.

So we had a GCloud platform, what do you call government cloud, which is both on on-premise and hybrid. We were able to use the whole compute storage that we had. We were able to actually spin up additional compute and storage on the public and we able to transition them within about 72 hours and get their services up and running within a week's time. If we were actually looking at a traditional model of anything that is related to non-native, non-cloud based infrastructure, this kind of switch and migration would take us months. But we were able to, right from the time we had the call with them to the time they were up and running on the environment, it was about within about seven days we were able to host that. So I think, so from a business perspective, the speed, I would say the acceleration of getting an environment which was hosted on their own IT infrastructure, bring them into a data center and then get them the services on a hybrid cloud was a key. You can say differentiator from anything that has been done before. So what we see as a business potential is speed, accuracy, resiliency, security elasticity, and the scale that the cloud infrastructures are delivering for businesses in scenarios where they get more secure services, most foster services scale on demand and still have their ability for improving their business continuity through disaster recovery as well.

Excellent. Thank you very much Harkirit. And Azhar, let's come across to you for some additional comments.

Yeah, just briefly, I think Harkirit already mentioned a solid use case and an example. I was going to just add to a few things because my conversation with different providers across the globe has been very similar. People who were so much interested in just deploying their own private cloud environment are now actively looking to see how they can leverage public cloud for backup disaster recovery scenarios. Especially if you remember some of the outages that have happened recently and they were in the news without naming the customer, without naming, some of those outages were primarily due to some operational issues inside their infrastructure certificate server going down or not being updated or some sort of routing issues inside the network infrastructure, which basically took down their entire network for six hours, eight hours, 10 hours, and so on, which is a significant loss in the context of business to that particular provider.

Now, because of that, they are now actively coming back to say, Hey, is there a way we have public cloud presence within the country, within the region? Is there a way we can actually use public cloud infrastructure to augment, add capability and capacity and switch over in such scenarios in such disaster scenarios? So this is the real, this absolutely that's happening now and increasingly I'm seeing a number of service providers to CSPs actually asking for this kind of a solution. That's why we think this was a very good use case and thank you to send digital for actually making that happen at one of the enterprise customers.

Great. Thanks for that, Azhar. Well, we must leave it there for now. Thank you all very much for taking part in our discussion today. If you would like further information on any of the issues raised in the program, then please follow the links below this video. For now though, thank you for watching and goodbye.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

Welcome back to the Open Ran Summit, part of our DSP Leaders Coverage and Time. Now for our live q and a show, I'm Guy Daniels and this is the second of two q and a shows. It's your final chance to ask questions on open ran from deployment strategies, Rick Evolution to upcoming developments. Now we've already received a lot of questions from you covering a wide range of open ran topics. However, if you haven't yet sent one in, then you do need to be quick. Please use the q and a form that's on the website. Well, let's now meet our guests who are going to help answer all of your questions. And joining us live on the program today are Rahul Atri, who is president of the OSS Business Unit at Rakuten Symphony. Beth Cohen, SDN Network product Strategy for Verizon Business Group. Ian Hood CTO, chief Strategist Global Industries at Red Hat, Richard MacKenzie, distinguished Engineer Wireless Networks with BT Matteo Fiorani, head of distributed Unit and infrastructure for Ericsson and Patrick Lopez who is the founder and CEO of core analysis.

Hello everyone, thanks so much for returning for our live show. As I said, we've got a lot of questions in from our viewers, so let's get straight to our first one. And here's the question, the adoption of Open ran by MNOs depends not only on technology or TCO, but also organizational realignment. As procurement and operational models are different to legacy networks, how is this work progressing? Well, Patrick, perhaps we could start by coming across to you for your views. It's not always technical with open ran, there's a lot of operational aspects. What's your take on how this is progressing?

Thanks. Hey, I think Open Ran inherits a lot of other technology or if you will, there are a number of prerequisites in order to deploy open ran, you need to have a network that has a cloud native or a cloud abstraction capability. So you need a virtualization layer. You need to be able to purchase and deploy hardware separately from software and to have an open ran, sorry, a cloud native pipeline. So you need to adopt capabilities such as C-I-C-D-C-T. So it's a lot of new skills to onboard At the same time as you're deploying a new technology and possibly new vendors with open RAN and many operators, even if they were not sure how much open ran they were going to deploy over time, they took open run as a poster child or rather as a working environment in order to deploy and to learn all these new technologies, how to deploy commercial off the shelf hardware, how to deploy software in a programmable manner, how to use systems integrator to help them along those tasks. So I think that we're not there yet, but many network operators that have deployed Open, ran have learned a lot of those key skills that are accessory for the future of 5G and six G.

Great. Thanks very much Patrick. As you say, a lot of key skills that they need to learn and adopt. Let's go next to Beth and then we'll get some more views, but Beth next please.

Sure. I want to talk from the perspective of the telco and I would say that good news is that we are able to build on a lot of the skill sets that we've been using for our cloud adoptions and being able to use it for oan. So our operations people have gotten used to virtualized systems, Kubernetes there are actually much more familiar with these tools than let's say five years ago and so that they can actually build on that. And so I think that we're further along in terms of the skillset or rather the underlying skills that are needed to be successful with Iran. So of course obviously we need to build on top of that to add the specific skills for ran.

Great, thanks very much Beth. Good to hear that we are moving along here and as we've heard so far, I'm learning from cloud native as well. Rahul, let's come across to you for your thoughts as to how we're progressing.

I think Patrick covered some of the points. Yes, the procurement cycle changes we need to adapt to have the decoupled way of buying in the equipment and technology. The second aspect I believe is what we are also seeing in the market. If you are moving to the software defined networks or cloud native networks, you have to be either a build versus buy organization. If you're a build organization like what we did in Rakuten, you build your own softwares, you try to build your own automation layers, you build your pipelines and you build the skillset to be able to manage the network which has multiple layers right now starting from infrastructure cloud and then application and services. The other kind of organizations are also buy which needs a lot of ence in the ecosystem. You need to find the right partners, you have to have the system integration skillset, not with the partner but also with yourself. I think if we can take the technological call on the right partner that is buy versus build the angle the otherwise is with cloud native networks you have to do things on your own. You have to become the technology company rather than just being the, so for me, I think the distinction and decision of becoming a build versus and finding the right model for build and finding the right ecosystem for buy is the change.

Oh, that's interesting. Thank you Rahul and Ian, let's come across to you now for your thoughts on this.

Yeah, so I'm going to follow up on what Beth made to comment that a lot of the customers have actually already learned a lot as they were building out their cores because on that to 5G core, they were building a cloud native deployment in that context and those skills and what I found is that the different operators had improvement in skill sets in different teams and then they kind of moved those skills around and that's kind of what's going on now is that the teams that really understand RAN are being cross-functionally joined if you will with the teams that own the platform and that's driving a faster approach and I think that that learning for some of our customers has actually made it easier for them to kind as Rahul was talking about, control their own destiny and be kind of the integrator leader, if you will with their partners. So this is kind of what I'm seeing.

Fantastic. Thanks very much for those insights. Ian and Matteo, let's come across to you as well please.

Yeah, thanks Guy. My comments is somehow aligned to also what Rahul have. There are different models that the operators can choose and that would trigger different type of competence needed on the operator side as well. So we'd refer to something like an operator that chooses to get preintegrated solutions out of the vendors. Then the vendor can take part of the load and can act as the prime integrator on behalf of the operator. And then of course the operator needs to build some core competence still, but that level of core competencies doesn't have to be that high, so they don't need the very specialized organizations to be able to run an open run network. On the other hand, there are operators taking a different approach. They do more in-house and in that case they need to build much more core competence to be able to run them to add system. They need to have integration capability by themselves. So that would require of course a much bigger change on the operator side and much bigger organizations to be able to run the network.

Great, thank you Matteo and thanks everyone for those comments for that first viewer question. I do want to move on now because as I say, we've got a lot of questions and Richard, I think I'd like to come to you first on this next question if I may, is about power consumption and the viewer asks, power consumption still seems to be a weakness of open ran solutions which will not be addressed until a new generation of chip sets hits the market in about two years time. How do we address this issue in the meantime? Well first of all Richard, is there an issue?

Absolutely there's an issue with power consumption, but that's not specific to open run. A lot of the problems we're trying to address in the traditional architecture networks as well. And a lot of the key ways that we can save energy are the things that we can do that are not specific to open run. So particularly just turning carriers off at quiet times, that's all about turning off the power amplifier. That's the main consumer. So if we're looking at a power consumption problem, that's the first thing we should address and we can address that now and it seems like the question is more focused on the actual chip set the platform. So there are certainly energy saving features that address that already. There's a number of different platforms so we're trying to address in open run to make sure that we're not just running on one particular type of platform, but that we can do X 86, we can do arm, we can do other platforms.

We want to make sure that they've all got different trade-offs in terms of consumption. So there are features that can happen now I'm sure in two years there's another generation of chip sets that's got some other incredible breakthrough, but again, that won't be a one-off big step I'm sure every generation of chip set that comes through, one of the things we're going to be asking is how does it affect power consumption? So that's going to be a gradual thing and we're going to see those efficiencies as time progresses. So certainly it is one of the priorities right now the recent Rick Forum event, they put energy saving as one of the two prioritized use cases and I would say that that's probably the area where there's the most attention in open run right now.

Good to hear. Thanks very much for those thoughts Richard. And we're here from Rahul in a minute, but Ian let's come across to you first.

Yeah, certainly I agree that power consumption is a challenge across the entire architecture and many things can be done now as been said in terms of what we do with the radios and spectrum, but we've already been through a couple of iterations of the technology for the servers that are doing the DU and cuus and one of the things in the open community we've done is we've made it so you can actually use operators to tune the underlying hardware and then we've got the Kepler project that allows us to monitor the power consumption and then adjust it on the fly. So these are things that we can do and is now a softer defined approach. So if you do bring some new hardware to the party to support the next generation of massive MMO at some higher frequency like we're going to need at some point, then we'd again use a softer defined operator that actually is a standard way to actually reconfigure that hardware underneath the platform.

Then that's how we'll kind of deal with it. So I think we've kind of got it under control, but certainly more work to be done to automate how we change the power on the fly and decide where's the best power to be utilized across, not just the radios with Spectrum and what frequencies they're using and the interfaces of the CU and DU but across the entire infrastructure because one of the things that is still out there is the cell site router, right? That's still a physical device. And so once we look at how we solve for that problem solve for the rick as well to actually utilize that for power consumption, these things will kind of evolve as well to kind of keep driving down and making this whole thing efficient.

Great, thanks very much. And as we've heard over these two days, it's an evolution, it's an ongoing development process here. Rahul, I promise to come over to you. So what's your thinking on the power issue?

I think like Ian covered, it's a good problem to have to be very honest. If it's evolution, you're not going to solve all the problems day zero. I think this is one of the most talk topic about whenever the TCO or the open ran topics comes out, I think we have done certain evolutions, we're able to understand the practice, we are able to, it grows with especially on the new application going forward, like was mentioning, there are some of open source projects coming out of CNCF. The project is the most interesting one where you can actually understand the P state C states see the CPU cycles, frequency utilizations of the chip set and also read I think around 120 different events and KPIs to understand how the application is performing. But on the other side it is also not only the hardware but also how your cloud is performing.

For example, we are able to tune the cloud onto one two core. We are able to insert a lot of agents in terms of PVPF or the Kepler project to understand how good is the application design, how you can do non pcards versus the P cars, and then on the management orchestration layer you always talk about Rick and the energy saving and other things. So for me I think it's a great problem to solve coming back to the earlier point as well, it's a problem of the ecosystem to solve together. It's not the application, it's going to be the evolution. Talking about similar ways we have seen in the past and it's why I say it's a good problem because we have multiple solution to that hardware chip set is one part of it. Application software, how it is written, how it manages and take the hardware into the loop is second part of it. And then the third option, Rick platforms all has to go together to solve this problem. But yeah, it's an evolution. We have seen the results we're going through, at least we know how and what is happening and then we have been able to say close the loop, understand take decisions and because it's software defined is much more quicker to take those decisions software turn on some of the carriers or some of the feature sets.

Great, thanks very much Rahul. Thanks for those comments everyone. I'll move on now because I've got a great question in here. Is there any space for a startup to play a competitive role in Open RAN and the Rick ecosystem and can we identify any likely areas? Beth, it's tricky for startups especially on the hardware and the infrastructure side. What's your thoughts on this?

I think there is room for startups. Verizon does support startups. We invest in them if they look promising and we understand that it's difficult to break into the ecosystem, but there's also real opportunity for startups to really disrupt the market. So the incumbents tend to be, they're looking at the bottom line and saying, Hey, I got to get my numbers every month or every quarter, but the startup is in a different situation, so they have, the thing about startups is that they have something that the incumbents don't have. They have a blank piece of paper, which means that they can really rethink how these systems work and how they can be delivered in a different way and that's very valuable. I know that certainly Verizon values that and we do invest in startups. I think there is, but it's done a little differently than the traditional venture capitals. I know that some of the incumbents will invest in startups as well. So yes, definitely they have a role in the ecosystem that can't be duplicated.

Absolutely. Thank you very much Beth. We've got a few comments to get through on this question, but Patrick, I'm going to come across to you next.

I think historically startups have had difficulty penetrating telecom's market and it's not because there hasn't been enough innovation, it is just the nature of the business in the sense that network operators, in order to be able to deploy a technology at scale, need vendor that have the same scale. So what it means in many cases is that those startups, those that are successful, those that have brought forward a technology or a product that is disruptive and create value, they get acquired, they get acquired by a larger vendor and within the parameter of a larger structure they can scale better and then they can become vendor to the technology operators. Startups that have been able to basically grow and deploy at network operators and then grow organically are few and far in between. There are some that have been successful in that space, but in most cases a startup that has a successful product or technology, their path to growth is through m and a.

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks Patrick. We do hear this, don't we, about the roots for innovation that the startups can provide, right where we're going to go next. Rahul, let's come across to you next for your thoughts on the potential for startups.

Absolutely, yes. I think one thing which the startups are very good at solve and solve problems differently, not just like what we do in telecom every day and out, we have worked very closely with startup in Rakuten, right from the platform building our own Kubernetes platform and the company happened to be outside telecom infrastructure, there were Kubernetes storage player and now they have the Kubernetes platform of our own. We also had a lot of innovation done on the databases side with Yoga Bytes, a lot of innovation done with Minai on the storage side. So I think absolutely yes, they come in with the tendency to solve problems, not with the telecoms or non telecom. They also bring the freshness. They also challenge the current ecosystem. The other part of the thing is whatever open source projects or software entities, we use all our brand built by startups in one way or the other.

I think C NCF F is doing great job bid with figuring out how to have a win-win enterprise model for these startups. We also have to do a lot more in telecom, nurture them, build them a part of the ecosystem to say that you're great with solving this problem and this is the larger picture, but you fit in here so come partner with us. I think a lot of operators are doing that, especially in terms of open Ran and Rick, there's an opportunity because it kind of moves the telecom into the space of technology becoming more software driven, become more like IT services. And then with Rick, some of the applications can be designed by startup. There are a lot of use cases which will come going forward to closed loop to do AI application to build small language model if not large to near real time Rick, and I'm not sure if we have some of the partners looking into already tapping in, but I'm very sure a lot of us enjoy working with them, learn a lot from them. It's just that how do we nurture them and make sure that it's a win-win for them. They will be bandwidth and the people to just have the long cycles, which we are not that famous for in telecom.

Yeah, quite right. Nicely put. Thank you very much Rahul, Ian, we'll get to you in a moment, but first of all I just want to go across to Richard.

Yes, there's a few things worth mentioning here. One is obviously across the globe there's a lot of funding initiatives to promote Open Ramp and a lot of those create collaborations where they are looking to make sure there's a role for some of the smaller companies and startups. So we are seeing them involved in a lot of collaborations and trials. I suppose the real challenge and the proof is going to be at the end of those activities, have they done something to actually win some business so that they're no longer reliant on that incentivized funding. But I think we're going to see a lot and we've seen particularly with the Rick, that's where the most obvious opportunity exists because that's the whole idea that with the Rick, if you can develop one particular X app or R app, you are no longer responsible for providing a full feature set that supports all services.

You've got your own innovation that focuses on one key benefit and you can focus on that and you just turn that into the product. So that really does enable an opportunity for startups and small businesses to be focused on what they're best at and not have to spread out their expertise over everything and become too weak. They can stick on being focused and being very strong. And I think a lot of the examples are university spin outs, but we are seeing other smaller companies, so particularly with the rick, we're looking at some vendors are now promoting themselves as xapp and R app vendors. So I think there there's going to be a lot of opportunities there and certainly it's not an easy win, but I think some of them are going to succeed.

Well, let's hope so. Absolutely. But you're right, it is tricky. Ian, let's come across to you for your thoughts on the potential of startups to play in open run.

Yeah, so as many of my colleagues have said, the startups have always been a part of the telecom industry and over time they as Patrick said, becomes an m and a piece and unfortunately for some that don't get funded the right, it's kind of a timing thing in anything as to whether or not they can actually survive to the point where they get acquired. But I think the areas where we are going to see them significantly more than we have in what I would call the, I'll call it the highway portion, which is the radio network out to the au. We've had limited new startups there, but certainly in the orchestration piece, the Rick piece and especially as Patrick was saying, the X apps to drive either location, other types of capabilities, and of course we have many startups and ISVs already in play in the AI space for all kinds of applications.

We're going to see them being applied into this equation to support the performance capacity sustainability equation that we talked about. So I do see lots of room for them, but again, it's a timing and as I say, if we don't kind of get this deployment moving fast enough, the timing may not be right for some of those startups who may have come along too early in the timeline and aren't funded long enough to actually get acquired. So it's a challenging kind of down the edge kind of equation for the startups, but I still think it's a good opportunity for them.

Great. Thank you very much Ian. Well thank you everyone for those comments. Before we get onto our next audience question, it is time for us to look at our audience poll for the Open Ran summit and the question we are asking you this week is, which are the most important areas of focus for the open ran community during the next 12 months? And you should, there you go. You can see the real time votes appearing right here. Interesting range of results so far. More field trials please. Total cost of ownership and operator commitment seem to be heading the pack but only slightly. Right. Well look, if you have yet to vote then you are running out of time. We will keep the polls open until the end of today and then we'll analyze the results on telecom tv. Right. As I said, we still have time for more questions, plenty of time and hopefully plenty more questions. So here's the next one. How will Open RAN impact the market potential for massive MIMO? Interesting question. We've had a couple of questions along a similar theme here. Mateo, I'm going to come across to you for your thoughts on this one.

Yeah, massive mimo is and open run is an interesting question and I think they have massive mimo and Open run a long history. I think I will start with the standardization aspect. I think one important piece to be able to make open ran Mass mimus successful is to select the right architecture that can be competitive in terms of performance with existing systems. And I think a lot of concrete steps have been taken there by the OR alliance that have recently decided to standardize an architecture in is optimized for mass IO. This will make the radio a little bit more complex but would also give the possibility to build open massive MIMO radios that are from a performance perspective at least on par with existing systems. The specification now are almost ready. They will be published in the June release train from the Alliance. So I think that is an important step for open run Massive mimo to be successful.

Then another aspect that will be important is what kind of hardware availability will be there over time because that is quite important for Mam Mima a lot more than for classic remote radio units. You need massive MA radio runs a lot of software, so you need to have a powerful silicon for that and there is an ecosystem building up for that. There are many different silicon vendor building solutions for open run mass IMO and that is important to see how this will evolve and what scale they will get because scale of course, it's very important for these vendors to be able to actually compete in the market. So these two aspects, standardization and availability of silicone are key for open run mass MMO to be able to evolve and become fully competitive.

Great, thanks for those insights Matteo. Good to see the ecosystem developing for this. Patrick, what are you seeing in the market regards massive MIMO and how it will impact open ran?

Thank you. I have maybe a little different perspective than my colleague from Ericsson here. I've seen massive IMO platform being deployed commercially at scale in networks and we've seen them in Japan for instance, either at entity Doomo or Rakuten Mobile. We're seeing them in the us, we're seeing them in Western Europe, we're seeing them in Canada. So I don't want people think that in order to deploy massive MMO in open ran you need to wait, you need to wait for more standards because the massive MO that are being deployed commercially right now of the same level and in some cases better level than some traditional vendors solution in the massive MMO space, it's not necessarily a problem of standardization. Standardization will continue to evolve and will continue to create more variants and more different ways to deploy massive MIMO. And I think that the uplink optimization that is being proposed and finalized at the open RAN alliance is a good addition to the tool set in order to deploy other capabilities. But I think that we see today massive MIMO being deployed commercially in open ran without performance issues. So that's the message I want to carry with you.

Great, thanks very much Patrick. A couple of strong messages there. That's good and thank you to our viewer for sending in that question. Well, here's our next one. Some telcos are open ran leaders, but others are happy to follow. How closely should these more cautious telcos follow and is there a danger that they could wait too long? Ian, let me start by asking you about this one and we know there's always front runners in any technology and open run is no exception, but what about those tokos who are just the more sitting back and seeing how things turn out?

I think the simplest thing to say is that if you will, it's time to just get started. We've had a couple of years now of work by the leaders around the world in Japan, in Europe and North America. So we're at to the point where we know that we can actually do this and we see the benefits now coming to those leaders that have gone there, but the longer you wait, the harder it is to actually kind of get there because there is, as we talked in this discussion, things to do with your organization, things to do with your operational teams. These are things that aren't really necessarily an open ran question. It's actually getting your teams capable of, and that's I think the biggest thing holding a lot of 'em back is their confidence in being able to be sort of the leader of their own destiny and take that risk to drive this forward to their actual goal, which the goal as we've kind of talked about is how do I actually increase my share of consumers in my market or go ahead and compete elsewhere and secondly to actually go after the enterprise market.

And so these things will continue to be delayed further if they keep waiting. So my sort of view is that the people who are first to market tend to lead and take the market share. That's always the way it's been in any industry and so there is a danger to continuing to wait and watch by the sidelines.

Great. Thanks Ian. So yeah, no time at the present. I think to delve into open run, Beth, you have a similar mindset to Ian on what those follower telcos should be doing now.

I think it really depends upon where the telco is. I personally think that the smaller telcos need to be fast followers and really step up the pace. Telcos at the end of the day are technology companies and I think we forget that. And so they love their bits, they love their bites, they love the widgets, and so I think that particularly the larger telcos that have larger budgets are more than happy to jump into O ran at the appropriate time and are willing and able to do that. The smaller ones tend to be more constrained by business factors, so for them they have to kind of dip their toes in the water, but I would not recommend that you wait too long. You really need to, I wouldn't say necessarily be a leader, but being a fast follower, that's really weird. That's the sweet spot for the smaller telcos.

Okay, great. Thanks Beth. Fast follower. Yeah, absolutely. We've got a number of other comments we're going to hear from, but first of all Richard, let me come across to you first.

Yeah, so I think one of the big opportunities missed with open run was it wasn't quite ready for 5G rollout. So for a lot of Brownfield operators, the real problem is that we launched 5G, we've already got existing suppliers for 5G. So the opportunity to then roll out any new technology is when that 5G rollout equipment comes to end of life or wherever we've got new areas that we want to deploy. So I think one of the early ways that we can roll out as brownfield operators is when our existing suppliers move their offerings to be more open run compliant. So that's one way to do it, but certainly when you say when we're going to just bring in a new supplier who does open run, you've got to wait until there's actually an opportunity to deploy something new. So I think that the factory missed 5G, that's put a lot of people back so there's no rush to deploy open run just for the sake of it. But there are a few other applications such as truck hosting, building and private networks where I think even Brownfield operators are looking to deploy what you would also almost call greenfield deployments.

Great, thanks so much Richard. As you say, there's a number of factors influencing deployment timeframes there. Matteo, let's come across to you next please.

Yeah, I think that as always there is a trade off in what is best to do. I mean if you are a front runner and start adopting the technology very early, you wouldn't have to go through a maturation process because the technology needs to mature. A lot of that has happened in the past few year and some of the leaders in the industry in terms of operators have taken that cost. But it does come with the cost being a leader and adopting the technology first because all the issues for the technology need to be ironed out. So there could be a benefit especially for say smaller CSPs in not being on the leader front and wait a little bit longer. But there is a risk of course in waiting too long as well because as we discussed also earlier, there is a maturation process the organizations need to evolve. There are a lot of lessons that need to be learned in deploying a new system. So waiting too long means also being too late in the game and being too late in doing the transformation. So depending on the size of the CSP and the type of business they want to run, there could be a different time and different sweet spot on when to exactly start, but it's better not to wait long.

Great, thanks very much Matteo. Don't wait long then. Rahul, let's come across to you next please.

It's so interesting. In the same forum we have discussed about innovation startups, technology, digitalization, ecosystem, and we actually started from offering opportunities to startups as well. So I believe that there's a shell around telecom. We are in a comfort zone and sometimes we wait for the next generation like 5G and 4G and five six G maybe to say, yeah, that's the right time to move along. I think we all know that we have to break the shell in telecom and move forward into doing something more, maybe open up new services on the service layer use cases, whether these are private network for manufacturing hub or a hospital or something. But the shell is that we need to make network more programmable in the sense they have to be platforms always available, self-configurable, runtime, dynamic, whatever we want to solve the use cases on the services layer.

If we don't do selling more data, selling more sim cards are getting saturated. That's why we see the arpo hit on 5G. I'm not sure it's the usual chance of having 3G, 4G, 5G or it's not working, even working, but I truly believe that we are at a juncture where we can, we are on the redefining telecom and we have the perfect opportunity to do that. I've said it before, anything which touches telecom, whether it is a delivery app, food app, cab, booking app, everyone has become unicorn on top of connectivity, but we suffer daily on terms of how to increase more arpu Open RAN is one of the ways to become more programmable in terms of network, whether it's starts with cloud. But yes, we will reach out to a point where we will have to do runtime slices, we have to assure quality of service, we have to do certain use cases which are totally not defined, not monetizable today, but the network has to become programmable and I believe that over has a great role to play along with Rick going forward along with other capabilities which will come going forward with open APIs and other things.

So I believe that if we all come together, create an ecosystem, don't have to solve the same problem. Again, different from BT is mentioning that in last two, three years the leaders have done a lot of fine tuning. We have had bad time, we have fine tuned, we have governed, we have figured out how to run these operations, why don't share with each other, why don't learn. And if you see that a lot of operator to build their own platforms. Now whether it is Rakuten, whether it is geo, we seeing entity also building something and there are a lot of forums which are coming together. So I think the ecosystem is right. It's all about some of the leaders and some of the operators coming together and assure and say yes, we will put the foot down and have open ran, deployed, whether it's private network, whether it is ruler, whether at the telecom hub. So I believe that the time is right and it's just about taking the right steps.

Great, thanks Richard. And other reasons there to jump into Open Ran and Beth, let's quickly come across to you for a pickup, a follow up comment.

Yeah, I just wanted to pick up on a comment about early adopters, right? So there is a risk when you are an early adopter. We're not a hardware company obviously, so we obviously purchase our hardware from our ecosystem and the network O ran and just ran in general is the ecosystem and the technology is changing very rapidly. So we do risk having to rip and replace the hardware that's out there and that's obviously it can be a costly risk so we hope that O ran will actually help that, but it's not a hundred percent. So I understand why some of the smaller companies might not want to take that risk of implementing something that ends up not working for them and needs to be replaced like a year or two down the road.

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you very much for those observations Beth, right. Let's move swiftly on to our next question, see what else has come in from the audience as CapEx reductions are implemented by the mobile operators, how will this impact the growth of Open Ran? Interesting question Patrick, are you able to shed some light and observations on this?

I can try. Certainly total cost of ownership has been one of the early claims from Open ran in term of reduction and obviously the costs of deploying or owning an open run system seems to be fairly advantages compared to more traditional RAN systems. If you are starting from scratch and we've seen I think every greenfield operator in the world has selected open ran system rather than a traditional RAN system for the speed of deployment and the cost of ownership when you buy the system and deployed from scratch for traditional brownfield operator, it's a different story because, well just as it was mentioned earlier, you don't deploy a new technology or a new vendor just because they're available, even if they're better, even if they're more cost effective because the reality is that swapping a vendor or introducing a new vendor in the telecoms environment, particularly the random environment is costly.

Any which way you look at it, it's probably 40, 50 million over a period of two, three years to do that just in terms of training and processes of people internally. So you have to wait for the right window and as mentioned there was one window going from 4G to 5G, they're another window for some operators that have deployed maybe Chinese RAN vendors and that are now forced to swap them out. Another opportunity is for those operators that are maybe moving from NSA to sa, another opportunity is the introduction and rollout of private networks and all of those are kind of like natural times at which an operator is looking at their network and thinking, okay, if I'm going to deploy something new now is it the right time to do it? With the new technology and certainly in term of CapEx reduction for operator, which is cost control comes also the quest to increase ARPU and increasing revenue comes from new services.

So rolling out new services while decreasing investment means that you need to buy basically platforms that are more open, platforms that are less proprietary because they can be reused and open RAN fits into that model because at the end of the day if you buy commercial of their shelf hardware, we can use that for open RAN and you can use that for something else. At the same time, if you buy a cloud infrastructure platform that is not specifically for open ran, open ran will profit from it but you can use it for other things. So all these benefits if you want point to the fact that in an environment where you want to reduce costs open RAN can be a good option if you have one of those windows of opportunities that are coming for you in the next months or years.

Great, thanks very much Patrick for those observations. It's worth mentioning that TCO issues topped our poll last year and it looks like it may well do the same again this year. Ian, lemme come across to you as well for your thoughts on how the trend towards CapEx reduction could be impacting open ran

Well I think the general situation for the operators is that quite frankly they're trying to drive down cost across their entire infrastructure and they do spend a large portion of their money CapEx and OPEX on legacy systems. So the only way that they actually go invest in other things is to look at those investments and say, okay, where can I not spend money on some of the legacy things and kind of balance this thing out? So that's kind of how that kind of drives it, but Patrick made a good point about there's a lot of compelling events as to when do you get into this business and to time that time that window so you can actually go after those other services that drive the revenue side of the equation. And so it's a constant balancing act of how do you actually improve the operational efficiency, the business efficiency of your company in terms of how you actually do processes And in the cloud native 5G core SA and NSA, we've kind of gone through this, how do we automate that process and we're going to apply that to the RAN to kind of drive down what a cost so we can actually reduce this expensive cost we have in the traditional ran, which is many, many truck rolls and the fact that the current LTE network is actually very much fixed at that edge of the network, these are the kind of things that have to kind of look at that cost and see how we can actually adjust where do I spend my money and investment while I'm dropping costs and spend elsewhere in the system?

We've even got people looking at how they can take their cos that they've got and kind of refine how they're built because they get a lot of legacy stuff in there that just needs to start coming out of the ground. So these are kind of the things that need to be balanced in looking at that and it's just an ongoing evolution of the economics to drive better efficiency and drive down costs to get to those new innovative services for the customer, both consumer and enterprise.

Great, thanks very much for those insights. Ian and Rahul, have you got a comment on this one as well?

I think I support what Ian and one is the timing aspect of it. The other part is how do you start doing bit by bit? For example, in our case when we were doing and we were lucky that we had the Greenfield network obviously, but the challenges were just the same. You don't get the skill, you don't have the platforms. When we started in 13, there was not even the NFEO standards properly defined and call first not defined how to bring on a split seven based open RAN automation coming from multiple vendors and how to even deploy cloud. So I think it also circulates what you see the future architecture and evolution towards your teams organization and platforms. Even if you start slicing today, there are a lot of legacy platform which are available which even the organization don't think about open ran, they are trying to migrate away from it.

For example, unifying the observatory systems or unifying the OS system. People EMS going away or unifying them into one. Then automation platforms teams are even without the open ran networks, building CICD pipelines, building the automation workflows. Workflow is a workflow whether you trigger for the open ran systems or you trigger it for the usual closed loop automation system teams have actually worked upon. And RF engineering is all about writing those scripts, macros the optimizations and understanding when this KPI hits what next three KPIs to monitor and then make the changes on tilt, make the changes on, make changes on profilings and also monitor pre post. I think if you look into the operator ecosystem right through plan, build, operate, monitors secure, there are possibilities which already are hinting towards migrating towards the future architecture and future platforms. If you think about tier ones, most of them including Ericsson, Nokia have evolved and shown architecture of the feature where a common Rick platform can handle non-cloud native or Brownfield network, which is non-open run and also an open run.

All these SA applications are hinting towards moving to our non realtime R platforms. All the automation platforms talk about orchestration, whether you are talking about the legacy RAN or we are talking about the open ran deployments and as I said, C CDs, all pieces around the open RAN or the non open RAN radio networks are coming together and as organization you have to take those calls to invest in systems because even if you take a call on Open ran to be later on at least the platform, the ecosystem is ready, the skillset is incubated. People start thinking about technology more as software rather than networks and only the telecom part of it. And also you bring in that culture of building things, going integrations, understanding the details of it, understanding what the API payloads are and how they're generated, how the business rules are rated. And whenever the organization defined to bring the possibilities towards moving to Open ran, it is easier integrations and by that time you're already become a software native. Telecom.

Great ri, thanks very much indeed for those comments. We've got to move on the Rahul, we've at least one more question in if not two because we've got so many in the audience. So I'm going to move across to our next question which is do you believe Open Ran and Rick is a good fit for 5G Ran sharing amongst CSPs? Interesting take there Richard, can I come across to you for your thoughts on this one?

Absolutely. Ran sharing is one of the use cases that we think is going to be successful early on in the adoption of Open Ran site sharing already exists and it's there to help with cost savings, but it comes with some major drawbacks and one of the key drawbacks is you are essentially making decisions on investments with your competitors and in particular once you've established a site sharing situation, when you want to upgrade that site, you're waiting for your competitor's permission to upgrade. So it is never been ideal and this is where Open Ran really stands out because now we can share a platform, a hardware platform, but we can still make independent decisions on the software and if it does have some sort of impact on one of our sharing partners, we can quickly roll that back anywhere. So it does allow for a situation where we can share infrastructure very effectively, but the operators can still compete against each other.

So this is a really good opportunity and the UK has been very keen on this. So the four operators in the UK have formed the Jots consortium, so it's joint operator technical specifications and they've issued a number of technical specs that describe how a neutral host has to build a system that the operators are then prepared to connect back to their various core networks. So I think in the UK in particular, this is a good opportunity but I think this is also becoming Global Interest Small Cell Forum have been trying to promote what Jocks has been doing for a number of years and now we see recently Telecom Infra Project has launched a neutral host group. So I think we're going to see a lot of this in the near future.

Fantastic. Well we'll keep our eyes open for that. Thank you Richard. I do want to squeeze in one final question that we've just had in the past five minutes and it's a bit of a left field question, so if anyone can answer this one, I'd be delighted. If you can keep it short, I'd be even more delighted. And the question is, can open RAN technology be used in cellular environments? Now we had about a month ago, we has a comment from a wholesale operator hoping that we'll get some trickle down technology benefits from technology such as Open ran especially into the wholesale business. But I'm curious, I like the question, can we use our learnings from Open RAN or some specific technology in Open ran? Can we use that in cellular environments? Anybody optimistic for that? Ian, thank you. Let's go to Ian.

I'm going to follow up on what Beth made to comment that a lot of the customers have actually already learned a lot as they were building out their cores because on that to 5G core, they were building a cloud native deployment in that context and those skills. And what I found is that the different operators had improvement in skill sets in different teams and then they move those skills around. And that's what's going on now is that the teams that really understand RAN are being cross-functionally joined, if you will, with the teams that own the platform. And that's driving a faster approach. And I think that that learning for some of our customers has actually made it easier for them to kind of, as Rahul was talking about, control their own destiny and be kind of the integrator leader, if you will, with their partners. So this is kind of what I'm seeing is incubating your teams to actually go apply these processes and technologies, the CICD, those kinds of automation techniques to your business. Those are the other areas that this evolution of open ran can drive into other areas that are non, if you will.

Fantastic, thank you very much Ian. And we've got a couple more brief comments in if we can Beth next please.

Yeah, I think that the whole disaggregation lends itself to being applied to other network technologies, not just ran technology. So yeah, I definitely see that it's a revolution or evolution either way in the industry to really drive that. Once the software, it depends upon what layer you're at, but if you're at layer three, it shouldn't make any difference what's running underneath. And even layer two one could argue that there's a lot of opportunity for desegregation to really allow us to use it for optical networks and copper networks, although they're kind of going away, but certainly optical networks as they, at the end of the day, we still have an optical network in the core and that's not going to change anytime soon. But if we make sure that these networks works seamlessly with each other, that just solves a whole lot of problems. Right now the telecoms are saddled with the fact that our older wireline networks run fundamentally differently. That should not be the case. So I think there's a real opportunity to really make them more transparent across the networks.

Great. That's very encouraging. Thank you Beth. And some more quick comments in please Patrick, let's come across to you next.

Certainly thank you. I was very fortunate to be at the RIG forum earlier this year and I think that in the R we can see illustrations and examples of how the technology can be applied in other fields or at least in other non cellular bandwidth. Management particularly comes to mind, find a proof of concept of modulation of frequency of the radio frequency from the telecoms network and from a radar application from the Department of Defense where basically you could detect the radar frequency and the spikes and have a collaborative method between the telecom network and the radar to use basically the bandwidth and the frequency in a way that is not adverse, where there's no need to mitigate interferences. And certainly if you think about that, you can think about wifi and you can think about other non cellular technologies and I think there's a lot of progress that can be made there to make sure that the technologies that we see today in the ran, even traditional ran like BIM forming, can be applied to other propagation techniques.

Thank you very much, Patrick. Yes, the Rick. And before we close this show, let's get a couple more quick comments in Rahul, let's come to you next.

I'm very optimistic what Patrick said about Rick internally in Rakuten we actually call that as Nick sometimes, which is network intelligence controller white has to stop at radio itself. We can think about optimizing transport, optimizing or optimizing a lot of other applications as well. So I think the concept of having a common platforms and able to build runtime applications, small containers to do quick jobs can be taken into any other industry per se. Not even cellular or wireline networks, but the concept you can have a common platform to build automations and close to functions which are self-monitored, which can even roll back when it requires, which can even have a lifecycle of their own. The applications are very similar to what cloud native technology is called, function as a service similar to what AWS does with other places. So Rick is something which has the capability to enhance the common capabilities of building platforms on automation side workflows, all those things can be taken into the other industries as well. I think very optimistic that it's high time that also telecom and enterprise and it can come and more innovation flows from telecom to the other side of the world.

Yeah, let's hope so. Thanks very much Rahul. Great comments there. This is going to be our last question, so let's hear now from Richard.

Yeah, I think that the key term is programmable networks. So the fact that open ran gives us that programmable radio access network means that convergence, which we've been talking about for years between fixed and mobile, that's more realizable. And so particularly the fixed network and the wifi networks can all be converged because we've got this programmable network. And so yeah, I like that term network intelligence controller. That's very useful. How I start using that myself, I think that's certainly one of the key takeaways. And similar is what Patrick was saying at the Rick Forum. One of the panel sessions that was actually set up there, they were talking about dual use because it was all about the components that are being developed now with the mobile operators requirements in mind. A lot of that can be repurposed in that case for military applications. So that the US government were very interested in that and that's a completely different network. I think certainly for our interests at bt, we're looking at private networks and a lot of those private examples, you wouldn't really class as cellular, it's just wireless. But we're taking advantage of those common components developed for open RAN that can be used to build these dedicated networks.

Great. Thanks very much Richard. It is lovely to see us all sharing ideas like this. It's fantastic. Well, we are out of time. That was a long show. We are out of time now though. So thank you to all of our guest panelists who joined us for this live program and that is a wrap for this year's open RAN summit. Thank you to all those views who submitted questions. We tried to cover the most representative ones we could in the limited time we had available. Now, if you missed any of our programs featuring all of these industry experts, so many of them, then you can watch them on demand from our website. Our summit series takes a break for a while. We return in September with the cloud native Telco. However, next month sees the return of the DSP Leaders World Forum and we will be live streaming the entirety of the two day conference. So please make sure you register for that. Until then, thank you for watching and goodbye.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

How Open RAN fits into Telefónica Deutschland’s broader network strategy | TelecomTV

Telefonica is one of Open RANs most ardent telco supporters and has been working towards deployments in multiple markets for a number of years already. Well, to find out how O2 Telefonica the Telcos operation in Germany is progressing, I'm talking today to Mallik Rao, the CTIO at O2 Telefonica, which is also known as Telefonica Deutschland Malik, great to talk with you today. Thanks very much for joining us on telecom tv. If we can start with the bigger picture, can you give us an overview of O2 Telefonica's open RAN strategy?

Yeah. Before getting into the open ran Ray, first of all, I would like to give a context of why are we doing it? What are we doing to just give you a bigger landscape. We've been announcing a program called GPS, the Growth, profitability and Sustainability across Telefonica globally launched by Jose Maria. Technology is definitely one of the big enabler for our GPS plan. There are two important building blocks in the whole technology landscape. Number one is opening up our networks through a well-defined simple to consume APIs for the application developer community to enable new business models, new revenue models, and 5G advanced capabilities like slicing red capital bring a lot of new use cases, so that's number one. So enabling the whole network ecosystem for application developers. The second one I would say is growth. However, grow sustainably telecom as an industry, we've been running building the plan, build, run kind of networks for the last two or three decades, but if you really want to go towards a CapEx intensity from high teens, the 17 18% towards the 11, 12%, that's what we announced as a part of the GPS plan.

You have to do things completely differently. You have to disrupt ourself, first of all as the service provider and disrupt the technology landscape and technology service providers as well as technology providers itself. So for us cloud as a technology, we see the disruptor and first of all, it disrupt us, and if it is disrupting us to deliver the service towards the customer, we need a disruptors in the market. So for us, belief in terms of disaggregation, decomposition to a microservices is a critical part of a pillar in our entire technology journey when I'm talking about technology right from B-S-S-O-S-S networks and digital enablers and digital platforms. So this is how I see it as a landscape. And then happy to talk a little bit around our initiative in each side of it. Maybe one big highlight for me in the last four years across Telefonica Group in Telefonica, Germany is our whole BSS transformation.

We launched about three years back A BSS transformation, completely hosted onto a public cloud cloud, no on-premise equipment, right from channels to the billing order management, product catalog, everything. It's a program which we call it as radical architecture and IT transformation. We moved close to 145 applications into a public cloud. Of course, in the multi-cloud environment, no on-premise solutions deployed without learning. And now we really want to say if you want to disrupt telecom, the core of telecom, you have to start working at the core. That is basically the access network and the core network. So this is how I believe on the overall say, initiative of cloud, what we are doing.

Okay. And so how does then the development of the RAN fit into this? I mean, what is the O2 telefonica strategy in terms of evolving? The RAN towards open ran,

So open ran, whether you call it open run, virtual run, cloud run, the idea for us is, or the belief in the last three, four years, we've been trying in different markets, right from the Brazil to UK to Germany, we've been working with entire industry ecosystem. What we learned from there is, at least for me, personal belief is unless the big suppliers really adopt the change that is basically aggregating the hardware and software, you are not making a big difference In a Brownfield network. You can build a greenfield network with open run technology. Maybe last few years you have seen different managed service providers trying this technology. But for O2 in Germany as well as across Telefonica, the belief is we need to disaggregate, we need to decompose the RAN software. Because if you want to run AI automation, right, you want to run the workloads in terms of CICD, DevOps, you cannot do a monolithic kind of architecture.

And that's what we've been trying to do. Again, we tried with all the suppliers. In fact, we've just started off working with Samsung in the last six, eight months, bringing the whole virtual run open, run and demonstrate deaggregate the software and hardware because the heartbeat of a hardware is different versus software. Again, just want to clarify, we don't have any aver that we should not buy a hardware from a Samsung or Ericson or Nokia kind of companies. We don't have a problem in buying the hardware. We have a problem in terms of the way the architecture of the RAN software is defined. So with Samsung, what we are right now working on disaggregate completely the software and hardware, so we've gone live with one site in Berg. Again, the belief for us is if you want to try open run or cloud run technologies in a rural area, we are not going to make a big difference unless it is working in our core of the cities core of our businesses, then only these technology will be successful.

And that's what we are doing with Samsung right now. We have of course in the funnel with Ericsson and in couple of, we should also be able to try it out. Our intent is definitely decompose for enabling automation for enabling application that will deploy new use cases at enterprise locations. For example, let's say if I'm building a private 5G network, the use case for the enterprise will not necessarily be applied across a macro network and right from access to the transport towards the internet. So we need to decompose this aggregate at every segment of our technology landscape.

Okay. So you mentioned there the first site going live with Samsung and that was a milestone you achieved just recently. What will be the next steps? I mean, will you gradually start to add more open ran sites around Germany? Will you wait and gather data and information and experience from this one site? What can we expect in the near future?

We'll scale up from these one site pilot to at least 10, 15 sites to begin with next one quarter. It's not a one year kind of plan. However, we would like to see the deployment of open run networks in Germany in a sizable scale starting into 2025. Intention is to go at least 20% of the network where we want to deploy with open run technologies and gradually say test the whole software disaggregation and ability to open up the interfaces for different use cases. That's what we're trying right now. So one side will go into seven to 10 sites in next three to four months time, and then we'll of course do load testing and do, how do you do the lifecycle management of a software? Because we want to really get into A-C-I-C-D DevOps kind of framework in the access network. We don't want to get into a deployment circle of every quarter or every six months. We want to go in life software deployment kind of capabilities. We've already started doing it in the core network recently when we have Ericsson core in our network at this point of time and we do inservice software upgrades, we tested the inservice software upgrades and that's what we want to start doing in the radio network incoming quarters.

Okay. So really this is fitting in then with this broader strategy. You talked about opening things up and having a more software and cloud approach. I mean, how is this manifesting itself? You mentioned there the 5G core, I mean there's been more new developments just right now with Nokia and AWS, hasn't it? How does this all fit in together, the evolution of the RAN as you evolve the core towards standalone cloud-based core?

Absolutely. In fact, as I've just mentioned, we have Ericsson as a complete core right now. However, we said we want to really start working on cloud native solutions hosted on a public cloud, right? Of course, we have Ericsson core, which is cloud native, however deployed on-premise. But we really want to take a big step in terms of going into public cloud. We've been working with both AWS, Google, Ericsson, Nokia for the last roughly about two years. I mean, I spent enormous amount of time in convincing the ecosystem to say, okay, this is the right thing for us to do. It's not just only for Telefonica, it's for the supplier ecosystem, it's for infrastructure providers like AWS or Google or Microsoft. So what we have done today, we've announced today is no more trial. Our intent is to go and do a million customers on a live customers live network.

And that's the plan which we have. We have tested all of it. In next, let's say in one to two months time, we will ramp up the whole core, which we have deployed on AWS and Nokia with 5G standalone capability to a million customers live in next say two to three months time. So why are we doing it right? If I look back, why are we doing it? As I mentioned, clearly disaggregation, disaggregation in managing software and hardware are two different perspectives. It also helps my team and my organization, the way we've managed applications and telecom, we will not be able to work in the cloud native public cloud-based deployments. You need to have, right? Starting from observability then your in-service software upgrades, the way you deploy the software, the way you manage the infrastructure. This is what we've been doing for the last one to two years time.

Now, we're fairly confident now that okay, with a million customers on the platform, we'll learn a lot. We'll learn a lot in how do we manage as Telefonica? Because in the industry, if we have moved to a situation from a service provider perspective, we said we won't have a single neck to choke, right? If any problem is that I want to go to one company or one solution provider, possibly in the cloud environment, it may not, we will not be able to achieve that kind of say hands-off approach. That's what I call it as we need to be knowing we cannot outsource responsibility. We cannot outsource accountability from a customer perspective. We will provide the services despite its hosted in public cloud or private cloud with security, with the data privacy. So that is the kind of learning curve which we are doing. My plan towards next year will be at least 20% of my overall traffic on the entire core network should be sitting on this kind of technologies.

Again, we don't want to start with, we don't want to stop only packet core. Then if I take the core network as a whole, so for me, core starts at the end of transport aggregation and core ends for me at handover into internet. So there is about 16 to 17 elements in the core network. So we want to see all these 16, 17 elements to be hosted on the public cloud, hosted on the cloud environment, and we are able to orchestrate the application, orchestrate the infrastructure, and orchestrate the service what we are delivering to customers. So this is journey which we have ahead of us. It's pretty exciting and of course it's challenging.

Okay. Yeah, no, absolutely. And this is the kind of the vision, the roadmap that we've been hearing from many in the industry for a few years now. How is all this going to change the way that O2 Telefonica works on a day-to-day basis and the skill sets that its staff will need? I mean, how much re-skilling have you already had to do within your teams and how is it impacting how the operations team is working on a day-to-day basis?

Absolutely. In fact, today I must say I'm super happy. When we started off about four years back, we had five cloud certified architects. So we started as a program, first of all, re-skill upskill program about three and a half years back. So we worked of course with all the hyperscalers in terms of cloud certification. Before we started moving the applications into cloud, we said we want to have 100 cloud certified architects. And we took a pretty bold step in terms of saying, I mean you don't need to be doing every time a business case. I offered to my entire organization, not only technology, to my 7,000 people organization, if anybody wants to learn cloud, if anybody wants to do certification, it's on my cost center technology cost center. And roughly 18 months into the entire program, we were able to have close to 1,800 people went through the entire program.

And today we have about 65 cloud certified architects. And so this is the first investment we said we want to do over-invest in people culture and trainings. If you don't over invest, there is no point for us to just do a pilots and trial. Glad that we started about three, four years back, this whole program today, I don't need to convince my team that cloud is the better thing. In fact, we have moved complete charging, right? The entire charging when we are working with Matrix and Google Cloud. So all my charging is now sitting on public cloud with data security, data privacy hosted in Frankfurt. So you are able to make these kind of big, bold decisions. Only when you have your people, your team, you're able to work in A-C-I-C-D, you're able to work with the suppliers in terms of saying you have a uniform pipeline of CSCD.

It doesn't need to have a separate and network doesn't need to have a separate, because we have built organization which is much more horizontal. I don't have any organization which is centric to domain. We talk about technology like for example, cloud and data center. So that's a team which enables any applications, both network as well as the IT say workloads. If I look back, we have moved these 170 applications into public cloud technology, and the biggest beneficiary of it is my stability and quality. I had only one incident in the last say, close to 18 months of operation with such a massive workload setting on the cloud because it forces you to be agile, it forces you to think DevOps. It forces you to really have A-C-I-C-D disciplined pipeline and security patching. In our on-premise world, we really didn't know what kind of security patches we need to put in every component. But once it goes to cloud, you are forced to do it. So discipline brings in discipline brings the culture, and culture is really extremely important for us to really manage these kind of critical workloads on the public cloud.

Okay, that's really interesting. And to see how things have evolved in the team and to hear about the appetite within your team as well for this kind of evolution and these kind of developments. So Mallek, great to hear from you today. Thanks very much for the update not only on what's happening on open ramp, but in your broader cloud oriented cloud native strategy as well. Really interesting. Thanks very much. So a really great update there from Mallik at O2 telephonic, and we look forward to hearing more from the broader Telefonica group and from other operators well in the near future about not only their open ran plans, but their broader cloud native, cloud oriented disaggregated network plans. Thanks for watching.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

Hello, you are watching the Open Ran Summit part of our year-Round DSP Leaders Coverage. I'm Guy Daniels and today's discussion considers the future of Open ran. How might its development change to reflect commercial realities? How will it be integrated into the generational evolution of mobile systems and what is the future roadmap for Open ran? Well, to answer these questions, I'm joined on the program today by Ian Hood, CTO, chief Strategist Global Industries for Red Hat Petr Ledl, VP head of Network Trials and Integration Lab, and Chief architect of Access Desegregation program at Deutsche Telekom. Matteo Fiorani, head of distributed Unit and Infrastructure at Ericsson. Rick Mostaert, vice president of Product Management ran for Avenir, Beth Cohen, SDN Network Product Strategy at Verizon Business Group and Patrick Lopez, founder and CEO of Core Analysis. Hello everyone. It's good to see you all. What a great panel we've got today. No, as I mentioned, we are looking at the future of Open ran, so let me first of all ask how have our expectations changed in what's been a relatively short lifetime for Open ran, what hasn't quite worked out and what unexpected new ideas have come to the fore? Ian, perhaps we could come across to you for your thoughts first.

I think what we've got to do first is think about Open ran as a tool in the path on the journey to an open software-defined autonomous system. That's kind of the first thing is it's a tool on a path and if we sort of look at the things that have changed over the last couple of years, some of the actual commercial parties have changed in terms of what's up first because initially TCO would kind of at the top and that was one of the things people looked at along the performance and latency, things like that. But now kind of the focus is evolving to how do we take advantage of this and enable enterprise revenues and also increase consumer market share and go after that quality of experience. So that's kind one of the changes there. And while they didn't go away, now TCO is still high on the list, but now we've got automation to improve operation efficiency and the whole lifecycle management.

These are still sort of the key factors and so the things that have taken us longer in the industry is to get to the point where we sort of say, you know what? We now can deploy this at scale, meet the performance, and the economics are kind where they need to be over time. So we've kind evolved to that point and we've also got a very strong ecosystem. We've got multiple partners supporting it and this is kind of where we're headed to actually go do this and we can do this without compromise on the performance and also on the front H costs.

Well thanks very much Ian. Great summary of where we are at the moment, but let's get some other views on this. And Rick, let me come across to you first. What's your perception? How have expectations changed? What's been good, what's been bad?

I think from my perspective, some of the good things are, I'll start with the good is the ecosystem has exploded. Companies that are, I mean the amount of engineering, talent, innovation, if you look at companies like Nvidia, Intel, Amazon, everybody's in, we're publishing I think on LinkedIn you can follow John Baker and see the ecosystem and that is new. I mean we need that fresh influx of ideas and product to come in. So that's been fantastic. I think another thing that's been more prevalent lately, and I think that the prior speaker mentioned operational efficiencies and things like that, and now with AI Open Interface is looking northbound critical for again other companies coming and innovate on top of existing infrastructure, existing deployments. What I would say probably hasn't gone and it's getting better but it's been a little slow, is I think the radios ecosystem on the radio side started off very slow. In fact, to the point where we had to at Avenir actually create radio to tilt gap and hopefully we see all the vendors come in with open radios because that'll really enable true diversity in the supply chain, true diversity in the vendor ecosystem on the ran side, which is what I think the operators are really looking forward to.

Great. Thanks so much indeed, Rick, for your comments there. And I know all of our guests want to come in on this opening question. So let me first of all go to Matteo. Matteo, what are your thoughts of how expectations have changed?

Thanks Guy. I think that open run is maturing as the previous speaker also said. I think definitely we see a very strong uptake. We see a number of things happening. As also mentioned before, cloud infrastructure are maturing a lot, so they go from being optimized for data center as also being optimized for one. For example, we start seeing strong solution for deploying single server system. That is one of the big challenges, the beginning for cloud infrastructure to scale down to distributed run deployment, which is fundamentally new for that type of applications. Then we see hardware platforms coming in. Of course Intel has a very mature platform, but then we see it now that there are also other challenges coming in with very strong solution such as for example, Nvidia and many others. And a lot of focus also on the automation aspects. Of course, as mentioned before with a lot of AOPs vendor for example, tried to enter the business with their own application to try to make things work. Of course this is complex so it will still take time for this ecosystem to fully mature, but we see a strong progress in line with the expectation. Definitely.

Great, thanks very much Matteo. Patrick, let's come across to you because it's only been a couple of months since you published your state of the state of the market report on Open ran. So what are your thoughts?

Thanks guy. I think I'll just talk about things that haven't gone fast enough. Obviously we heard about a lot of progress and a lot of innovation on the open and run field. From my perspective, what hasn't progressed fast enough has been actually operators and carriers posture towards Open ran in the sense that, I mean open ran is a transformative project for network operator in the sense that you have to have a cloud native infrastructure, you have to have the processes, the tools, training in place in order to be able to deploy that. And also, I mean one of the desires of open run was the ecosystem multiplicity of vendors, the ability to pick and choose a solution from various vendors. And in order to do that, you need to be able to integrate them. And I think that open run is not expected to sport, but not all, but many operators have been waiting for others to actually do the hard work of doing the integration and the deployments before they can jump in. And I think that it's probably not the best approach because in order to benefit the most from Conran, you need to operate it and to operate it, you need to actually integrate it yourself probably.

Thanks very much Patrick. Well luckily we have two operators on the panel. So first of all, Petr, let me come across to you. Integration is very close to your heart and your job. What are your thoughts on how expectations have changed?

Thanks. I think that I agree to the picture that that was outlined by predecessors here. You are right in terms of integration that this is a challenge that we need to tackle. And from BT perspective, we are also believing in the industry cooperation in this space to develop a framework, providing a certification and batching regime that would allow to decrease the integration cost that is related to necessary testing and alignment. So to a large extent we can do it once in operation and then maybe remaining 20% relief for the individual operator efforts that is pretty much attributed to their individual needs. So that's one thing challenge. The other thing that I would like to call out here as well is that from our perspective, architecturally we are really calling for the horizontally layered architecture and implementation. We really want to move away from the vertically integrated silos, even if we adopt approaches like Cloud run. So for that, what is needed is also acceleration of management interfaces. So management interfaces not only to network functions, but also to cloud infrastructure as an enabler. And that will allow us to adopt really independent management plane. In this sense, this is something where we are also investing to explore own development in this phase of SMO solutions perhaps. And this is really an opportunity that we see, that we see new bringing potentially will potentially benefit benefits.

Great. Thanks so much Petr and Beth, let's come across to you and hear your thoughts for this opening question.

So I want to add, I mean six, right? One of the things that I'm very hopeful about is that it's a cooperative effort between the vendors as well as the operators. So that always, I mean that's really what needs to happen to make it success because if the vendors are getting together and not talking to the operators or the operators are doing it separately, which the operators really can. But I do know that the operators are participating actively in providing the requirements and providing the support to make sure that the open room initiative is successful. And I think there's a high degree of motivation to make it as taking advantage of open source as much as possible and the disaggregation that cloud architectures and infrastructures facilitate with and incorporate all the newer technologies to make sure that Open ran is successful. Obviously the interface with the radios is always the tricky part because at some point you need to touch on the hardware, but I'm very hopeful that this will be a successful project. I do be aware that we need to make sure that everything's secured. We need to have hooks to allow us to incorporate into our backend systems, our OSS systems, our BSS systems, as well as make sure that the architecture is compatible with our underlying other cloud architectures.

Thanks very much Beth. And thank you everyone for those comments. And Ian, I'm going to quickly come back to you because we started with you. Do you want to quickly come back with a comment there?

Yeah, I did. One of the things that Patrick mentioned I think is really important and that is that operators really need to kind of control their own destiny here and become sort of the integrators along with their partners in building this out in this multi-vendor world. That kind of the first thing. And I think the other thing that because we've learned so much from building our LT networks and our 5G core networks in this same manner and built reference architects forward and kind of gone through that process, gone through the automation, the lifecycle management efforts, the complexity that we think we have is not as difficult as people have been making it out to be. So for those who haven't actually started yet and kind of wait for the others, they really need to take a page out of those who've actually gone ahead and are driving this who've actually kind of solved some of these things. So that's where I see kind the ones who've kind of said, I'm going to start now. I can't really wait, have I got the advantage of what they're going to go do? And those are kind of sitting on the sidelines. They really need to just get started.

Great. Thanks very much Ian. Well let's kick on because there's a lot of ground we want to cover today. My next point is whether or not this has been technically more complex than we originally thought. Have we perhaps over-engineered Open, ran, and Patrick, let me come across to you first.

Thanks Ray. I don't know, I've been working almost 25 years in telecoms and Open RAN doesn't feel really more complex than other technologies that have been introduced. What's about Open RAN is that a lot of that technology used to be closed proprietary. So the complexity was there but it was hidden because it was basically managed by the vendors. But it's always been there now by creating open and disaggregated network for the first time in durran, basically you are exposing that complexity but with the benefit of having many vendors and many operators looking at it at the same time and proposing an architecture, a set of interfaces and protocols that are open, which actually removes complexity in the sense that well now they're better understood. And if you look at the journey of Open ran, I think it's remarkable to see that particularly the Fronthaul interface, which was probably one of the first world work items of the technology.

And that was at the beginning, Harley contested and there were a lot of doubt. It's not even something that we talk about anymore, or at least in its current version of category in the sense that now everyone takes more or less for granted that integration between virtual CODU vendors and R vendor following the specification of the or N Alliance. Well you are going to do testing, but the integration itself, so heavy lifting of that, that's pretty much come. So I'm just looking forward to see that same level of maturity going through each of the layer of open ran the back hole, the mid hole and interfaces with the SMO and near real time non real time rate. But I think it's progressing in the right direction. So answer your question again, I don't think it's been that it's been engineered properly because now you have a variety of vendors that are able to compete on the same field with the same open interfaces and we're seeing that the integration efforts are accelerating.

Great. Thanks very much Patrick. Yeah, maybe the questions really is whether or not we expect too much or we still expect too much rather than the over-engineering side of it, but let's get some other views on this and Beth, lemme come across to you next.

So where I see, I wouldn't say it's over-engineered, but I think it's different engineered and it's something that I think both the vendors and the telecoms have needed to overcome the hurdle of having a different skillset. So working with open software, working with disaggregation, working with cloud architectures and infrastructure is a different mindset, requires a different set of skills. And I think particularly in the beginning there was a lot of need to pivot certainly within the telecom industry, but I can see that the telecom industry has embraced that approach. And I know Open RAN is based on the container architecture rather than the virtual machine architecture and the containers themselves and bernet still have significant gaps that need to be addressed in terms of supporting multi interfaces and other types of basic telecom requirements. But the good news is that the CNCF is in fact supporting these new architectures and understand the importance to the telecom industry. I just attended the one summit last week and I attended an entire day of workshop activities around open ran, but there was a lot of cross-pollination with a number of the other projects, so it was very heartened to see that. So more to come.

Thanks beta. I like that. Engineered differently. We've got some more views. So Ian, let's come to you next and then we'll go around over the guests. So Ian first?

Yeah, I want to kind of follow on best comments there that it requires this different set of skills and that's really kind what has really kind of made it difficult for the operators to kind of upskill their teams and become confident in deploying these technologies. Learning how to go deploy in this, I'll call it differently engineered world, but we have seen that's an over, but I have to say we've kind of had what I would call feature creep over time of what the goalposts are and what is kind of our first okay four into what we're going to get done so we can actually get further down this path versus adding other things that yes, they'll become useful to add more value to get to that enterprise services and AI and those things. But I think we've hardened enough of it now to kind of know where those things come and with the work, as Beth mentioned as well with the other working groups, the security groups and the other aspects of these things, I think we're closing in on a lot of those gaps that people were concerned about and I'm seeing I'll call it less feature group now that we had early on.

Good to hear. Thanks very much Ian. And we'll come to Rick in a moment and also to Matteo, but Petr come to you next over-engineered or feature creep or just differently engineered, what's your thoughts?

So I would say also that it is not really over engineered. I would say it's more complex. It is also more complex for us as operators to integrate and deploy and manage. But I would also like to highlight, and this is also why I would say that it's not over-engineered, I would highlight the work that was done in the OR alliance because this community has been working diligently to simplify the process. So by providing architecture design interfaces, specifications for key interfaces, test specifications for potential compliance and interoperability. So I think this was great help to navigate us to the complexity as much as possible.

Interesting. Thanks very much. Petr and Matteo, what are your thoughts? Yeah, look, actually

What I would like to do is a bit summarize the key takeaway from the previous speakers because I agree basically with fundamentally everything they said, and I think one takeaway is fundamentally that though it has not been over-engineered, but rather it has exposed the complexity of building telecom systems that before was not fully exposed because was handled within single vendor deployments. So that is fundamental, the fundamental aspects. Then maybe the thing I would like to add is that the integration comes in different shapes and forms because in the OR alliance architecture there are multiple interfaces and multiple touch points. So there is one aspect being the vertical integration of the software on the cloud and hardware platform that I think is the one that has been tackled the most and I think it's the one that is getting more mature. Second point would be the integration more on the horizontal domain for example, on the software toward a radio on the frontal interface. And that is what is also maturing, especially on the CAT and the remote radios, maybe some more work to do on the massive milo but on the remote and the cat as Patrick mentioned before, it is mature. The last piece that I think is very important and we need to see some maturation on is on the management interfaces though are still in early days and I think we have not seen so much in multi-vendor in those aspects. So that is where we would like to see more maturation going forward.

So Rick, has this been more complex than we originally thought? Have we perhaps over-engineered open run?

No, I don't think it's been over-engineered at all. In fact, I think a lot of people thought it would be complex, but through experience we've actually discovered that the interfaces are very well defined and we've had a lot of success doing integrations and in fact we've seen large scale deployments now where multiple vendors have come together. The KPIs are very good, it works very well. So absolutely not. And just one more point I'd like to add is it's not just about do open fronthaul, we've seen a lot of innovation and openness within the whole RAN stack. For example, we have multiple vendors now coming in at layer one and by using the fpi small cell forum FPI interface, we've been able to integrate multiple layer one chip sets into our DU software and we see that happening across the industry as well. So the complexity has always been there. Like somebody else mentioned, we've opened it and exposed it and by doing that we've actually made it quite achievable to see the multi vendors come into the ecosystem here. So absolutely not over-engineered, it's been working very well in our experience.

Thanks very much Rick and thanks everyone for those comments. Now might we see more mainstream governance and specification development activities? For example, moving more work into 3G PP perhaps Matteo, can I come across to you for your thoughts on this one first?

Yeah, that is an excellent question actually. I would start by saying a little bit about the OR alliance and the tremendous progress that the OR Alliance have done in the past years. Actually if I go back in time, I still remember one of the very first or alliance meeting in 2018 and I remember that the entire OR alliance community was fitting in a single room and we didn't even feel all the chairs. But now the community has enlarged a lot and this has grown a lot, or Alliance has a standardization body, it has matured a lot in the quality of the produced specification and in the participation of different vendors and operators. So there is a lot of work and tremendous work that OR Alliance has done. And another aspect that is very important is that now the OM alliance is becoming to some extent more global by submitting specification through Etsy Pass process so that they actually go into front terms and have broader reach because more companies are actually part of Etsy as a standard organization.

So this is actually very important to enable a global adoption of this specification. So we should keep in mind that Door Alliance is playing a very important role here. Then of course going forward and especially when six G comes into play, we need to think how an alliance and 3G PP will work together. What we want to avoid of course is duplication of specification. We need to make sure that or Alliance and 3G PP continue to work in a complimentary way and not in a conflicting way. And that can also lead to the fact that some aspects could be moved from the OR alliance into three GP when it comes to six G specification, what aspect exactly needs to be discussed and agreed of course, but that would be one way to avoid fragmentation, which is extremely important.

Absolutely nicely said Matteo, and I think it's really important to say that the Owner Alliance has done a lot of extremely good work over the years and continues to do so.

Where's the next step? The future of Open ran, what sort of linkages is it making with not just 3G BP, but Etsy and other associations? Beth, let's come to you for your thoughts on this one and then we'll get some additional thoughts after.

So speaking as a person who's very active in the LFN Linux Foundation network, and I was very heartened by seeing that there's a number of projects that are in alliance. I'm actually going to be working on, there's O Cloud, which is the infrastructure piece, and ICUT is the project within LFN, which is the set of infrastructure. It's a reference model, reference architectures that support these types of workloads. So I'm going to be exploring the synergies there. And also I know that there's some work to move some of this stuff into GSMA, which is also a telco standards body if you will, that supports the requirements documentation. So I am very heartened to see that yes, that the O Ran alliance is not sort of a standalone A, we don't talk to anybody else kind of organization. It's really looking piggyback on all the great work that other standards bodies and open source organizations have done in this area already.

Yeah, thank you Beth. And it's not just about moving towards more work into three gpp, but it's also bringing on board all the other associations that are doing parallel activities and broadening out that community of work. Ian, let's get your thoughts please.

I really liked Matteo's comments here on the fact that this open approach and disaggregating things has exposed kind of the complexity that was hidden by the perform proprietary ones. I think Patrick said the same thing, but in terms of where do we do the work, what I'm also really happy about how the O Alliance works is that they actually look at, let's take advantage of some IT U specs that are really important, IEE specs for synchronization, these kinds of things that already exist rather than let's recreate the wheel that's already there. Then how do we connect the work in GSMA and IEE and the OR alliance? And of course, as Beth mentioned, make sure that we have connections into the cloud native world and deal with the other interfaces that we know we're going to need to do open lifecycle management and then apply benefits of analytics and AI for not just for performance, but also for the ability to drive down the power consumption through our sustainability efforts. And that's another piece that's going on, if you will, within different aspects of the GSMA.

Yeah, thank you very much Ian. And yeah, the more we work on this, more groups work on this, the more we'll get done. I'm going to expand this out in a second too because Matteo mentioned a six G earlier. But before I do that, I'm just going to go across to Rick for your thoughts on how the initial work and so much has been done by Owen Alliance, how this might get expanded and enhanced.

Well, I think it's maybe more of a request and where I think it needs to go, we hope we get there is in addition to the specifications and the technology and I think bringing in specifications and technology from other industries, especially cloud, and again it's just bringing in more capabilities into this industry, which is fantastic, but we really to get to the end state, I think we need some kind of a product certification predation type of lab situation where it could become just much more plug and play. That's going to take some time, but I think the standards bodies need to take that up and make sure that's kind of built in as part.

Great, thanks very much Rick. Well I'm going to come across to Patrick now, but I'm also going to expand the question and move on a little because I also like to ask about whether or not open rank could become more generational agnostic and what impact it might have on possible six G scenarios and candidate technologies because it all kind of flows together these two questions. So Patrick, what do you think?

I think we would be remit if we didn't mention at least briefly the telecom infra product, which at the beginning at least of open ran was a great promoter before there was the O Ran alliance. I remember one of the team that was leading at Telefonica wrote the first RFI ran publicly with Vodafone at the time and published the result and started really the work and it was very different because it was not specification, it was actually testing, it was actually putting people together, companies together and creating the foundation. So even though the tip has moved down to other projects, it's still part of open run. I think they deserve a mention here. And that goes to your question, how do we see open run in a multi-generational activity going towards six G? And probably Open Run was one of the first technologies that was very early on desire to be multi-generational in the sense that it was creating originally for 5G, but very quickly operators were saying, well we're not going to deploy 5G in isolation or we're going to deploy 5G on top of our existing network.

And it could be really difficult to deploy 5G on open run and then keep two G, 3G 4G on existing technologies and some vendors to get on to themselves to create versions that are two G, 3G 4G and 5G capable. And from that perspective it was already multigenerational. And when we look forward at six G, I think that most of the people on that panel will agree that it's not a question of whether open run will be part of six g open run will be part of six G and will be one of the architecture and one of the deployment options within the six G environment just by the virtue that basically those interfaces, the philosophy of open and desegregated network is now permeating a lot of part of six G even outside of the run itself. So open run if you want is configured a lot of the percept of architecture for six G.

Thank you very much Patrick and thanks for referencing tip there for its early work. We had tip on one of our panels yesterday where we looked at the rear Ian, lemme come across to you, is open ran already multi-generational.

I think Rick said it was sort of because of it being a open kind of approach and being cloud native by nature and distributed six G is its evolution to bring by more value on top of this infrastructure to enable those enterprise capabilities, the AI capabilities that kind of just fits into how this is going to evolve in this journey and there's no end state if you will, but I do agree with Rick that we need more things like we have the Oex in Japan, which is testing variations of the multiple flavors of how we interconnect the puzzle pieces. But there's also another group that's been formed in the last couple of years also driven by our friends at NTT in Japan. I was at their members meeting just a couple of weeks ago in Vancouver and they're seeing an evolution that includes the mobile side of the world and so people in a working group now looking at use cases to actually improve the distances that Open Ran can actually support by putting all photonic networks into that backhaul and fronthaul scenario, right? So there's another expansion potential coming out of yet another form where people are looking at how do we improve the capabilities of delivering these kinds of services around the world using photonics to drive down latency between data centers and also out in the front hall and backhaul

Options are increasing there. That's interesting Ian, thanks for that update. And Beth, what are your thoughts on Open RAN and how it's positioned or positioned as generational agnostic and what it can do for, we hate to say six G but we're going to have to six G.

So I think that Open Ran is very definitely thinking about the future and really architected to support multi-generations. But six G is very definitely still, we wouldn't call it a Iest project, it's probably a little beyond that, but I don't think the requirements are really fixed enough to really say that Open RAN can work toward supporting it because it's not really crystallized enough. But I think Open RAN is architected in a way that allows it the flexibility to support new generations of technology and new generations of thinking ai, hey we had to bring it up sometime AI and machine learning. What I heard is that six G is going to incorporate those aspects of the technology and Open RAN has to be ready to support that. So I think it is or it will be, but again it's still very cloudy.

Okay, thanks very much Beth. Let's come across to Matteo. What are your thoughts on the Open RAN and how is position for Future? What lies beyond 5G and being generationally agnostic?

I think at Open is definitely a generational agnostic to some extent. Of course today it's designed to support mostly 4G and 5G and the architecture is being optimized for that. When it comes to six G, I think one key question we need to address is what are the six G use cases? What are we really building six G for? And then based on that we need to understand how the open run architecture can evolve to meet those use cases that we want for six G, there need to be an evolution of the open run architecture to be able to tackle six G and all the relevant use cases. There is no question that brand will evolve in that direction, but to understand exactly how that would look like, I think the first key question we need to address is really what are we building six G for? What are the key six G use cases?

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks Matteo. And hopefully that's hopefully that I was going to say five years away but it might not be. Hopefully that's four or five years away looking more the medium term. A final question for you. Can we outline a likely and honest scenario for Open RAN in the years ahead maybe like two or three years ahead, what is the future roadmap of Open Ran and Rick could we start with you?

Sure, that'd be fantastic. Yeah, I'm going to try to set aside my open ran Kool-Aid and be pragmatic about this. But I think if you look at the situation today we have open RAN has been very successful in standalone networks where there's not any existing barriers to entry. You look at Dish network in the US 20,000 sites, Japan, lots of SA enterprise networks around the world. Radio availability is good, a variety of RAN vendors, it's been there but the majority of the deployments that could go to open ran are in the future. So if you consider what's happening with pilots, lots of pilots announced across Europe, north America, Asia, those are in progress. We start to see this brownfield scale out happening really ramping up probably next year as these pilots get completed and multiple companies are involved with those types of pilots. And so as we get through 25, 26, 27 and start to scale this out, we will see a significant share of modernization projects.

Replacement projects will be all ran and that's been mandated. All the vendors are aligned and if so, as the vendors come through with their roadmaps or the ones that are already there, we will see that in the next five years really start to get some significant volume in the market and we are well on our way to get there. So good start. We're scaling out, we don't talk about is it possible it's not a size project anymore and now it's just we still have some barriers in entry. We have a lot of installed base that's not open. RAN is open, ran capable, but it hasn't been integrated. But as we do modernization, we'll see those types of networks will convert to open. I think majority of the industry is behind that now we're pushing forwards.

Fantastic. Thanks very much Rick. And we covered Brownfield commercial scenarios in a panel yesterday and there's a lot more to learn on that. Let's go to Petr next. You've been so closely involved with Oprah ran, what's your thoughts of the next two or three years? What's your roadmap?

Yes, I would definitely build up on what was said heated before, so I would definitely subscribe to that. We should be seeing increased disruption and deployments as mentioned at the moment we see already scaled deployment, especially from the greenfield deployments, but we already have also committed from the major brownfield carriers. So we will see the deployments scaling in the Brownfield environment as the renewal cycles are coming. And of course by then it is important that we are able to move the horizontal model of architecture and break the silos and of course solve also the integration challenge. What we will be also seeing is the advancements in hardware and software developments that will again improve on performance and efficiency parameters that we need in the large scaled deployments and in the complex configuration and also especially in the software development to see the adoption that is allowing cloud run approaches and required automation as well as mentioned SMO and management layers with the evolved management interfaces and task but least of course ai, ML based optimization solutions that will help us to contribute to all the maturity, performance and efficiency that parameters that we need to achieve.

Thanks very much Petr. Lots to do still but lots to look out for as we're on the years ahead. We've got a few more views to get in before we close the panel. So Ian, let me come across to you next.

So I think I agree with what Rick and Matteo and team were talking about here in terms of where things are going in terms of brand itself. But as we got started, the next place for open ran is kind of actually in the private wireless kind of world where that's how I'm going to go deliver these enterprise services on that same horizontal cloud platform that we talked about. So that's kind of the next sort of thing we need to get moving on and get those use cases that Matto talked about. How do we go solve for those? But there's a couple of other things that are actually in flight we kind need to make sure we work on, which is as we all know, the amount of power being consumed in the network is majority in the radios but also in the DES and sees that are part of the architecture.

So Brett had an intel came up with an open source project to go look at the power consumption by the processors in Linux and cloud native platforms and to kind of drive down that approach. But in the advent of opening up the world, we have AI capabilities today, predictive analytics that actually speak to the back channels of the radios today to actually go adjust them for performance et cetera on the fly. And we need to kind of open up how we do that to drive down power consumption for sustainability purposes with more of open interfaces for that purpose that go not just to the CU and S that happen to run on standard COS hardware, but all the way to the radios who are much more customized hardware at this point as that evolves sustainability kind of another big piece of the puzzle that we need to work through. But this all leads to okay, we're building this highway, making it open, expanding it out, but if we actually want to get to those enterprise deliverable services on an open platform, we know we can do that with traditional ran. We need to actually put all these things cu do use IUs, ups and other applications on a common platform at the edge to go deliver those services and open RAN is helping drive to that path.

Very interesting. Thanks very much Ian for those observations. Beth, I'll come across to you next please.

So I want to pick up on several things. One that Ian said and then Rick also several people have mentioned the tech refresh. I think particularly the larger telecoms where there's Brownfield, I think we're going to see more open ran coming in as tech refresh kicks in. We have to replace the equipment every so many every so often and we saw this with SD-WAN with AS companies had to do tech refresh on the routers, they brought in SD wan. So I expect to see sort of similar types of incorporation of O ran into our infrastructures, particularly with the larger telecoms that have the more difficult brownfield. Another area that I see ORN really stepping up and being a really good fit for is the PIX wireless access, which is of course growing and that includes the private wireless as well as just a subscription based fixed wireless access. So there's great opportunity for those O ran boxes to scale it down to be the single router antenna boxes that we need to support the FWA implementation. So I see great opportunity for O ran to really be a really good fit for those use cases.

In the market, how do you extrapolate this? Where do you see the roadmap and the path ahead for open run over the next few years?

I think there are a couple of possible scenarios for the evolution of open run and pragmatically. If you are an operator and you're looking at introducing a new technology such as open ran and possibly a new vendor, this is a huge undertaking just because it's producing a new technology in Duran is expensive and lengthy and introducing new vendors is also expensive and lengthy, generally speaking in telecoms. So we started to see a trend let's say in Raiders wanting to deploy something that is let's say open ran, capable and even open ran, but with maybe not a lot of variation in terms of number of vendors, maybe either a single vendor option or when I say single vendor, I mean for the radio and the CODU or maybe CODU and radio from a single vendor with maybe another vendor for other radios. Then I think that's fine pragmatically to get started to get deployed, right.

I think that we're going to see over the next few years though possibly for the first time vendors that are not traditional radio vendors are going to bring something that is unique or that is very different from other vendors. And we mentioned the Rick earlier, this is probably where we see the most innovation, the most efforts regarding the integration of machine learning, deep learning and AI into networks generally speaking. And we're starting to see signs of companies that are not necessarily radio vendors traditionally that come up with Algorithmics that can actually change quite radically the way we deploy it, the way we manage radio networks, either from a spectrum efficiency standpoint or from a power consumption standpoint or from a traffic management standpoint. And I think that as those technologies and new vendors start to mature in the market, there is a chance here that really accelerates and change a lot the way we think about deploying networks in the near future.

Right. Thanks very much Patrick for those insights and we've just got time to go across to Matteo for your thoughts on the future direction of Open Ran.

Yeah, thanks. I think a lot have already been said. So what I maybe want to highlight is just three quick things. First is that definitely adoption will continue to grow. We are in trials and soon in deployments some of them will become large scale. Also I expect with Brownfield operators, the two things that I think will help in that to go in that direction is one is what we define as pre-integrated solution. So especially in the early days of open run to mu a little bit of the complexity of the system integration, having vendors to partner and doing pre-integration is one great solution to be able to accelerate solution that are ready for the customer and ready for deployment. The second important aspect to make this deployment successful is actually that we need to be able to meet the performance and KPIs of the additional networks also with the cloud native and open network. That is something that is challenging overall because especially for large operators, this can involve the coordination of many different frequency layers that are deployed in different ways. So this could be a challenge that need to be addressed to be able to deploy at scale, but we do see that this is the direction we are going.

Great. Thank you very much, Matteo. We must leave it there though, although I am sure we will continue this debate during our live q and a show later. For now, thank you to all our guests for taking part in our discussion. If you're watching this on day two of our open Ran summit, then please send us your questions and we'll answer them in our live q and a show, which is coming up later. The full schedule of programs and speakers can be found on the telecom TV website, which is where you'll also find the q and a form and our poll question For now though, thanks for watching and goodbye.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

Hello, you are watching the Open Ran Summit part of our year-Round DSP Leaders Coverage. I'm Guy Daniels. Now as the development of Open Run continues and with commercial deployments now underway, telcos are investigating how to use AI to automate and optimize their radio access networks. Joining me now to explain more is Paul Miller, chief Technology Officer for Wind River. Hello, Paul. It's good to see you again. Let's start off by looking at the challenges that CSPs face. What are the biggest challenges as they roll out and start to manage their open RAN networks?

Yeah, thanks guys. So it's really interesting what's going on now. We've reached a point in the evolution of open ran and virtual ran deployments where we now have several years of deployment at very, very high scale happening in multiple geographies and it's really exciting to see that because we're obviously seeing the fruition of many years of investment for many companies in that ecosystem bringing open ran to reality. And so the feasibility and performance are now proven to be superior than legacy ran, but there are new challenges emerging as we've gotten to this stage of maturity in deployment. Obviously it's one thing to build an infrastructure and an application that functions, it's quite another thing in a telco service provider to build this application so it can be maintained and operated at full scale in a telco service provider network. As we know, many 5G deployments have over a hundred thousand sites that are used for the VDU in the case of the open ran. And to manage that as a fully distributed architecture requires a high level of automation, and we're now seeing the ability to bring AI in to help assist with that automation and operations challenge in running such a large open ran network.

Well, that brings us nicely to ai. What would you say is the role of AI in a telco network or perhaps what should be its role? Where can AI have the greatest impact and how would you quantify it?

Yeah, so we're seeing it enter in a couple of different areas. We see certainly the SMO and the realtime Rick and these sort of things that are enabling dynamic control of the radio function within the 5G network to have interesting AI based applications. Things like dynamically controlling the direction of the signal based based on where the endpoints are and saving power and efficiency and that sort of thing is happening for our company. We're very involved in the infrastructure layers of the deployment of Open Ran and what we're seeing is open RAN is obviously founded on a cloud technology called O Cloud from the O Ran software alliance, and that architecture basically is Kubernetes deployed at an extremely high scale and that means you have both a disaggregated, what we call a vertically disaggregated system with hardware, a virtualization layer, and then the RAN application sitting on top of it as well as an east west disaggregation where you now have multiple vendors interoperating with each other through the open ran standards. That is a massively complex thing to deploy and maintain with multiple vendors involved in that architecture. And so we're finding applications for AI in the operations management and oversight of this type of network basically because the deployment of that system with the high node count, with the complexity of it, it's too much for a human being to absorb. You need software automation in order to maintain and operate that environment and AI is proven to be an incredible addition to that as we'll see today.

We'll come on to that in just a moment, but I'd just like to pick up and ask, given what you've told us about where you operate in the network and what you're seeing, how has Wind River been leveraging AI so far?

Yeah, so we basically build a solution that we call studio operator that has a completely open source foundation based on the Open Infrastructure Foundation, Starling X, and that is a geo distributed Kubernetes solution that allows you to deploy a Kubernetes architecture across thousands of sites and run that from a single pane of glass. This is very important for an operator trying to run at high scale to deploy with zero touch provisioning, to maintain these virtualized applications across thousands of sites. On top of that, we layer on Wind River analytics that gives us the ability to monitor and visualize with the reporting and machine learning what's happening in that deployed architecture. Then on top of that, we deploy our orchestration and automation platform, which we call conductor, and this is where AI starts to enter into the application because conductor gives you a single pane of glass view over the entire network.

But as we had just spoken about, the ability to use AI on top of that is proven to be incredibly powerful. For example, predictive outage avoidance where all of the data is coming back in from these edge systems is aggregated in a data store. The AI has the ability to peruse that and identify problems before they actually occur. And so AI is bringing us the ability to identify a network outage before it occurs rather than having the service provider react to it after the event occurs. The other thing that it's useful for is debugging the network event correlation is an extremely important thing where you have all these different systems, there may be a fault that occurs that you see you experience an outage or an impact, but what was the root cause of that? Which system was it? Was it networking? Was it storage? Was it compute? Was it virtualization? And so the ability for an AI to consume large amounts of data and correlate that information and provide in seconds an output to the operator that says, here's exactly where your problem is that caused that outage is of massive value. So event correlation, root cause analysis, predictive outage avoidance and automation's operation are all areas that AI is being leveraged in the running of open ran networks today.

Incredibly useful. Now Paul, you promised us to show as an example, so perhaps you could take us through a demo now.

Yeah, certainly. So this is a demonstration that we ran in Mobile World Congress this year, and this is the AI that we mentioned. It's a large language model AI sitting on top of the open ran network. It sits on top of that conductor element that I mentioned, and you can have a natural language interaction with the system. So here you can see the user querying how many sub clouds, what are the names of the sub clouds and the ability to gradually interact with it as you would talk to a human, are the systems running? Are there any faults in the system? Can you tell me about those systems? What are the name spaces that are deployed there into which I can deploy containerized applications? Are there any problems in the system? Here you can see what's the version of Kubernetes running. Perhaps you need to upgrade your Kubernetes and notice much like you would use modern AI tools like chat GPT, you're able to have a conversation with the AI that's now sitting on top of the network.

This replaces clicking on dashboards and firing scripts and driving API commands manually turning these hundreds of API calls into a simple normal English question that you ask the gen ai. You can see here the user asking about alarms in the cluster. Are any of the alarms critical and give me the details for that alarm. Notice how quickly you can tunnel down into the problems and resolve what they are. You'll see here the user asking, well, what do you suggest for me to fix this? How do I address this alarm? And the system will research that and come back in seconds with a variety of answers. In fact, we've demonstrated at Mobile World Congress this year, the AI can actually suggest commands that can be executed by the user to resolve the problem. We've seen AI able to analyze through log files and come back and point to the exact source code or script that's creating the problem that the user's experiencing.

And you can see here the power of having just a very easy interaction between a user and this massively deployed system that may have tens of thousands of sites asking questions and getting answers and helping solve problems. Right? Are there Kubernetes security certificates that are about to expire? Where are they? When's their expiration date? You don't have to know anything about the underlying commands or scripts or APIs to do this. You just have a conversation with the ai. So the things that you see it doing here as we're looking at would take a user looking up in manuals, researching through API commands or user interfaces hours to figure out how to resolve these things. And as you can see in this compelling demonstration, the AI is doing it in the blink of an eye as the user naturally interacts with them in normal manner. So pretty exciting demonstration and lots of videos like that that we gave examples of AI at Mobile World Congress this year. We think this is the next generation of operations for Open ran. The ability to operate a highly disaggregated distributed system through simple interaction with an AI is very, very powerful automation.

Fascinating. Paul, it's only when you see it do you realize the full potential. Thanks so much, Paul for that. A final question for you then. What should the industry expect from you and Wind River in the near future?

Yeah, it's very simple productization, right? We're starting to see as Wind River is unique in the market of having the only highly scaled operational deployments of V Ran and open ran in the world. We're getting challenged by our customers in the market to solve the problems of running these systems at a high scale. So bringing the capabilities that you saw into the product and productizing them beyond proof of concept to actual product capabilities that our customers can consume and use is very, very important. And we expect to be bringing that to market this year. And then of course, expanding the role. We're actually bringing some of these AI tools into our own internal teams. The ability for our teams as they support the customer to leverage ai, to analyze logs, to look at source code, to rapidly turn around changes in addition to the operational features that you saw today. So it's both going to emerge in our products as well as being used within our teams internally to support our customers.

Well, thanks very much, Paul. It's good talking with you again and sharing your views on Open Ran and ai. Thanks very much.

Thanks guy.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

Welcome back to the Open Ran Summit, part of our DSP Leaders Coverage and Time. Now for our live Q and A show, I'm Guy Daniels and this is the first of two q and a shows. We have another one tomorrow. It's your chance to ask questions about Open ran, its ongoing development and its commercial deployment. Now, earlier today we held not one but two panel discussions, one of which looked at Brownfield Strategies and the other focused on the RIC. Well, not surprisingly, we have already received many viewer questions, but if you haven't yet sent us one, then please do so now using the q and a form on the website. And if we run out of time today, there's always tomorrow. Well, let's now meet our guests who are here to help with all of your questions. And joining us live on the program today are Sushil Rawat, who is director of RAN strategy for Telus, Juanma Canabal Muñoz, specialist Open RAN product strategy and planning at Vodafone.

Randy Cox, VP product management with Wind River and Rick Mostaert, vice president of Product Management RAN at Mavenir. Hello everyone. Thanks so much for returning for the live Q and A show. Let's get straight to our first audience question because as I said, we have a lot of questions. It's a very, very popular summit. So the first viewer question we've got here is what are the primary RAN concerns of the leading mobile operators? Is it initial cost operations, cost supply, and flexibility or service flexibility? And how does open ran factor into this? Well, Juanma, perhaps we could start with you as representing one of the leading mobile operators. What are the concerns for you? What's your take on this one?

Thank you very much, guy. This is a very good question. Open RAN among the goals of open RAN, we have the TCO reduction. Okay? And I will give you two examples for TCR reduction and the need for gaining inefficiency, for example, base ones equipment, we cannot suddenly forget more than a decade of development in single RAN advancements regarding those equipments. And we pretend to do the same by means of code servers and obviously there are a lot of interest for reaching that, but we need to gain more efficiency regarding capacity of the servers, regarding speed, regarding the possibilities for scaling with less equipment, and of course regarding energy efficiency. This is a very, very umbrella goal. And the other example I will give you is the system integration. Okay? This is another challenge. Open RAN is basically like building with Legos, okay? We have many pieces of different shapes and we have different interfaces to match the different pieces. And if we want to build a castle, for example, in a reasonable time and spending as less money as possible, okay, we need to gain efficiency in system integration and as I said in the panel, in the certifications in order to build a castle and not to build a bridge or to build a cat. Okay, that's the idea.

Great. Thanks so much Juanma. Thanks for those two examples of operator concerns. And Randy, let's come across to you next. What are you seeing from your perspective as the major concerns?

Well, I was just thinking about this and I had really had three items and they've aligned very nicely with Juan. I think the reduction of TCO has been a concern, but I think as carriers do their research and dig into this deeply, that becomes less of a concern because they start to see the advantages of O ran as a complete package. And so I think Vodafone is an example of that and there are a number of others that are moving in that direction as well. I think integration can definitely be a challenge, and we've experienced that and at least at Wind River, we've learned quite a bit of what it takes to do this type of integration and it does take initiative and planning on the carrier's part, but it is absolutely doable and it is just a different way of doing things, but it is certainly workable as we can see in the commercial deployments that we're in today.

I think the third one that he did not mention that I would highlight is performance. I think carriers are concerned about whether O ran can perform at the level of traditional ran, and we know that it can. We've experienced this in the UK as well as in Spain, and Vodafone has been very clear about that and public about that. We've gone through a lot of work to achieve that, but we now have very good proven evidence that O Ran can perform at par or better than traditional ran. So I think those were the three from my perspective of some of the concerns around carriers being willing to adopt O ran, but I think all three of them are starting to really be broken down into items that we can overcome.

Randy, thank you very much for those. And Rick, let's come across to you any additional concerns you're hearing or are you seeing a similar set of concerns as to what we've just heard?

Well, I think, I don't want to repeat the great points I already brought up because they're all right on the money and as a vendor, TCO comes to the top. One of the things that I wanted to bring up regarding TCO, the energy efficiency performance, those roadmaps are happening. We have plans for those. We work with the operators and our partners, but vendor lock-in, I think it just must be said that that's actually a driver of higher TCO. And the industry right now is really, especially in where there's geopolitical concerns, there's not a lot of RAN vendors, there just isn't. So by opening this up, we've already seen cases where by bringing in new vendors that down prices, it drives down the TCO and that's absolutely a critical component and it does work. In fact, as an operator, it's extremely powerful if you actually have leverage to be able to replace or move somebody new in and you're not locked in. So I think that's actually one of the fundamental drivers originally for Open ran is to make sure we have a vibrant ecosystem of healthy vendors that can come in and continue to innovate and drive that TCO down.

Great, thanks very much Rick. Number of questions in about TCO and last year on last year's summit, it was the number one concern in our poll. Sushil, let's come across to you as well. You are sitting there in Canada. What are your primary concerns ran and how Open RAN fits this?

Sure. On top of what my colleagues from Vodafone and Wind River mentioned, I would like to top up two additional items in line with what Rick was just saying before. Vendor lock-in is definitely a very big aspect of motivation for operators to move into open ran direction. And the way to achieve that is disaggregation between hardware and software with virtualization of ran workload with disaggregation of hardware and software. Now what operator are able to achieve is do a separate lifecycle management between hardware and software. And the way TCO works is how you repurpose your hardware, how you change your hardware generation after generation, how you change your software generation after generation. Now if you disaggregate the lifecycle management of software and hardware separately, that plays a very big role in how you change from one technology to other technology or from one supplier to another supplier.

So that desegregation is definitely one major aspect of motivation. And the second most important aspect is now with Oran, we are able to leverage the capability of hardware even more than before. Earlier in traditional ran the hardware is purpose built and not always utilized to the full capability of silicon itself. It all depends on what your configurations hardware capacity and traffic models are. Now with disaggregation, if you have more capacity left in the hardware, you can repurpose that capacity for something else. You can run an edge application, you can run a routing application, you can run a UPF application. Now you have more independence and more openness of how you utilize your hardware, how you pack in more capability within the same boxes that is available in the network. So those are the two major aspects, two major benefits that I see motivating operator to move in the direction of Open Brand.

Fantastic. Thank you Sushil for that. A great set of insights everyone. Thank you very much. Well, moving on to our next viewer question, and this is one that speaks to first mover advantage, really what is the immediate benefit for the Open RAN leaders, those operators who have been first to deploy and for how long might this advantage continue? Randy, perhaps we could start with you and get your views. First of all on this one, is there a first mover advantage and as the question suggests,

Well, I would start with two things. I mentioned performance before being at par equivalent to traditional ran, and so I think that's a concern, but I think that is an immediate benefit in terms of the carrier not having the concern around that and that they can hit the ground running from a performance perspective. But right behind that, the immediate benefit I would say is innovation. And as we look at innovation, there's a number of areas today that we're already bringing in the industry in terms of the ecosystem. When we talk about applications at the far edge, when we think of things like bringing a virtual cell site router to the edge and being able to replace an actual physical box at the edge has tremendous benefits in multiple ways, but namely in a reduction of TCO. Another one would be already mentioned is energy efficiencies where we're working very closely with our partners in the RAN CNF and being able to actually interact with the RAN software as well as the hardware in order to bring very specific energy efficiency type features to market that really benefit the carrier. So that's another innovation that is available today and immediately available for the carriers as they deploy.

Great, thanks very much. Randy and Sushil, you are one of the open ran leaders that's mentioned in this question. Is moving early giving you an advantage?

It does, and I would take this question even more broadly. It not only benefit the operator that is adopting it first, but it does help the larger industry. Look open Van has been around for about 10 years now and there has been a lot of investment through suppliers, smaller, medium size, big size and very little traction in terms of how Brownfield operator or big, there has been some greenfield deployment, but if you come to Brownfield operator or the large telcos, that has not been as aggressive adoption as everybody thought there will be. So now since more and more operators are moving in that direction, it's helping the larger industry overall keep the suppliers motivated, keep them going to innovate more. Now, when it comes to a particular benefit toward an operator, definitely the innovation first mover advantage is you make sure that the software performance is in place and once you stabilize the overall performance of full stack, you then have capability to leverage and innovate more and more in the new areas like Randy was mentioning about virtual routing stack, virtual UPF on the edge and whatnot. So it helps break that cycle of chicken and egg story where a lot of operator keep complaining that there is no feature parity and there is no TC advantage. But once you move ahead with doing it, you realize there is more and more potential and there is scope for more innovation and then you start innovating with suppliers and suppliers are motivated because you're actually investing and deploying it so you have more scope to innovate and end result save on your TCO.

Oh, that's very interesting. Thanks very much s for that information. Okay, I think we should move on to our next question then. And this relates to the RIC and of course we had the panel earlier on the RIC. So the question is we heard a lot about the intelligent controller today, but what is still needed for the RIC to fulfill its full promise? One more. Could we come across to you first for your opinions on this?

Yes, of course. Well, I think regarding RIC platforms, platforms are ready. Okay. Main tax to finish are at least finish the basic standardization of Sun interfaces like oh one oh and oh two. Also I mentioned in the previous panel all regarding in interoperability and onboarding, improving the APS part, the onboarding, everything enhanced or improved by the certifications as an enabler of a seal of warranty. And also regarding some interfaces, for example, the two that definitely brand vendors adopt a clear position of openness in E two interface because some vendors are embracing the open RAN, but their approach is different. And obviously I have to say regarding a standardization, this is a nonstop task. Standardization needs to evolve according to the needs and obviously we will need to evolve the standards, introducing new capabilities such as who knows in the future make the protocols, the interfaces quantum safe for example. But there are basic topics that need to finish.

Thank you Juanma for that and if anybody wants to know more about the current state of the RIC and hasn't seen the panel yet, then I urge him to do so. We'll come to Rick in a moment, but first of all, let's go to Sushil, the RIC, A lot of work being done on the RIC. Sushil, but still some work to be done. What in your view is still required for it to fulfill its original potential?

I think my Vodafone colleague did touch upon that basic challenge that I have been saying, especially around the rig ecosystem in industry is about openness on near real time space. So the O one and E two interfaces are areas where definitely the standardization body has to do a better job. I mean they have done a great job in front door interface and whatnot, but when it comes to O one interface and E two interface, I think there more standardization, more active conscious effort needs to be put in place so that it become less impactful for suppliers or DU vendor to integrate with. But what I'm observing right now is because of lack of maturity of that interface is near real time. RIC is becoming more and more DU supplier play than a third party play in near real Time RIC, non realtime RIC, you'll see a lot of non ddu supplier being a platform player and application player, but when it comes to near real time, it's becoming more and more proprietary implementation becoming more of a DU supplier play. So I would like to see that interface becoming more and more mature so that a third party or independent near real real time can also be integrated with the DU directly.

Interesting. Thank you Sushil. Rick, I promised to come across to you From where you sit and your view of the market, RIC has promised a lot what is still required for it to fulfill this promise?

Yeah, I love talking about the RIC because that's my name and it's always funny to hear your name called during these conversations so often. Anyway, I spot on, right, Juan and Sushil already nailed the E two interface is key. But I just wanted to add a couple things on that we need to make sure that the RAN vendors are actually motivated and will come on board because open FRONTHAUL is one thing well established, at least with most vendors. Some are still coming along, but if you look at open ran big picture, we've proven open interfaces work, we've proven step two is scale and performance that's well underway and being proven. And the third thing here is innovation. So with well over a hundred vendors participating in the O ran ecosystem, think of all the talent, the engineers, the money, big companies coming in and the way they can really innovate is to bring those A IML enabled apps over the top to work on anybody's ran. So standardization E two is critical. We can't have that be an excuse. It's not good enough. We need to get that going and then you have to have the vendors come along, all of 'em. Otherwise it's just we're going to miss out that big opportunity of what RAN can really bring in terms of innovation on top of what you could ever get on traditional ran.

Great. Thanks very much Rick. Some clear call to actions there from you. Thanks very much. Well, it's time to check in on our audience poll now for the open RAN summit. And the question we are asking you this week is, which are the most important areas of focus for the open ran community during the next 12 months? And you, there we go, used to see the real time votes coming in side of me here. It's early days on the voting, but it looks like, like the Peloton is slightly fractured, but there's no breakaway leaders just yet. Now if you have yet to vote, you've still got time to do so. So please do so now we will take a final look at the voting during tomorrow's live q and a show, right, we still have time for more questions. And here's one, can we realistically remove dependencies between silicon accelerators and layer one software to create an open L one such as that proposed by the multi G initiative? Rick, could we start with you? Can you shed some light on this?

Sure, sure, I'd be happy to. When we think about open ran, we just talked about multi-vendor or multi multi-vendor on the radio side, multivendor on the RAN side mix and match open interfaces, E 2 0 1, all those things. But it goes beyond, that actually goes down into the DU for an example. So we've already seen today multiple layer one vendors coming into the market. In fact, there's been many integrations. Avenir, we've integrated four different layer ones and we can do that through an internal open interface. But how about programmability, right? So we have the new vendors coming in on layer one. You can mix and match those. You can deploy multiple layer ones in a single network. And we're seeing that, and that depends on 4G, 5G, massive MMO, non massive MIMO. How do you get the best TCO? You get to pick which one goes best with whatever use case.

And so that's coming along very, very nicely. And then if you think about multi G, one of the goals there is how do you make it programmable? How do you take a RIC or an application and actually modify parameters in real time, modify schedulers, how does that all work? That's going to take another step to do that in a multi-vendor environment. But that's where this is all heading. And some of the use cases that are being developed today is actually to do that. And if we have that openness between layer one and layer two or between ran integrator or ran software vendor and a chipset provider or a software provider, that's where we're going to see that. And that's just another, if I go back to my prior answer, it's just another way we can innovate not just between DU and radios or between non realtime RIC and I Iran. We can actually start to innovate deep into the stack and just imagine the possibilities there. So very exciting we're making by bringing in multiple layer one vendors by opening up these interfaces. We're on a path to get there. So I am actually very excited about the future there.

Good to hear Rick. Lots of innovation going on there. Sushil, what are your thoughts? Is this something that interests you as well?

I mean it's always good to have choices, right? As we all know, current software from most of the suppliers as very X 86 centric and operators are looking for other options, maybe ARM-based solution or other X 86 based architectures and custom built CPUs and whatnot. So for sure having openness on selection of silicon, not having dependencies on CPU silicon or accelerator silicon or specific silicon, that motivation is there from all the operators. Operators are talking to suppliers to support multiple CPU architecture. Now going to the open L one, I think that's a bit aspirational because we all know today Oran took us about eight to 10 years to get to the level of maturity stability in performance. So it took us about a decade to get here and to start working, to start having an open L one in production. It's probably going to take some time, but definitely a good area of innovation that basically serves the purpose of openness and disaggregation.

That one piece of software has made a lot of difference in terms of what kind of CPU, what kind of server you select. So from technical requirement point of view, from future innovation point of view, working on an open L one architecture is definitely promising and we should be looking at that, having it realistically done in shorter period of time. I think that's a bit of a long shot. I would assume that it would take a decent amount of time to stabilize this and whatnot. But yes, aspirationally a good vision and from operator's point of view, all of us probably, I can't say for all the operators, but at least for the one that I've been talking to, most of the operator do want that flexibility of selecting the hardware architecture in terms of silicon. So yeah.

Great. Thanks very much Sushil. It looks like there's a long roadmap ahead for open RAN. Randy, let's come across to you. What do you think of this?

Well, I think as Suhil was speaking there, I would agree with him in terms of its aspirational in one sense, but as Rick also mentioned, there's a lot of different suppliers out there from an L one perspective, and I think this is where the disruption in the ecosystem can actually occur if those L one suppliers can actually pull this off. Now I do think it's a challenge quite frankly, and the incumbents, the two large incumbents as you know, this is going to be an area they're going to likely push back on hard because that's where their secret sauce is. And so they're unlikely to want to give that up. And I think the benefit and challenge at the same time is that the openness here will drive the disruptors to actually enter the market. And I don't really understand the question in one sense around the dependency on silicon because quite frankly there's always going to be a dependence on silicon in terms of performance and wanting to reap the benefits of new technology coming out. So there'll always be somewhat of a dependence there in terms of getting the benefits of new technology. But from a supplier perspective, I think this really drives disruption and competition into the ecosystem itself.

Great, thanks Randy. It's going to be interesting to see how it all pans out. This is excellent. We are getting through a lot of questions in this session and let's move on to see what else has come in from the audience. Okay, here's one about the ecosystem. The question is how many vendors can be integrated into an open ran environment? Now, I know we touched on this earlier in this summit about the differences between the data stack and the radio network, but are the limits perhaps technical limits or they have more to do with management complexities? Rick, what's your take on? Well, the extent of the ecosystem and vendors and what open rank and support,

Well, I don't know if there's a number of, is it five, is it 10, is it 20, is it 30? I think what we've seen actually already in deployments is you can have horizontal vendors, for example, radio vendors and maybe a server vendor, a layer one provider as an accelerator, a couple software vendors and on up, right? All the way up to the core, your management, your OSS, your RIC RIC applications. So there's really no upper limit. And Dish Network has a couple dozen more vendors that are well managed. So it comes down to is it really how well does everything play together? So certifications are important to the industry. I think we mentioned we'll talk about that in a panel tomorrow.

And then I want to address the integration piece that's come up a couple times and it's less of a topic this year than last year I think in the industry or the year before, but we've seen proof in multiple deployments around the globe that on these well-defined interfaces, the burden doesn't necessarily have to rest with the operator. They still have choice. For example, I'm going to use these three radio vendors, so DU vendor, make sure this stuff works and that's a role they can take on. Chip said IODT, that's a role that can be left to the vendors to go do we've seen that work Well, server ca layer, I'm sure Randy can speak to this, but these integrations are already happening and the operator doesn't have to deal with that. They can pick and the vendors are happy to go make it work. And we've seen that happen multiple times.

So we've already established large multi-vendor environments. I'll go back, I'll say it again, it is so powerful for an operator to say, you know what, DU provider, you're not cutting it. I'm going to take this market or I'm going to bring somebody else in and overnight I can upgrade that because the hardware is common. So I said disaggregation between, I think was talking about this earlier that disaggregation between software and hardware is very powerful. It keeps people motivated, it brings in innovation hungry companies that want to disrupt and are disrupting. And so that's part of O Ran again, it's very exciting. We've seen 20 plus vendors in our network already working and there's parts that need more work like we talked about like E two and the RIC near real-time RIC. But that will come.

Great. Thanks very much Rick and thanks for mentioning the panel we've got tomorrow that you're on tomorrow. That's going to be a good one, the future of open ran. So don't miss that one. Randy, can we come across you and your thoughts as well, Rick set you up nicely there for some extra comments.

Sure, no problem. I would agree almost with everything that Rick said there. In terms of the number, I would not want to guess at a number I think and anybody who's guessing at a number probably would be a bit of a stretch to be frank. I do think it depends on expertise and where you sit in the network. I will say at least from our experience with being a cloud provider in this space and when you look at the server, the hardware itself, the CAS layer if you will or cloud platform along with orchestration and analytics and then the RAN software, we find ourselves quite often in the middle, very much in the middle of the integration process between those three entities in the stack. And I think there's going to be a natural kind of rising of who is in the best position to actually perform that integration and determine what is working and what isn't. And quite often Wind River finds itself in the middle of that and so if I use that as an example, I think that could play out in other parts of the network as well where there will be a natural place where that activity occurs with a very strong interaction between the vendors themselves. But yeah, it's pretty exciting as Rick said, and lots of benefits and things we haven't even thought of that I think are going to come out of this whole openness in the network.

Great, thank you very much Randy. We've got about 10 minutes left so hopefully we can squeeze in a few more questions. And here's another one we've got, we haven't heard much about open ran security this year. Is that because all the previous issues and concerns have now been successfully addressed or were the early warnings about security somewhat exaggerated? Interesting. Juanma, can we perhaps start with your thoughts on the security question? We've had a couple of questions on security, so is this something still to be concerned about?

Yes, obviously there were lots of concerns two years, one year ago. Some of them, I wouldn't say they were exaggerated, some of were of them were understandable, but some of them were some kind of hype trying to analyze the security breaches. Okay, well I have to say that working group or alliance working group 11 is making a great job because they are identifying hundreds of security breaches vectors and then they are identifying the elements of the network that could be impacted by those security breaches because main security breaches are caused by the complexity of the network, the different elements of the network and the interoperability among them. So they have compiled, they have gathered a full list of security breaches and the elements that can be affected and also they have suggested how to fix them, how to solve them. And they are working very close with the other working groups in or an alliance in order to improve security, especially in my opinion, in interoperability among the different parts of the network. Because in reality in open RAN we are following main specifications means security specifications and we cannot forget that we are based on 3D PP standards. Okay. So security is a matter of concern but I think a lot of great job is being done.

Great, thanks Juanma That's reassuring too here. Thanks for that update, especially on the work the O-RAN Alliance is doing. Couple more questions hopefully. Here's one, the panel earlier mention that Open RAN is matching in terms of performance parity with traditional RAN is open, ran also matching on service offerings as well. Sushil, can we come across to you for your thoughts on this question and where this one's going?

Sure. I think this also resonate with what we have been saying since we made our public announcement about adopting or and technology in our network in a MWC earlier this year we did see, I won't say parity in terms of performance oran in many areas even outperformed traditional ran. And the only reason we are able to adopt Oran today is because it provides the feature parity, right parity and that directly translate into capability of operator to provide services that they're providing today. At least those services should be met. So to answer that question directly open ran today, do have feature parity, do have performance parity and do have services parity. And not only that, I would like to add that with oan actually the capability of an operator to add new service to the network is actually much faster now. So the time to market for new service because of this hardware disaggregation now any new service introduction is not dependent on buying new hardware and rolling out that hardware into production basically or and provide us faster time to market when it comes to new service introduction. So that's how I see Open Ran adding value to operators monetization journey.

Great, thank you very much. Hel and one more let's come across to you for extra comments.

Yes, I would like to add that Open RAN opens the door to a new concept for optimization. That is the idea of optimizing not at cluster level or cell level or network level is optimizing at user level Imagine services that are especially designed and especially optimized for one specific user. Okay, that's very innovative. Also, I do like to say that open ran can contribute to the expansion to the development of other industries, how we have a lot of data, network data that aren't still unused used. Those data can be used in use cases in industry use cases through interfaces that are being standardized in our alliance. For example, the way one interface opening the possibilities for innovation and for contributing to the economical growth of other industries.

Great, thank you very much Juanma and Rick, let's come across to you as well.

Yeah, I just thought it'd be a good opportunity to build on the comments so far on this question with an example. So if you think about standalone technology for 5G Open Ran has the ability and is bringing innovation in that space for different types of services. For example, if I want to do Edge video analytics and I have hardware already deployed, say Nvidia GPUs and servers, because Nvidia is doing a layer one stack, we can go ahead and deploy a network on existing hardware on the edge. So it's actually that type of innovation. That's just one example. You have COT, servers deployed all over the place as another example that could be used for edge processing or downtime that might be a little bit more futuristic, but that's one of the areas where we start to combine some of these value added services and new services with the RAN in the network to really drive some innovation in the space. So I think that's just a couple of examples to build upon what the other folks have already said.

Thanks very much Rick, appreciate it. One final quick question to end today's show that it's just come in a few moments ago and it speaks to the generational aspects of Open Ran. The question is how is O Ran tackling the coming six G, let's call it how is Open ran addressing what comes beyond 5G, let's call it that. Will it keep openness across 4G, 5G and beyond? Can current open ran infrastructure support this evolution to whatever comes next or will it require another hardware replacement cycle from operators? Anybody want to comment on how generational agnostic open ran is? Let's go to social first and then we'll go around

I think six G I think I've been mentioning this throughout the q and a today, this disaggregation of hardware and software and the programmability that you get in the radios because of the BG base based implementation. Now this basically separate the hardware infrastructure from the software itself. So regardless of six G or five point 5G or any other generation hardware cycle or hardware refresh is independent of software generation now. So I would see six G and other generation of communication technology is going to standardize the open interfaces even more and the capability for operator to roll out those next generation of software will be much more faster than before because now operator will be able to roll out next generation of the technology without having to swap their hardware.

Thanks Sushil. That would be refreshing. Let's hope. So let's go around and Randy, let's come to you next.

I think it was the maybe second question that you asked us around the immediate benefit and then the long-term benefit. And I think the long-term benefit is what you're getting at now in terms of six G. And I always look at this as a preparation if you will. What we're doing in open ran in 5G and the other Gs is a preparation for six G in the sense of the cloudification of a network is a new way of doing things and requires new organizations or different organizations to change the way they're doing things, to change the way they're operating their network, utilizing the benefits of automation, the benefits of being able to swap out vendors in a very easy manner. The services at the edge, all the topics we've discussed today are really in preparation for what will be required in six G. And so I think if operators are thinking, oh, I will wait to do this until six G, I think they're going to be behind and they're going to take a long time when six G hits the market for them to make that change or adapt and evolve to what's required for six G.

So I view this as now's the time to do this, take advantage of what we can today and be completely prepared for what is coming and the benefits of six G.

Good advice. Thank you Randy and Rick, let's come across to you for what will be our last question today. So Rick,

I am not sure I can say it any better than Sushil and Randy already did. That was two very good points last year before some of the larger vendors jumped on the OA bandwagon. Everybody said, well, they said this was a 60 technology, it wasn't really a 4G or 5g. So I think disaggregation, cloudification the way of working, the way you build a network. I mean I think this whole industry is catching up to the way the other industries have already evolved to the cloud and a way of working. We're bringing that to Telco and absolutely this is forward compatible with what's ever coming down the pipe because your platforms and your base is already there. It's software. It's not tied to hardware. So again, I can't, Shahi and Randy really covered all the points very well.

Great, thank you very much Rick and Juanma, final comments from you open, ran. Is it future compatible?

Yes, of course. As my colleagues, Abia said, the foundation of based on the disaggregation of hardware from software, the cloudification and the upper interfaces are the perfect foundation for the six G for entering into ccca. Indeed European Commission is making a great effort in funding opportunities for CG development through the SNS young undertaking. And if you see the different projects in the different streams of research and investigation, you will find that almost 90% of the projects are based on the open RAN paradigm. I mean disaggregation of hardware and software cloudification and opening interfaces. So definitely open RAN is a very good starting point for the future for the six G.

That is very interesting. Thanks very much. Well, we are out of time now, so thank you all for joining us on this live program. Do remember to send in your questions for tomorrow's live q and a show as soon as you can. Don't leave it too late and please do take part in the poll. There is still time for you to have your say. Now here's the agenda for tomorrow day two of the summit and it includes a panel discussion that looks at the future of open RAN. You don't want to miss that. Until then, thank you for watching and goodbye.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

Hello, you are watching the Open Ran Summit part of our year-round DSP Leaders Coverage. I'm Guy Daniels and today's second discussion. We are going to be reevaluating the RAN intelligent controller. What is the current status and viability of the RIC? What are the opportunities and the challenges and do we actually need a discreet RIC? Well, joining me on the program to help answer these questions are Richard MacKenzie, distinguished Engineer wireless networks at bt. Rahul Atri, president of the OSS Business Unit at Rakuten Symphony Juanma Canbal, Muñoz specialist Open Ran product strategy and planning with Vodafone and Eugina Jordan, chief Marketing Officer for tip, the Telecom Infra project. Hello everyone. Really good to have you all on the program. Now we've seen some major multi-vendor trials of the R and its associated apps. What can we conclude so far from these? What lessons are there for its development and commercial use? And Richard, I'm going to come across to you first because we last spoke about the RIC a year ago on last year's open ran summit. So what have we learned in this past year?

Well, this has been a big focus area for ourselves at bt, but the industry in general, and we've seen a lot of updates in this area. So at the RIC Forum, which was just over a month ago, we saw 18 different demonstrations of third party applications running on RIC's. I say a third party, 18 demonstrations of applications running on RIC's and most of those were capable of running third party applications. What we've done ourselves at bt, we've been involved in several tip projects. One in particular is worth mentioning that was running last year and has now completed, and that's the ARI 5G project. And in that one we had a single RIC, but we had three different app developers and we were showing that those third party X apps could be installed on a single R. And so it's possible to mix and match vendors on a single platform.

So that's what we learned from that project and that's now matured and finished and now started a new project that follows on from there. And we've sort of made the goals a little bit more ambitious this time. So now we're looking at multiple RICs. So we've got two RIC vendors in the project and we've got three different app developers. And the idea here is that we're going to try and install the apps on different RICs to check the portability. But what we're also going to do, and this is the big challenge for the industry at the moment, is we're going to run those applications on the R at the same time. So when those apps have different objectives, there's going to be the potential for conflict. So we know about potential conflicts and we started to discuss as an industry for the last couple of years how we might address them. In the last year we've seen the Oran Alliance have actively started addressing this. The work isn't completed, but we're seeing from a lot of trials now that we can give good examples of what happens when there are conflicts and also good examples of how to resolve them. So it's still work in progress, but this is probably the last big challenge before we can say that we're truly in a position to deploy third party X apps in a commercial deployment.

That's really interesting, Richard. Thanks so much for those updates. Moving along swiftly, aren't we? I'll come to Rahul in a minute, but first of all, Juanma, let me come across to you and what's your experience been? What have you witnessed as a result of all these trials over the past 12 months?

Yes, I would highlight also the conflict. Okay, the conflict between the different applications that my colleague has just mentioned because we participated in a demonstration for T with two different applications with different and opposite goals such as traffic steering and energy saving, and both applications work smoothly. So with any problems without any conflict between them. But also I would like to highlight that it's very important to have when trialing the R and in general in simply running trials dedicated or very without a dedicated roadmap with the specific goals is ineffective. Okay. You have to trace a clear roadmap and you want to test and you want to try it with a specific goals.

Great. Thanks so much. One, we've got to be aware, we've got to know what we're doing and why, what our ultimate objectives are. Thanks for the update, Rahul, I promise to come across to you as well. What's your experience been of the past 12 months and what we've learned so far?

The only difference with us is we have a production open ran network running, so for us it's more than trials. One thing which I believe, and I think everyone prior to me speaking also believe that it's RIC is a ecosystem player. You need a lot of partners to collaborate because everyone can bring in value. So there has to be a common R platform where you can onboard applications. When we talk about platform, the platform should be capable of hosting third party apps but also managing the application life cycles and integrating that with the telemetry systems and take actions. What we have seen is the early adoption, early use cases seems to be the so evolution a lot of so partners have started evolving their products and started calling them non realtime RIC applications. There've been some attention towards realtime RIC as well, but I think the whole ecosystem apart from the telemetry and AI models also need to evolve through that.

So for us, we have recaps in productions for some of the use cases we already talked about. It's a lot about ecosystem, a lot about coordination, conflict management, but that was again the case in so on as well. The good part in last 12 months is the ecosystem has evolved. There are a lot of roadmap not only with the design partners but also from the other players who have also started accompanying us into open ran ecosystem. This also shows that the industry is actually evolving towards open ran and that's why they're also starting thinking about not only day one use cases but also the day two use cases. Erik for us also is an evolution in terms of how to bring innovation into the RF engineering as well and then manage the network more like soft.

Great. Thanks very much for update rule and we heard in our earlier panel today about strategies for Brownfield open ran deployments, commercial deployments, and Rahul, you mentioned the importance of ecosystems there, which brings me nicely to our next point and that is the extensive ecosystem of developers and the creation of numerous new applications perhaps doesn't yet appear to have happened or at least certainly not as we might have thought it has. If that's the case, why not? What's holding back the growth of this particular sector? Eugina, do you have any insights and what progress are you seeing?

Really, really great question. So let's look at why any company would develop an ops and our app. They need to have a business case and they need to have a path to market and return on their investment. So let's look at five aspects. The first one is there's an example of app store and android store as well. One is open, one is closed. So we don't have a lot of open rigs here in telecom and it's extremely hard for an op or app developer to get onto a closed R unless there are trials like Richard was talking about with T four, Ari and Ariana. Number two, the requirements are not clear. The feature set is not clear for developers to realize the potential of their investment and that's the third one is the investment. The investments in telecom are shrinking, so if there's no feature set, if there's no business case for developers and there's no clear path to market on what risk they can get on, then they're not going to get investments from either private equity or traditional investors or even angel investments.

Number four, it's always about the process. There was a discussion last year as you mentioned about portability. It is still an issue how you're going to port apps onto different types of freaks and the last one is APIs and there is still discussion in the industry and that's what Ariana is working on, on APIs to other or on elements in the pole architecture. So it's figuring out how those APIs from R going to extend to X apps and AOPs. So unless as an industry we figure out what is the business case, where the investment will come from, is there going to be open or closed? What would be the process to implement port and integrate? We're not going to attract new app developers.

Very interesting Eugina. A lot of issues there that could potentially be very challenging. I'll come to one mind a minute, but Rahul, let's come back to you first. What are you seeing as the challenges to selling this to developers?

Definition of RIC, I think the platform is what the platform telcos will own or the tier one partners will bring, but then the definition of RIC apps, when we talk about RIC apps and telecom networks, we talk about a lot of career grades and mission critical services, but when we talk about RIC, it can be any application. It doesn't have to be a closed loop, could be a business analytics could be giving the trains could be producing some reporting out of it. It's very difficult for somebody as a third party developer to look into telecom A as Eugene I mentioned about the operability. Where do you test it? If you have brought in a build application which can do a similar job as RIC, where do you test it? I mean there's no open platform to test it today. There's no infrastructure and nobody will open up their labs and it's a long cycle in telcos and probably you'll gain more value and have less time to market.

If you build an OTT app, you'll fail fast in that case. The second part of the puzzle is what do you define as rec applications? It doesn't have to be, as I said, sleeping cell energy savings or the usual things we do. If it's look into every CSP, their RF engineering teams, their optimization teams have built a lot of macros, lot of things which they do every day. Cluster optimization engineer, HQ engineer who comes and look into their area to say everything is good in my network, my area, or there is a dip in handover success rate. Why do I do steering of traffic here and there? Do I have outage in one carrier? So there's a lot of things which they do every day. They have small scripts, they have small manuals, they do scripting around it, macros, all those can be converted into recaps and then there's a lot of platforms available. Just have to put the code into a container and just load it on, integrate the APIs from telemetry and that can be an action.

Great, thanks very much. Rahul. There does seem to be a lot of challenges still and not all of them are technical challenges. Juanma, let's come across to you. Are you also seeing a problem in developing the ecosystems and attracting the developers?

Mining is also technical. I mean building open run application is not just coding. Okay, it is, it requires a unique skillset and of course you need traditional developers but also you need people who knows who has a special skills on embedded deep on radio protocols signaling. So it takes time to develop expertise in.

Okay, thanks very much everybody. Great insights into what the industry is facing at the moment when it comes to the applications there. We've got X apps and we've got R apps, we've got the two aspects of the RIC. Are we seeing a preference amongst those supportive developers and indeed telcos themselves for either one or the other? Are there X apps getting more traction at the moment or are apps, Richard, from where you sit at bt, what are you seeing?

Well it is a really good question and it's really hard to get consensus across the industry at the moment about which one is the most important or the most useful or even which one will be rolled out faster than the other. But what I can share is some stats I collected from attending the RIC forum just over a month ago and although that didn't show every RIC vendor or every app developer, it was a good representation of the industry. There were 18 presentations of those 15 involved. The near real time RIC, only eight used the non-real time RIC and six used a hybrid so they used both near real time and non-real time. So in that sense you'd say that the near real time RIC is certainly getting more attention right now, but there are some solutions already where there's no intention to use the near real time RIC. So there's certainly disagreements and I would say overall most use cases there's an argument to use either or both.

Interesting. Richard, what appears to be a really simple question is actually quite tricky when you delve into it, isn't it? I think we all want to come in with some comments on this one, but Rahul I'm going to come across to you first if that's okay Then we'll get everybody else in but real let's hear it from you first.

Pretty similar findings. I think it's very easy or probably desirable for all the current ecosystem players to uplift their current solutions like SA or CSON or eons into the non realtime RIC, but always if you talk to them and if you see they always have a roadmap or liking towards near realtime RIC, but it'll take a lot of other integrations and other possibilities to also look up to the realtime RIC, opening up the software stack, opening up the protocol layer, opening up the events on the real time and also having the right model trained and also taking the decisions in the run time. I think it evolves a lot of integration, trial testing and a lot of detailing around the ran vendors. Fortunately for us we have our internal sister company who works as ran software provider, so we're able to do some of the things early findings on that.

One thing which I'll also like to add is going into the future use cases like slicing and the edge and gaming use cases where quality of service and a lot of use cases which involves customer realizing the dip in the services change in the latency patterns and other important KPIs rather than only the round link uplinks or the scheduling would require the near real time break or a similar solution to be present because then you need to assure these services, this quality of intent and other use cases to the user. So whether they come directly preintegrated into ran softwares or they come as separate recaps as ecosystems for real time, I think we'll see in next six months evolving and especially when the ecosystem is adapting open ran a lot more. I think we'll see a lot more of these things coming up.

Yeah, you're right, it's developing. We'll have to keep a very close eye on this and see how it pans out. Eugina, let's come across to you next. Are you seeing a separation? Can you delineate between the two RICs and the associated apps yet?

So let, thank you. So let's look at where X ops and ROPs originated from. It's nothing new, so X ops, they are your so rebranded applications and the reason that there is more, I think Richard gave really good data. I think the reason there is more sun or ops, it's because it's been around for 10, 15, 20 years, so it's very easy to turn them into more portable applications for R. If we look at aaps, they are repackaged analytics, repackaged business intelligence reporting and the challenge with aaps, it's not just a technical one, it's actually a business one because X apps they deal with technology, they can come from the radio vendors. It's very easy to get the data. You can use unsupervised models to train X apps with AOPs, you touch your customer, you touch data that is private, you need to implement security, you also need specialized team to work on those AOPs. You cannot use unsupervised models because you deal with data, so you need to use supervised models because of you dealing with customer data and analytics. So it's not a surprise that we see more apps developing in the future when we have open RX and we have access to all the data, we'll probably see more a apps, but that's going to take some time.

Thanks very much for explaining that Eugina, that's great. And one more let's come across to you. Are you seeing a split yet? Are you seeing a preference for X apps say over our apps?

I don't think there is any preference between X apps or our apps. I think Xap think of them as the high performance option. They are great for innovation and as Regina has said, they are user specific because they can make made user specific adjustments. On the contrary, our apps are just an evolution of season solutions, so they are more feasible currently, but I think at the end as technology advances there will be more UBS and also, let me put an example, a use case can be designed as an arap. For example, energy saving sales switch off, but at the moment you need a better adjustment following the traffic profile, following better the traffic profile and having a more dynamic response capability that ARAP translates or evolves into an Excel.

Very interesting. It does sound like this is a fast evolving space that we'll have to keep a close eye on. Thanks very much everyone for those insights. Let's move on because I wanted to pick up on app portability and subsequent integration challenges because these were brought up during last year's summit as being a big problem 12 months ago. Now we've already heard Richard, Eugina, I think maybe all of you have mentioned portability at some point already. Can we just briefly look at this again and tell me has there been any progress? Is this still a major problem or has the situation got better? Rahul, you are really closely involved in this. What are you seeing?

I think for our apps the things have evolved. The portability, as I said, I think a lot of partners and a lot of customers have figured out what they want the platform to be, how they want the platform to be and that's very critical because that becomes your landings on that becomes your app store in this case and if you have solved the platform part and then how does it integrate with telemetry and how does this takes a closed loop action, whether it happens from the app directly or it goes via your central lifecycle management or configuration management. So onboarding an app, defining the lifecycle of an app and then managing the app on the coordination and conflict management. These are some of the things which are taking place. I think having an app on top of platform is the easiest thing. All the partners or all the rec players have found the gist of it and probably have the early standard defined to make that possible.

But when we talk about production, it's also very important that there's a central platform which is managing the applications, the apps, their health, how the heartbeats are monitored between them and the other systems integrated, how do you configure them? For example, one recap which is traffic steering. How do you configure that to do different kind of traffic steering across multiple clusters or across different clutter types or let's say in urban area, the suburban area and how do you manage that configuration in this case because so those are really a boundaries or specifications of those. Let's say sell IDs eNews to say these areas, this is the configuration to load and this is the decision tree to take and this is the business flow. How do you do that when there are different sets of configuration involved? A platform comes from somebody else, the app comes from somebody else. Those are the kind of integration, those are the conflict. Those are the areas where a lot of focus have been spent on recently.

Great. Thanks very much Rahul. A lot of factors there. A lot of questions we have to ask ourselves. Richard, are you happy with the progress that's been made on this front as an industry as a whole? Are we making progress on app portability?

Well, it's still certainly a big issue. Well, it's certainly an issue. It's how big an issue it is because what we have found is when we have an app vendor and they've already created an app that's onboarded onto one particular R, when they try to repackage or rebuild that to work on another R, it's not a significant amount of work. It might take a week or two and a couple of people's time, but it's not huge amount when we think of what real integration challenges can be, so it's there as a problem. It's certainly not plug and play. If we want to get anywhere near plug and play, then we certainly need updates to the standards. The standards are still lacking enough detail to achieve plug and play, but I'm not sure it's such a problem. There's only a finite number of RICs and we basically want to make sure that that's a manageable workload for any app vendor once they've created their app.

That's the main challenge, but then there's a bit of extra work if you want to make sure that it's compatible with every RIC. One other thing worth mentioning is probably every RIC vendor that I can think of, I don't think there's any exceptions, produces some apps, X apps or our apps and then some of those RIC vendors are quite keen to just promote their own portfolio and not really as focused on third party. And then there's the others that are very keen to encourage third party xap and that's the main differentiator at the moment. If the RIC vendor is open to helping with the onboarding process, it's very manageable and if they're not really open to that then it is a big challenge.

Good insight. Thank you very much for that. Richard and Juanma, let's come across to you and your thoughts about portability.

Yes, I would distinguish between the onboarding of the ops or the Arabs and the fitting of the parameters of the R apps and x apps into your network. I would distinguish that and also I would put focus on certifications. Okay, we haven't speak about that and I consider that certifications are a seal of approval and way to advance in their availability for R apps and x apps.

Thanks very much. One more for that. That's much appreciated. Brings us to our final question and I just want to play devil's advocate very quickly here and that is to ask you all do we actually need a configurable and programmatic RIC because we hear that some operators are interested in its potential to enable service differentiation, but is the RIC actually a solution to a problem that we don't really have? Eugina, what are you going to tell me?

Such a great question because I always answer my questions with the telecom history, I guess I've been in the industry for too long, so let me take you back to 3G. When we had CDMA and GSM and both technologies had their controllers, then once we started working on lt, we decided you know what? We're going to have the X two interface and X two interface is going to be used for radios to talk to one another. What it did is it not only closed the network and hence the need for open ran to open it up, but also it created a lot of chatter and it prevented progress of some of the use cases that 4G was supposed to enable. Yes, my view is what RIC is solving is solving the mistake that we made as an industry when we eliminated the control of four 4G and it's going to help manage the base stations and also deliver better customer experience and in addition, it'll help with different use cases, IUT use cases, private network use cases where there is a lot of IOT devices and you need to manage them. So yes, we do need RIC because it's our ability to enable more devices, more use cases, more services and connectivity across home, outdoors, indoors, and so on.

Thanks Eugina, and as you say, we should never forget our history. We have to build on what we've done. I'm going to come across to all of you and Wema, I'm going to start with you and ask that simple question, do we actually need the RIC?

Yes, of course. I think RIC is the solution as Eugina has said, well, it's complicated. We cannot rely on many different platforms with different purposes coming from different vendors. Thus is a lack of flexibility and an innovation of course, and also networks are becoming increasingly intricate, so we need to develop new services and manage new services and we need automation for that because automation is needed for a better deployment and faster also optimization in the field of optimization. We are very used to optimize the network at cell basis, at cluster basis or at different time of the day, but we are not used to optimize at that user specific level. This granularity is not achieved with traditional platforms with cson.

Thanks very much. Juanma. Very clear reasons why the RIC is important there. Rahul, let's come across to you next. We have issues that we need to address, but is the RIC the right way to go about meeting those challenges for telcos?

The whole point of moving to open networks, open ran and software defined networks is to make network look like infinite and self config or always runtime configurable and if we want to achieve that, if that is the future use case, if that is the future monetization strategy, RIC is very important. The apps are very important to make that happen and that's how the ecosystem will grow. That's how you'll get the third party partners and if you're looking for third party developers and opening up, then we need to define those use cases, those services, and then let the platform be open enough to deliver those services faster and configure those networks. We will see the approach. People will have different definitions about open ran, even though with the current brownfield current non-cloud native networks, there's the only layer which will make network configurable on the radio side most of course, but configuring them for that specific use cases and services. So I'm very optimist that there's going to be very important layer and RIC actually will define or redefine how we see the networks, how do we see software defined networks and how do you see RAN and deliver those use cases. Next challenges, next monetization use cases for telecom.

Great, thanks very much Rahul. Another positive answer there and finally, last word to you, Richard, why should we continue all this work? Why should we put the effort into overcoming all these many, many challenges that we still have in order to make the RIC a success? Why do we still need it?

Well, as you said, there's a lot of challenges still to overcome, but right now do we need the RIC? Maybe not just in terms of 4G for mobile broadband, 5G for enhanced mobile broadband. If we're deploying open ran, we're just deploying them as essentially another base station so we can use the existing management platforms. We don't need the R, but as soon as we start offering different services, the R starts to have an advantage. As soon as we want to be able to create services quickly, then it's got a major advantage. And when we start thinking of, I always think that the earliest deployments of the R where we're really going to see the power are in the private networks. When we've got deployments that have completely unique requirements with the R, we can piece together the X apps and the R apps from a range of vendors from across the ecosystem to piece together your exact bespoke requirements, met with a R, and you can create that service very quickly, launch the service very quickly and ultimately optimize it as well. It's not just about launching the service, it's about making that service as good as it can be. When we start using the power of AI and machine learning, the R is in a perfect position to exploit that power and so as time goes on and we start launching better services and optimizing the network, that's where the RIC becomes essential. So right now, no, we don't need it, but in the future, yes we do.

Fantastic. Thanks very much, Richard. So if you're moving towards being a digital services provider, and I hope you all are, then you're going to need the RIC at some point very, very soon. Right? We must leave it there though. I'm sure we will continue this debate during our live q and a show for now, thank you all very much indeed for taking part in our discussion. If you are watching this on day one of our open ran summit, then please send us your questions and we'll answer them in our live q and a show, which is coming up very soon. You'll find the question form on the telecom TV website along with our poll. Goodbye for now.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

Hello, you are watching the Open Run Summit part of our year-Round DSP Leaders Coverage. I'm Guy Daniels now as open run deployments start to scale and feature not only in greenfield sites but also existing Brownfield networks. The wider industry is closely following the actions of the major telcos and one of these leading CSPs is Orange and I'm delighted to say that joining me now is AUSA hat who is director of innovation in Radio and Environment at Orange. Hello Teresa. Good to have you back on the program. It's been a couple of years since we last spoke. Now let me first of all start by asking you about the position of Orange on Open Run. What's its assessment of the technology and its viability to orange?

Yeah, actually we're confident that open RAN will happen, so the question is not if, but it's when. So we are interested in open RAN and our interest is relying on three main pillars, so openness, cloudification and intelligence and these different pillars are not all at the same level of maturity. So if you start by the openness, so it's a key requirement for us in order to increase under diversity to SWAs. In short term we are actually considering open frontal ready equipment as a main requirement and it's key for us. But in longer term we would like also to extend this openness to the cloud infrastructure part and we would like to actually see a smooth, let's say portability of vRAN software across diverse cloud infrastructure. And this is today less major compared to the open front top.

The second pillar cloudification, so actually we have a strong interest towards unified cloud infrastructure and orchestration with native CICD in order to reduce the opex. Cloudification is today more or less major for rural use cases and this is already actually the case. I mean we are already actually trialing it in Romania in a pilot and it is successful for V two G and V 4G and soon we'll test V 5G. But for more complex scenarios, particularly in urban with high capacity, let's say radio configuration with massive MIO, there are still some improvements to be done on the cloud infrastructure part, particularly in terms of dimensioning and energy consumption. But we are confident that this also will happen in the near future, particularly with the next generation of chip sets. And the last pillar intelligence, so higher automation and achieving this level four is one of our main objectives with higher customization, higher reactivity in terms of network operation, network management and network optimization. We are targeting actually a multi-vendor, multi technology and multi-domain SML including non realtime R which should be able to work not only with open cloud ran but also with traditional ran. And in that spirit we are considering the migration of our CS L towards non real-time R including with our traditional RAN network.

Fantastic positive message there and thanks so much for going through the various elements that you keep your focus on. You mentioned some progress that you're making there and some trials and what you, are you able to provide us with a summary update on what your deployment plans may be?

Yeah, actually deployment of open RAN and its introduction in our networks will be gradual as the Brownfield operator we are very demanding requirements and also introduction of open RAN comes with some impacts in terms of operation and which requires also lots of upskilling on our side. That's why we are considering this migration from traditional ran to open RAN as a journey. We are today in a learning process we are progressing very well thanks to different initiatives that we have. So pko in the past different lab testing including or plot fest in our premises and also the ongoing pilots in Romania. So in terms of introduction, we are targeting first Europe on a case by case basis, so as I said, rural is the first case that we're considering, so we have already a pilot ongoing and urban would come next when it is major, particularly for high let's say capacity radio configurations in urban and once the improvements in terms of dimension and energy consumptions are already there. The deployment scenarios that I mentioned was rural, urban, once major, but at the same time we are also actually studying and evaluating some other opportunities for deployment, particularly in the context of private networks and this could also be beneficial in order to be able to have a kind of unified cloud infrastructure for different type of workloads for enterprise use cases.

Great, thanks very much. That update toa, now open run has the promise to extend the range of potential suppliers in theory lead to more competition, but can smaller alternative vendors really compete and have direct relationships with telcos or do they need to be preintegrated and bundled through more established vendor, perhaps one who already has that existing commercial relationship with a telco?

Yeah, actually it's true that open rank comes with this promise of mix and match between different vendors increasing let's say vendor diversity, increasing flexibility of deployment including with smaller vendors. But we should not forget that it's a new model particularly for brownfield operators who are used to single ran deployments. So we need to consider again this introduction step-by-step. I would say that in the initial phase, pre-integrated solutions bundled with well-established vendors could actually speed up the readiness of deployable solutions. But in the longer run we can actually work and we are actually working actively in order to have a kind of coordinated testing and a global certification framework to manage in a more efficient way this intergroup testing between different vendors and reduce this, I said test burden on operators and avoid all of these redundant type of testing and this should at the end help this smaller vendors to, and this should give them a wider access actually for integration and for interoperability type of testing.

Yeah, we'll be certainly welcomed. There's growing interest in incorporating AI within the ran including its ability to optimize operations. There's growing interest to incorporate AI everywhere. What is the likelihood of an AI native open ran? Is this something orange would be keen to develop or keen to see being developed?

Yes, indeed. Actually AI is taking a growing role in the RAN at different levels. We have AI for operations which started to become actually available in commercial networks for multiple use cases such as predictive maintenance such as anomaly detection or root cause analysis and so on. We have also AI for network optimization. So here initially we're considering AI for radio high layers for example to optimize mobility, to optimize load balancing energy efficiency. But then potentially later we can also consider AI for lower radial layers including radio physical layer. But of course it'll depend on the gain versus pain. So I would say that as such, open ran is indeed aimed to be AI native and we need to consider several say architecture principles to introduce it. As I said before, a multi-domain and multi-vendor SMO is key with open interfaces such as O one, O2, A one that could bring intelligence to our network and to the whole automation processes. And then we also need to consider support of our week applications, particularly to a non-real time r, again with supportive open interfaces and in a multi-vendor environment. And this also needs to be able to work with our traditional right

Now you mentioned Rick there. How closely are you following developments with the R? What role do you see for xap and R apps in your radio network?

Actually, we're actively following the development of Rick and we have several initiatives, test initiatives inhouse. I would say for us this RIG framework comes with several benefits. It brings a kind of standardized framework for multi-vendor operation and interworking, which actually help us to have a better, let's say interworking compared to what we have today with csun. It also brings more, let's say differentiation for operator with customized apps and it bring also kind of more homogeneous experience across different RAN vendors with third party applications. So these are the main benefits that we see with standardized RIG framework. And in that sense our main objective, our first main objective is to actually ensure the migration of our CSUN towards the non realtime. Rick, as I said, not only for open ran cloud ran, but also with traditional ran the role of SAP and near realtime. Rick is not that clear today for us compared to the non real time R, which is more major today. We still need to evaluate and we are evaluating actually the real gains and use cases with near real time ECAP that could really bring value for us.

That's great, thank you very much. And a final question for you. We've been discovering during this summit that good progress has been made, but there are still challenges ahead. So what do you see as the challenges that Open Ran still needs to overcome in order to fulfill its potential?

Indeed, there are few challenges that needs to be overcome to allow wide scale deployment of open ran, but we don't see any showstopper actually that prevent open RAN to be widely adopted in the near future. So among the challenges that I would like to mention, so I would say first software parity feature parity compared to traditional ran, but we see that today it's improving very well in the ecosystem depending on the vendor of course we have already solutions that are available in the market with I would say near feature parity compared to the traditional ran. Then we have energy efficiency to be improved, particularly for high capacity radio configuration. And this is more related to the energy efficiency of the cloud infrastructure as I said before. So some improvements in terms of let's say dimensioning and energy efficiency still to be done, but we're confident that this will happen with the next generation of chipset and also with the target of one server per site that is now considered in the near future. Then another aspect I would like to mention is interoperability. That still needs to be improved both on the open frontal and also on the portability of the vRAN software over different say type of cloud infrastructure. We have the SMO maturity that needs to be improved in order to truly allow multi-vendor and multi doin management of both cloud ran, open, RAN and traditional ran with a real open rec marketplace.

Then there is this, let's say challenge related to integration, which is still remains actually. We think that the global integration framework in the industry could help to reduce the test burden, the INTERABILITY test burden. So on our side in the short term, we are relying on vendors to take the lead for this integration part. However, in the long run we don't close the door for us to take a more active role actually in the whole process, which would also bring us actually more autonomy in the choice of our partners. Another point that I would like to actually add is related actually to operators side and the fact that we need also to have a change of mindset with introduction of open ran and to adapt our processes and particularly for example, related to vendor management and also all of the reskilling and upskilling that would be required for automation and ization. This is also an important point to keep in mind and to finish, I would also like to highlight a more, let's say generic question for the whole ecosystem longer term, and this is related actually the question whether two lines of products will be maintained over time or if eventually it'll converse to single line of products, which will be based on open ran cloud trend.

Very interesting and a great question there at the end. We'll put that to our panels later in the summit and see what they think as well. We must leave it there. Thank you so much for taking part in our show today. Great insights. Now don't forget the full scheduler programs and speakers can be found on the telecom TV website and please do take part in our poll. Goodbye for now.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

Hello, you are watching the Open Ran Summit part of our year-Round DSP Leaders Coverage. I'm Guy Daniels and today's first discussion looks at Brownfield Open ran deployment strategies. Now initial open ran rollouts focused on greenfield sites, but the major opportunity lies with its use in existing Brownfield sites. So how are telcos approaching their deployment strategies and what trends are we starting to see? Well, I'm delighted to say that joining me on the program to answer these questions are Sushil Rawat, who is Director of RAN Strategy for TELUS. Randy Cox, VP Product Management at Wind River and Robert Curran, Consulting Analyst with Appledore Research. Hello everyone. It's good to see you all again. We have as usual lots to talk about today. Now, where are we actually in terms of Brownfield commercial deployments and if we look at environments first, where is the biggest interest currently? Is it urban? Is it rural? Is it closed campuses? Robert, perhaps I can come across to you first and you can share your views on what you are seeing.

Yeah, thanks guy. Look, I think there's interest in all of the sectors that you've mentioned there, the urban infill densification, improving coverage in downtown areas, highly congested areas, that's one distinct application. We're seeing the rural inclusion as well, serving the underserved areas, that's important. Campus networks, industrial, inside factories, manufacturing buildings and so on, they're all important. Even seeing interest from potentially military applications as well. The interest is in getting mobile capabilities into places that it's not currently there without needing the same level of maybe commitment or long range strategy or procurement cycles that otherwise might be involved. So we're certainly seeing, I think, interest across the board. I don't think there's one standout from a Brownfield point of view. There's lots of ways in which you might be interested in using open run. Some of that's enforced from the environment, geopolitics and so on, but some of it is organic. Anything you want to experiment on, anything you want to try out and open Ran is certainly proving a popular option for that quick startup chance to experiment, try something different and see what results you can get from it.

Great. Thanks Robert. Pretty comprehensive then. sel, let's come across to you first. Lemme go then we'll hear Randy's views, but Sushil, what are you seeing from your community and also what are you doing yourself at telus?

So we have been seeing across the globe multiple operators doing open end trials and also getting into the deployment depending upon the use case and depending upon the strategy that they're adopting, the deployments are happening in various different geographies or different kind of network density.

For a brownfield operator who is doing this deployment, especially focused on 5G or with the modernization in their mind, they're probably looking at clusterization of the sites into rural areas to first check the feature parity, performance parity and everything and then expanding it.

We at TELUS, we have announced that we are going to do our open end deployment starting this August. We already have 10 15 sites already on air on open ran technology for the last three, four months now. And

we have started deploying open RAN in dense urban areas, pretty much a urban environment where we have highly loaded site, which gives us a real picture of how Open RAN is performing in terms of KPIs and customer experience and whatnot. And we've been pleasantly surprised to see how open ran is at par and in some aspects even better than traditional RAN technologies.

So very, very diverse deployment scenario based on the use case of an operator.

Very interesting. Thanks for those insights and updates. And Randy, what are you seeing from your partners? Where are they looking at deploying their brownfield? What environments are they focusing on when they go commercial?

Yeah, I would say we don't really see any specific trends here really. It's really in number of types of environments. I think with the progress the industry's made in this technology, there's no limitations that would suggest it needs to be in a less intensive environment, one from another. The deployments where Wind River have footprint are in some of the most densely populated urban environments you can find places like Manhattan, New York or Tokyo. And now in big cities in Canada and the UK specifically as Suhil was mentioning in Telus, certainly the urban environments there we're seeing great performance. So I think this is needed everywhere and we're ready to be able to provide that from a technology perspective to the carriers around the world.

Great, thanks Randy. So it's obviously very versatile in terms of environments, but what about specific topologies and network configurations? Are we seeing clusters of open RAN being deployed in Brownfield or are we seeing it integrated with the more traditional RAN deployments? Sushil, let's come across to you first.

Sure, I'll be happy to answer that. So approach of swapping a network or approach of deploying a new technology totally depends upon the motivation behind that change that operator is adopting. In case of our scenario, we have mandate from government of Canada to swap our incumbent vendor with a new technology. So for us, the deployment is very sporadic where it is not necessarily to be a cluster offite, we are going with a plan network upgrade process where we swap sites across the country. It is not part of any specific clusters or a clusterization approach. It is very sporadic. Also, we are going to adopt open RAN for technologies like in-building and small cells and whatnot. So very, very diverse kind of deployment in our case at least.

Okay, thanks. So it depends very much on business case and way around your planning strategy and the network as a whole. Randy, you were saying there's no observable big trends in terms of the environment of deploying Brownfield, but what about the topologies?

Yeah, we see a mix of both clusters of open ran but also integrated specifically with traditional ran. And mainly because in open ran we are seeing carriers deploy all the gs, so 2G, 3G, 4G, and 5G. And so in certain cases this can force a mix of traditional RAN as well as O ran example in Vodafone. You may have seen at MWC the side-by-side performance that they performed in ada real Spain between traditional and ran and the performance was as good or better than traditional from an O ran perspective. And we know that in Telus we've seen the same thing in that kind of environment. So this is proving to work whether it is in a clustered environment, topology or whether it's a mix if you will, or integrated as you've said.

Okay, thanks Randy. And finally Robert, are you witnessing the same from the research you're doing, the talks you are having with industry?

Yeah, I mean there's a kind of inevitability about the progress here. It's very clear the first few years in open ran a focus on parity, parity performance at a individual cell level and now it's clear there's enough evidence across the industry that there's at least power performance if not better. So the approach so far has largely been on balance, more sort of individual cluster based localized rather than across the board on a brownfield basis. But yeah, and that was first wave. Now we're getting through that and seeing the kind of commitments that the companies like TELUS are able to feel confident making. We're going to go to network wide with this and that's a strong sign. So yeah, that was always going to be the approach we'd have to take for any new network technology, make sure it doesn't affect the operation of a cell side in an adverse way and that's fully proven now. So now we're on to the next phase.

Okay, thanks Robert. Thanks everybody for those insights. It's going to be interesting to see how this develops in the next 12 months, whether that continues, but as we enter commercial deployment in Brownfield networks, can we look at the makeup of the relationships between vendors and operators here? Are we seeing the same set of disruptive companies that kickstarted open run or are we seeing the more traditional vendor incumbents gaining ground again and perhaps eventually coming? Good. Randy, you are our sole vendor representative on the panel today. You've been disrupting telecoms yourself. What's your view on this?

Sure. Well we definitely see disruptors in the market in O ran and V ran and they're taking market share for sure. I would say though there's likely to be probably a limit to the number of them that will happen over time. I think they will evolve and there will be more that enter the market, but there's definitely disruptors and the number of disruptors I think will be dependent on how fast and how big the carriers make decisions in terms of deployment of role ran, which will create a competitive environment. I mean the faster the carriers adopt, the more competitive that market will become. I think over time the disruption will also occur in terms of innovation where new ideas and technologies will be adopted at the far edge capabilities like we're doing with Juniper where we're hosting a virtual CSR or cell site router. This is really bringing innovation that drives down TCO and so I think that's part of where you will see this kind of disruptive environment where these new innovations and ideas come from and that really will drive the industry.

Great. Thanks Randy. Robert, I'm going to come to you in a moment, but let me bring in Sushil first because I think you want to come in on this and pick up on some points.

Sure. So while disruptive have been true to its name, they have been trying really, really hard to keep the envelope moving on the performance and features and whatnot. What we have seen as of today is disruptor have been really performing good in greenfield deployment. You can see that in Japan, also in Germany and also in the American market, the disruptor vendors have been really pushing the envelope and performing really well When it comes to Brownfield, traditional suppliers are putting their efforts in, I won't say all of them are where we want 'em to be. In all of this greenfield brownfield scenario, if you see where we stand today, Samsung, which is kind of sits somewhere in between disruptor as well as the traditional since they didn't have as big of a market share as a traditional supplier, not as little of a market share as disruptor. So Samsung has been winning quite a few project across the globe in Brownfield specifically and that has a lot to do with how complex and how demanding Brownfield operators are in terms of feature parity and performance and whatnot. So that's where disruptors are struggling a little bit to gain market momentum on the Brownfield side while they're doing really well on the greenfield side.

That's really interesting. These are absolutely fascinating insights here. Thanks very much both of you Robert. This is interesting, but is this just a natural way of evolving relationships and dynamics when we bring new technologies into play?

Yeah, it's interesting. In telecom, the value of incumbency is incredibly strong inside telcos and there's no doubt about it. We have seen incumbent and vendors really move quite a long way in the last couple of years to lean into the open ran agenda. They've had a lot of involvement in terms of developing the standards, contributing to things and trying to shape things and we've seen that play out when it comes to it Ran is a huge area of spend and size is going to have a factor in their incumbency and familiarity are always going to be very, very strong. That makes life more difficult for companies who have set out to only do open ran, but part of what we're seeing is the entry into the ran market of companies that are strong in other areas that now find a position, find a niche within what is open ran and particularly some of the fusion between open ran and cloud or desegregated RAN is offering opportunities for companies to come in and be disruptive but not necessarily be startups.

And that's kind of an interesting shift in the market landscape here. When you look at the stack of companies involved in putting together an open ran, some of 'em are companies, well some of them may be companies that are traditional providers and some of 'em are companies who come from a different context and that's quite interesting to see how the ran market as a whole is being disrupted. No doubt about it. The incumbency comes for a lot still. So I think referencing there you've got to have something really impactful to carry you through as a pure open ran vendor and there are some examples of that, but it's certainly a challenge for sure.

Oh yeah, this is very, very interesting. Thanks very much Robert and talking about the stack, let's move on because open ran also promised telcos, multi-vendor scenarios and a lot more, more choice, a lot more range of companies. What trends are we starting to see with regards to deployment partners? Are telcos happy with multi-vendor arrangements or are we starting to see a preference for single vendor led integrators and integrations? Sushil? Perhaps we could start with your thoughts on this one. Telcos happy with a multi-vendor approach. Do they want more like a one lead, one lead point of accountability or are there more factors involved here

When it comes to stack or multi-vendor scenario? It's a very wide question. Multi-vendor is kind of inheritant as part of the technology itself is a nature of the stack. So when you do open ran, you are probably looking for a third party server supplier cas supplier application supplier and SMO supplier. So that's an inherent nature of the technology itself. So the data stack has to be a multi stack and that's probably what all the operators prefer. We have taken that path where we go and individually contract with all the suppliers and make sure that we get best of the technology, best of the price and get best of both world in terms of technology and commercials aspect. But when it comes to the network wide deployment or multi-vendor radio suppliers, that's where it becomes a little different question, right? Do you want to have that kind of probability where you have six different supplier, maybe not necessary because open ran as an architecture itself now allow you to disaggregate between the top end application software versus the infrastructure layer.

So on the infrastructure you already have a multi choice. However, on the top end application stack, now technology give you option to go single vendor, which gives you a scale and give you economy of scale, you probably have a better cost of ownership with a single supplier. So a lot of operators are going into single vendor direction when it comes to the application stack. However, it also gives you flexibility to pivot to a different supplier at any point in time. So since you have that flexibility now to quickly move from one supplier to other supplier in pretty much real time now, there is no need to have a multi-vendor network when it comes to application at least. So I personally see that as a stack having multi-vendor mix. However, on the application side, most of the operators going into the single vendor duration.

Great, that's really clear. Thanks for that definition, how you see the makeup there and what it actually means to telcos. Robert, what's your thoughts on this and are you starting to see trends emerging?

Yeah, it's interesting. I think there's a certain amount of refinement happening in Oprah ran over the past 18 months or so. I think we've gone slightly away from the dream of I can plug anything to anything and settled into a more pragmatic view which says well actually I want to plug some things into other things that work. I still get my choice of vendors, but I'm happy to narrow that down a little bit where the industry is meeting telcos halfway is really in establishing ecosystems and pre choosing partners that will independent companies that will work well together. So this is subject of a report we just put out on ecosystems in open ran because what's interesting about that is that the difference of lead if you like vendors in each case are not necessarily just alternatives of the same kind. So we're seeing different formulations around either hardware players or application software or radio providers and so on.

So it's interesting to see how that is meeting this need for the industry, which is always concerned about system integration. If we're going to disaggregate things and have open interfaces, who's going to put all that back together? Who's going to validate that again? And that's where we're seeing I think as a pragmatic response industry to say, look, we'll take on some of that burden for you and including groups like the Telecom Infra project, which again is an industry collaboration, they're trying to address that area. So I think what we are seeing is we're not done on the whole cycle yet, but we are seeing a consolidation into it being sure there's some individual choices, but operatives feel more comfortable when they can see an ecosystem in front of them and buy into that, even if there are choices within that. So it's an interesting development.

Absolutely. Thank you very much, Robert. And Randy, what are your thoughts here? What are you seeing?

Well, I think there's obviously no doubt that the integration effort in deploying O Ran is a critical factor. I think carriers are, from our perspective, carriers are wanting and willing to be the integrator as they move forward so that they can drive this at the speed that they want. I don't see a trend where there's a third party integrator as of now. That doesn't mean it can't in the future at the moment I don't see that. Along with that, with the carriers taking more of a lead in that integration element, I would say that in terms of the ecosystem, we see vendors, we know that we must work together and so we're doing that in a very willing and transparent collaborative manner across the ecosystem. I see that and experience that regularly with all the multi-vendor partners that have to contribute in order to have the O ran market succeed. So I think that element of things helps in the effort required to do that integration and so I expect that to continue and only get better as we move forward.

Great. Good to hear Randy, thank you very much for that. It brings us to our final question. It's been really apparent during our conversation here, this market is evolving incredibly fast still, it's certainly not stagnant. It's a heck of a lot going on and a lot more still to do. However, it does appear that many operators are taking a cautious approach to deploying Open ran. We hear from research firms that are halving and reducing revenue forecasts of Open ran, especially in the short term. What do you think is the reason behind this caution and how can we accelerate Brownfield commercial deployments? Sushil, lemme come across to you first for your thoughts.

Reducing market share for Open ran, as you mentioned Guy, I think it's not necessarily has anything to do with Open ran. What we are seeing is overall if you see globally the 5G deployment are reaching their completion and for operators to adopt a swap of their existing equipment or adding new equipment, that has to be a logical reasoning or a reason that justify the expense of adding or adding that cost of introducing a new technology or solution. So I don't think so operator globally are cautious or skeptical of Oran as a technology, but overall what I say is there is a trend of overall reduction in investment, especially when it comes to radio access technology with 5G deployment nearing its completion. So my comment would be that it's nothing to do with open ran as such. It is just that the deployment from here on will be much more pragmatic and much more business driven than the technology aspiration driven.

Yeah, absolutely. I get you. Thanks for those observations. So Randy, what are you seeing? Do you agree that this is part of a wider picture of toco spending and we shouldn't just take open ran in isolation here?

Yeah, I would say I would agree with Hil on that. I do think that we probably all as an industry want to see open ran faster in that regard and I think there always has to be some kind of catalyst for a technology change as actually I think Sushi mentioned that earlier with respect to O ran. If carriers are looking at the detail of the progress within the industry, there's a number of different catalysts to encourage adoption here. And so if they really look at it closely, there's a TCO element in terms of improvement. That performance we've mentioned is as good or better than traditional. There's innovation and competition and of course the operational ease of cloud native technology. I think that alone is a reason to do this. Getting carriers really prepared for the evolution to six G when we get there. So there's a lot of work from that perspective and benefit of moving. Now an interesting report from Analyst Mason, I think it's an interesting selection of data there that the CSPs provided themselves. I think it was 41% said that they would speed up their deployment of RAN if they could. And so if we look at this, I think the industry wants this to happen and so we are ready to make that happen. I think the more carriers that deploy, the more confidence there'll be by the rest of the market and I think the ecosystem and market are ready and I say let's roll in the deployment.

Well we all support that advice. Randy, that's great. Thanks very much. Robert, do you want to come in with some final thoughts here as to is the time right and how we can accelerate Brownfield's commercial deployments?

Yeah, love to discuss this. It's a case of the 5G market sneezes and open RAN catches a cold. The difficulty is there is a near term slowdown as referenced in wireless network build out, but you can't hold that tied back eventually. Networks need upgraded routinely and so that cycle is part of how Open RAN is being normalized if you like. It's becoming part of that typical thing. The thing that most wants to break out of, in fact, it is still a gate that it's got to go through. I think there's a challenge with operators, even those who are the pioneers from a bra field point of view continue to, their strategy has always been to continue to do what they're doing as well as do open ran. So there's no barring perhaps TE us and their strategy. Recently all Broadfield operators are doing hybrid strategy on that and that begs the question, well what is it that Open Ran has to do?

I think Randy's touched on some really key points there. We've proven the parity thing. The next thing is what can an open ran do that a conventional RAN just can't do? So some of that is commercial access, access to innovation, easy to upgrade and so on. But I think when operators start seeing their results from Brownfield at a business level, they see that lower GCO showing up in annual reports. They see the effect on launching services to customers and bringing innovations to customers. That's when things will start to, I think really accelerate that momentum to address that question, what can we do to accelerate it? We've got to show results in ways that are meaningful at a business level and ideally meaningful at a customer level. Open around could certainly do that. You look at the amount of innovation going on experimentation and things like break and performance management and those are straight to the heart of all those top level concerns, costs, customer experience, all that good stuff that tugs like to talk about. When we see those kind of results bubbling up as a direct consequence of Open ran, that's when extra momentum will come into the market and we'll see more growth.

Great. Thanks Robert. Great insights from all of you, but we must leave it there for now. Although I'm absolutely convinced we will continue this debate during our live q and a show later today. For now though, thank you all for taking part in the discussion. If you are watching this on day one of our open Ran summit, then please send us your questions and we'll answer them in our live q and A show, which as I said is coming up later. The full schedule of programs and speakers can be found on the TelecomTV website. And don't forget to take part in our poll. Goodbye for now.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

As we have seen, major network operators are now exploring open ran systems for improved performance and greater innovation along with cost reduction opportunities. But where is the market at the moment and what will the adoption of open ran look like by the end of 2024 to discuss this, I'm now delighted to be joined by Matteo Fiorani, head of Distributed Unit and Infrastructure at Ericsson. Hi Matteo, thanks for joining us. So it has been an interesting last year for Ericsson and the wider industry, especially in open ran. Matteo, could you give us a quick summary on what's going on? What are the key drivers in the market and how is Ericsson addressing these?

Absolutely. I'm delighted to be here. We had a tremendous progress in the open ran space in the past year. I can mention first of all that we have made a lot of progress with our key customers in the industrialization of Open ran. Of course, one of the major achievements was the contract that we had signed at the end of last year to get with at t to bring open ran to the market together and explore new technologies in a partnership. But it's not only about that, we also made a lot of progress in relation to new technology areas. For example, we have released our SMO platform, of course Erics Orient intention automation platform. We have announced that mobile Congress that we are working with 14 different aaps vendor that will build aaps on top of our open platform to create a strong ecosystem in this space.

We also announced that we will be part of the new alliance, the AI ran Alliance together with SoftBank and Nvidia to explore the potential of AI in ran. We have a very strong partnership together with Intel where we have a tech hub in Santa Clara where we are exploring new open ran technology and bringing the innovation forward in this space. And we are working with many other customers to bring open ran into trials and into commercial networks during this year and the next years to come. So a lot of exciting news, a lot of progress in the open ran space. We think that all the technologies of Open ran, the cloudification, the open interfaces and the open management, the orchestration system are maturing and we are there to industrialize all these technologies in the years to come.

And if you can tell us more about the key elements of Open ran, what main changes can we foresee as part of the cloudification? You mentioned a stepwise approach to a cloud native ran software.

Yeah, that's an excellent question. So there are many definitions of open ran and when we at Ericson define open ran, we mostly consider that is composed of three different technology areas. There is the area of Cloudification that includes hardware and software desegregation and also the capability of running the ran software as microservices and adopting cloud native principle in the ran software design. So that is one aspect. The second aspect is the adoption of open interfaces, most notably the adoption of the open frontal interface. That is the second key technology area of open ran. And the third one is the open management and orchestration system that includes and real time ran intelligent controller that would enable ran automation but also new type of use cases including the possibility for service differentiation, monetization for operators. So these are the three key technology areas that make up open ran.

And as said, clarification is one of the three key technology areas is extremely important. We at Ericsson are addressing it in two different ways. First of all, we have brought into the market back in 2021, our cloud ran product, which is a fully cloud native implementation of the round software. And that compliments our traditional product called purpose-built ran that is based on our hardware asset. Cloudera is fully cloud native and embraces the concept of cloudification and hardware and software resegregation, but we are not stopping there. We are also bringing cloud native principle in our purpose built ran software. And over time we'll introduce concept like microservices and DevOps also on purpose. And this would enable us among other things to make some of the software modules common in between our cloud and product and our purpose viron product to maximize our efficiency, deliver features faster to the market and making sure that our customer will always have best in class features and functionality no matter if they choose to go fully cloud native or if they want to stay on a purpose built ran product.

As you mentioned, open interface plays an important role in a future open network and by this I am referring to frontal interface in particular. When can we foresee interoperability with third party radios?

Yeah, open Frontal is definitely one of the most important interfaces in the OR architecture. There has been a lot of progress in the standardization of the open frontal interface. So first of all, I would like to give a little bit of history on how that standardization has happened. So when the OR Alliance started with the standardization of the Open Frontal interface, there were two main flavors of the interface that were specified. One was called the Cut a Flavor that was mostly designed for remote radio units and the other one was the cut B flavor, which was mostly designed for massive volume radio units. The CAT A is fairly stable, it's a very good interface. The CAT B solution was not fully optimized, especially for uplink performance for MAM O products. And this has been over time recognized by the OR alliance community and a lot of work in the last two years has been done to improve the specification to target improvements in the uplink area of the mammo systems.

And last year or alliance has come to an historical agreement to uplift the specification and introduce a new uplink architecture to address this problem. That for us has been an important trigger because it means that now the OR Alliance has a specification that allows to adopt the interface in all the different radio segments with full performance and capabilities. And that has been for us an important trigger to decide to introduce the open frontal interface in our entire portfolio over time. That means that we will support open frontal interface, standard compliant in our purpose-built ran software as well as in our cloud and software and in our radios. When it comes to interoperability that of course that requires an extra effort on top of the standard specification because it requires system integration effort and also a plan on how to do the lifecycle management. We expect that this would start soon. We are already working with some partners and we are planning to release commercial solution during this year 2024, and we'll continue in 2025 and onwards. And what we see is that the first step will mostly be integration of the remote radio units and massive IMO will be added over time.

Speaking about flexibility, choice of cloud and hardware platforms and ease of rollout, what is your view on system integration of cloud ran solutions? One that ultimately killed the business case?

That's a very good question. System integration of cloud software on top of hardware and cloud platforms is one of the most complex aspect of deploying an open ran fully cloud native network. But it's still a very important aspect because of course what we want to ensure at the end with a cloud ran solution is portability. So we want to be able to port our software baseline over different hardware platform and over different cloud platform. This flexibility is one of the biggest benefit that the cloud and architecture brings. So we need to have a good solution on how to tackle the extra complexity that is driven by the system integration on hardware and cloud platforms. And the way we are planning to address that at Ericsson is in two ways. The first is that we will work on preintegrated solution. So we are creating an ecosystem of partners including hardware vendors and cloud infrastructure vendors, which we work with very closely so that we can integrate our software on their platforms before we go to the customers and with the plan that we will go to the customers together so that the operators would have a solution that has been preintegrated so that the large part of the complexity of the system integration lifecycle is already take can care.

So the pre integrated solution is the mechanism in which we address to a large extent the system integration complexity. Then obviously each operator has its own ways to deploy the Nectar can preferred products and solutions, so there will always be deviation. So it will not be a one size fits all, even if we do pre-integration. This doesn't mean that every operator would use exactly what we have Preintegrated. We'll have to make adjustment on a per operator basis in that space. We are planning for integration services that the operator can purchase in order for us to help them to adjust and make the necessary deviation to make the solution fit a hundred percent to their network. Through these two concepts, pre-integration and integration services, we plan to tackle this extra complexity driven by the system integration.

Network management is another key area in Open ran. Can you take us through the development in this area and how will Open Networks be managed to include both cloud ran and an installed base of purpose-built equipment?

Yes, this is a very important area because as we go into 5G and as we go into open ran and we add open ran to existing purpose-built ran networks, the complexity constantly increases. So this complexity cannot be managed manually by personnel. We need way to automate processes for configuring the network, monitoring the network, and doing improvements in the network. So this must be automated. So innovation in the management and orchestration space is extremely important. One way to address it is through adopting the OR and SMO concept. SMO stands for service management and orchestration, the OR and SMO is designed to address this increased complexity through automation. And Ericson has launched an SMO product that is called EIP, Ericsson Intelligent Automation platform. That is and based on the OR and SMO architecture, including a network manager and orchestrator and non realtime intelligent controller. These different components will enable automation of the network and will enable the operator to manage different type of networks, including both purpose-built ran and cloud on in a consistent way, giving the operator a single pane of glass to manage the entire network no matter if it's purpose-built or cloud native. And on top of it, the operator would have the possibility to add a apps that will add additional control loops on top of the traditional ran control loops to drive new services and enable better service differentiation, making the network overall more programmable and also enabling 5G monetization. So the innovation in this space is very important, both to keep the cost down through automation, but also to enable new monetization opportunity through a apps and added on services.

And looking ahead, what needs to be put in place to deploy an open ran architecture at scale and where do you see the industry at the end of 2024 in terms of open ran adoption and maturity?

Yes, we see that open ran is being adopted globally. I think that we are moving forward with the adoption of open ran. We are working with many operators in this space, so we see a great momentum around the adoption of open ran. It's a process, it will take some time, but we expect that during 2024 we will focus on a lot of large scale trials with some of the key and main drivers from our customer side. And in 2024 we go full scale in large scale commercial deployment. And beyond that, in 2026 expanding also the number of operators will be starting adopting this new technology as it becomes more mature and solid. An important aspect when going into this journey, especially for a company like Ericsson that has a large install base with many operators based on purpose built ran, is to think about the coexistence of cloud and an open ran metrics with traditional purpose built round metrics.

Most of the operators that will introduce the open ran technology from Ericsson will actually have also our purpose built around. So they want to have consistent way of deploying the solution when they have this mix and this type of hybrid metrics. And this is what we are putting a lot of focus on by enabling efficient coordination solution between these two technologies as well as a single management solution that would enable the operator to have a consistent network view, including both the purpose-built ran and the cloud ran. This becomes extremely important to make sure that we can in industrialize open ran and make it access a success for our customers going forward.

So lots to look forward to in the open round space in 2024 it seems. Matteo, thanks for joining us today and sharing your insights.

Thank you very much for having me here today. It was a pleasure being here.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

Hello, you are watching the Open Ran Summit part of our year round DSP Leaders Coverage. I'm Guy Daniels Avenir is one of the leading proponents of Open RAN and its virtualized network architecture with work dating back to the early days of X ran Who Better to give us a progress report on the current state of play of Open ran and the lessons learned so far in what is still a relatively short timeframe. Joining me now is John Baker, SVP of business Development at Avenir. Hello John, really good to see you again. Now during this year's summit, we have been looking at the advances made to date on Open RAN and its deployment as well as considering its prospects for the next couple of years. Can we start by identifying the progress of Open Ran and can you give us an update as to where we are as an industry?

Yeah, great to be with you Guy and certainly as you say, it is been about six and a half years since we really got into this open ran venture and with about six companies that really formed the basis of X ran that, which then moved into the Aran Alliance. And as such we have now over 127 companies in 21 countries actually participating in the open ran ecosystem. And the initial criteria for Open RAN was to bring new system vendors as an alternative to the two trusted incumbents. And as such, today we have over seven new system end-to-end suppliers in the open ran ecosystem. So I would argue strongly that today Open Ran has been a success within the vendor community and in the operator community.

Well, let's talk about that ecosystem, John, because Central to Open RAN is the support of a broadened engaged ecosystem that covers technology companies through to apps developers. Is open run succeeding with this goal? Where are we today in terms of ecosystem development?

Yeah, I think we've certainly got all of the segments and I think I broadly classify the segments as the remote radio units, central units, distributed units, and then into the R, which is the new area of development going forward. But within each of those categories, I think you've probably got between 10 to 20 companies that offering product, which is Ang compatible. And Avenir alone is integrated with 14 plus different radio vendors over the last couple of years. And then as of the end of last year, we've seen both Ericsson and Nokia really stepping up and starting to take the open round journey. And to that extent, pretty much every trusted vendor in the marketplace is now on the open ran train.

Well, as we've heard, a huge amount of work has been done to get open, ran to this point. All eyes are now on commercial deployments, especially around Brownfield sites. What's your view on the current adoption of Open ran?

Yeah, I think first of all I would say, as I've always said over the last few years, it's not a revolution, it's an evolution. And the adoption of Open Ran is really sort of based on expiry of existing customer contracts and new frequency bands becoming available. And from an avenue perspective alone, we've seen deployments and contracts being led with the likes of Doce Telecom with Vodafone VMO two Dish in the us, which is still the largest and the fastest open RAN deployment has gone out there with over 20,000 sites today supported by Open Ran software. Momentum is gathering and we still see new operators coming into the deployment scenarios on a weekly, monthly basis. So we expect that to continue as existing incumbent vendors contracts expire and operators make their decision between non standalone 5G and standalone 5G.

And there's obviously a lot more to come John, but we've seen so much already. What have we learned then so far as an industry? What are the key learnings from getting open ran to this stage?

Yeah, I think the biggest one is vendors and operators have learned to work together and that's a huge step forward in the industry in terms of speed of innovation in which you can bring new technology, new interfaces, and new vendors to the table and prove that partners can work together and compete at the same time and rapidly solve problems that may exist in terms of the integration process. And we've also seen that in the standardization world with the N Alliance rapidly bringing new specifications together and bringing 'em through the Etsy adoption process. And what this is showing overall is that with Open Ran, we've really broken the generational labels effectively that have been tasked such as two G, 3G, 4G, where every two, three years you come out with another generation of technology going forward. With Open Ran being the basis of a six G architecture and a six G platform, there is absolutely no reason why operators are working on the generational cycles anymore. You're going to see new technology solutions, new features, new applications coming out as and when operators and technology companies can actually innovate. So I think it's a foundational change to the ecosystem, which we're going to see the benefits of going forward for a very long time to come.

Well, let me bring it to another point, John, because a lot's being said about the comparative merits of Open Ran versus more traditional ran. Now that we have data from a large number of trials and from early commercial adoption, what's the feedback so far on the performance of Open ran?

Yeah, so I think in terms of the major deployments and the tier one operators that Maven has been involved with, we're certainly seeing that Open ran performs equally well, if not better in certain areas then close ran. And so from that perspective, from a performance perspective and a future parity perspective, we could argue that we are there, we're equal, there should be no differentiation in any of this. And from a security perspective, open RAN is proven and shown to be equal in a from security perspective. So a lot of the early arguments that came out there from a number of the large incumbents about the weaknesses that have all been proven wrong essentially. And so it's now providing a strong platform to move forward on for next generation technologies.

Well finally, John, there've been a lot of positives as we've heard, but we know we're not there yet. There's still work to be done on Open ran. What would you say are the main challenges that still need to be addressed by the industry?

Yeah, so there are two major challenges that need to be addressed, certainly from a vid perspective. We've been very vocal about a couple of these. One is actually product certification. I think as you see in the ecosystem, there's 18 plus otics that have now been defined in the open ran ecosystem. But in reality you've got a question whether Otics can actually carry out standardization from an accreditation perspective. Can you go and get a product approved in one otic and then that approval process is accepted on a global basis? So we've got some teething issues there in terms of accreditation of laboratories and commonality of approval processes across TIC Labs. And then the other sort of elephant in the room is the definition around what is A is cu, which is being leveraged by the current incumbents to try and keep some exclusivity in the marketplace.

Just explain the background of that is that the great thing about OR alliance is that they didn't actually specify how you build a DU or a cu. The bad thing about it is they didn't specify how to build a CU and a du. So what you are left with is an operator to actually specify all the interfaces that are necessary on a common product or the industry self regulates to the extent that all of the interfaces defined in the ON architecture are actually available in those over round products. What we're seeing is certain vendors trying to keep proprietary interfaces in the products as well as adding open round interfaces to the extent that those products will again give vendor lock in the marketplace. And I think the industry is grappling with that issue to define what's the minimum configuration of a du, what's the minimum configuration of a cu. I think on the fronthaul side with the CAT a CAT B interfaces, I think we are good in terms of those fronthaul interfaces. But from an industry perspective and the operators avoiding vendor lock, they need to be very careful about making sure that the r and m interfaces and the necessary fronthaul interfaces support both forward development and look after the legacy development that's already done. Otherwise we're just going back into another form of vendor lock, which was caused in the industry about 15 years ago.

If that happens, we end up negating all the positive work that's been done in Open ran, but we know the industry's trying to get their arms around it and hopefully that will get resolved fairly soon.

But let's hope so John, it's going to be an interesting 12 months ahead, but we must leave it there for now. Good talking with you again, and thanks so much for sharing your views with us today. Yeah, absolute pleasure.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

How AI can help safeguard businesses from cyberattacks | TelecomTV

In the past few years, reports from across the globe have found an alarming increase in cybersecurity threats, especially as companies and societies move to a more digitalized world. Verizon business reiterated this in its latest Data Breach Investigations report. Now let's find out more on these findings from Philip Larbey lead of the Verizon Threat Advisory Team for emea. Hi Phil, it's a pleasure speaking with you again. First off, your latest report rate alarm on the level of cybersecurity incidents found and also breaches confirmed in 2023, have these increased compared to previous years. And what do you suspect are the main reasons for this trend?

Yes, I mean, it's a great question. The data breach report that we issue, of course, is based upon the data that we collect from is current 94 countries and about 80 contributors. So from year to year, the size of the dataset that we have will be different. And the great news about the 2024 report is that it's actually double the amount of data that we've actually seen in the 2023 report. So whilst it may not be an indicator of the level of cyber incidents that are occurring globally, certainly we know from the day-to-day activity of what our teams are handling in terms of customer incidents, the forensics that we're doing, yes, there's no question that there is a continual increase in the volume, overall volume that we tend to handle. But the actual report itself, I think the one thing I can say is it's more qualitative this year because we have a substantially greater size of data that gives us really good insights in terms of, as you said, the geography, where the incidents are occurring, but also from what we call a vertical sector perspective, which commercial sectors are we seeing being targeted?

Where are the incidents being successful? And we certainly can see some changes. Probably one of the key things for this year is actually some additional contributors that we have to the report in 2024, which includes some very key, what we call local competent authorities, and they're the authorities to whom mandatory reporting of cyber instance must occur. So for this year, it's given us a very, very interesting insight into the volume of instance that are being reported because of things like GDPR and that's given us a slightly different picture to where it was last year.

And how do cyber attacks vary by type and the motivations behind them? And is this region specific?

Yes, very much so. Certainly what the 2024 report is telling us that from what we saw last year was of course the very serious nature of ransomware attacks. That is still incredibly prevalent. We saw it somewhat leveling out of the volume of ransomware attacks last year across all different sectors and all different geographies. But one of the very interesting dynamics that the 2024 report shows us is we knew that there was an element of ransomware or ransomware attacks where there was what we call a double-edged sword. There was a secondary extortion dynamic that was beginning to appear and that was steering data from organizations by threat groups and then having a second extortion to stop them, pay that extortion to stop them making that confidential data public. When we actually take that extortion dynamic, which is growing in addition to the ransomware levels, which have remained relatively the same as last year, but the extortion dynamic has certainly seen as take a leap in terms of how from a proportionate basis, ransomware and extortion is now pretty much a third of everything that we're seeing.

The other dynamic is, as I mentioned earlier about the mandatory reporting to some of the contributors of the report, and sometimes there is a significant focus on the external threat that is coming into organizations, but this mandatory reporting is actually very clearly unveiling how much of an internal risk actually exists. And we talk about miscellaneous error and that encompasses a number of things. Misdelivery sending things inadvertently to the wrong ity misconfiguration, which is just the human error of configuring some of the security environment incorrectly, but also the susceptibility of individuals to things like social engineering attacks. Now when we take all of those into account, this internal error dynamic is actually now getting almost as much as the volumes that we see within ransomware and extortion. So ransomware and extortion is about a third. This internal error has jumped from around about one in 10 of the breaches that we see to almost one in three, so about actually about 28%.

So the report is very much a reminder this year of really what that internal error dynamic is as well. The third most serious dynamic that we're dealing with is really what we call business email compromise. That is a way that threat groups are able to compromise organizations email capabilities or service, and manipulate those email accounts so that they can induce payments going out of the organization to their own accounts. And again, we've seen a very significantly increase in that. So they're predominantly sort of the key type of attack types that we're seeing. And from a geography perspective, we're actually seeing them very much everywhere.

That's very interesting. And you mentioned the human error diving into the landscape in the EMEA region. Your report suggests that the human element in breaches continues to be significant. In your view, what are the reasons for this and what improvements can be made there?

Again, it's extremely good question because the human person is quite a delicate dynamic in that from one day we can do something which can be very logical and very sensible, and the next day, for whatever reason, we can do something that is completely different and would appear crazy. The threat actors know that the human person is susceptible in different circumstances. And Covid pandemic, when everybody was working at home, showed us that they had almost a completely different security psyche. So the second dynamic here is that the security infrastructure that most organizations operate dealing with the human person and its ability to do so many different things on different days, that's far more difficult for technology to actually be able to deal with. And the threat actors know that. So they play very heavily upon the weaknesses within the human person, the susceptibility to, for example, in phishing, making something look very real, that it's genuine and inducing them into clicking on something. So as much as the threat community can use, the frailties of the human person means they've got better chances of succeeding in their attacks. So they're very clear about where they can use the she and person in different individual phases of the attacks that they're currently undertaking. And certainly the trend that we can see over a number of years tells us that prevailing upon that human element is actually causing their attacks to be incredibly successful.

So on that matter, do you see a rising need in the use of AI to assist with protection from cyber attacks?

Oh, I don't think there's any question there. Absolutely. Yes. And we're already beginning to see the introduction of AI in addition to machine learning, particularly at the very first phases of when security infrastructure is alerting that there may be something going on within their environment. So whether they're using endpoint detection and response that creates alerts for just as an example, that usually goes to a security operations command, a SOC as it's called. And historically, that's been a very manualized process of dealing with those alerts to actually identify whether they're true malicious or whether they're false positives. The introduction of AI now that is available at that what we call level one type of instant response means because of the learning from all of the things that have gone on in the past, it means the automated process with AI means the ability for the infrastructure to respond through triage is so much more quickly. And we talk about something called mean, time to respond. That's how quickly, of course, can you respond to these errors. And we're seeing these new applications and capabilities that bring in AI at that level one area is significantly improving that meantime to respond.

So AI is increasingly used by companies, but is it also increasingly utilized by criminals as well in the digital space? And are you concerned its role will become more integral to future complex cyber threats?

Absolutely. There's no question. And we do cover AI within the 2024 DBIR this year in the context of how is it being used by threat actors and the likes of criminals. We're certainly seeing with so much emphasis that's now on the likes of generative AI chat GPT for example, we're certainly seeing how threat actors are using that type of AI in the social engineering type of attacks. So when they're preparing phishing emails or pretexting, then they're using that generative AI to make the social engineering attacks far, far, far more realistic. What we are not seeing is the use of AI in the actual continued ongoing process of an attack once it's actually within the organization. So is it likely to come in the future, I suspect, yes, we will begin to see that, but there's no evidence in the data that we've had certainly this year or last year that shows that there's any significant use of it in the scope of attacks.

Well, that's good to know. Phil it was a pleasure finding out more about the latest insights from Verizon Business on cybersecurity attacks. Thanks for joining us.

You're very welcome. Thank you very much for being here.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

Vodafone’s Mabel Pous-Fenollar on network automation | TelecomTV

You are watching Telecom tv. We are joining from Future Network 2024 in London. Now I'm delighted to be joined by Mabel Pous-Fenollar, Global Head of Digital and Zero Touch Operations at Vodafone. Hi Mabel. Thank you for joining us today.

I'm part of the networks team in Vodafone. So I have the digital and zero touch operations within network operations. We have a vertical looking at autonomous networks for operations, working with the other verticals to see how we get into the right autonomous network level. So we do that across our footprint. So it's a vertical group function that we do that across our European market.

And so automation I assume is growing in importance for Vodafone. Can you share more about your challenges and your goals in terms of automating the network?

Okay, so let me start with the goals and then we come to the challenges afterwards. So in Vodafone, our goal is to reach towards what we call zero touch operation as much as automation as possible. And you might have heard of the level of autonomy. We believe that different areas and domains will have a different level of autonomy and we're looking at how we can make autonomous networks both for the fix as well as the mobile technologies. Our goal is to reach zero touch operations across our technologies, across the different domains as well. The access, the dashboard, the core, the services domain, and across our footprint.

In addition to that, one of the goals to get into the enablers for that are very much related to the technologies that you bring. And we heard today a lot about those enablers, the data, the ai, the genis, but also the software development and whole networks serving towards software development. But the other super important part is the people and the processes. So it is super important that we actually change the way that we do things. We upskill our teams to be able to bring with the new technologies, autonomous networks, and bring autonomous networks in the legacy technologies as well. And then least but not last is the processes. So we're seeing with the new technologies like SDN 5G SA open ran, a lot of autonomous comes embedded with a lot of continuous integration and continuous deployment part of it. So super ascension that we also change our processes and the way that we do technology and with that goal.

So our goal is to create a networks of the futures by bringing our autonomous levels towards zero touch. And the challenges we see, again, very much related to the pillars that I just mentioned, technology, we see a lot of really, really good progress both from the network as well as on the IT domains with gen ai. So we don't see that as a main challenge. Data quality is one of them, but also we see the challenge, the culture effect. So how we bring our organization along to make that change. So digital is a transformation and this is what I will say one of our main challenges as an industry.

You mentioned data quality. How do you try to make the data as clean as possible and to get the best actionable insights based on that?

So we have a very strong strategy and we partnered with Google to build the data data and to make sure that we have all the data for the different markets in a commonplace.

What we see is that there is areas where the data is more rated and the quality is higher, the areas that we need to enhance the data, at least the areas where we probably haven't used the data before and we haven't experimented with the data. So we see that it's both is an education to us to make sure that the people who insert data, who use data, keep data clean, but also we see new technologies that help us to make sure that we purify data in that aspect. So it's both in terms of how do we ourself use the data and make it relevant and better quality as well as how we use technologies to do that porion and clean the quality of those setting. Taking pictures, we were talking earlier on inventory for telco is one of the key areas where data is not that purify and how we can take different data in broad to make sure that the data quality gets better.

And so how would you monetize the data going forward? Once it is clean and of great quality.

We see different aspects. So one of the key things that we see is that it is super essential that we use the data internally, that we use it to do the things to improve our customer performance, to do better efficiency. And we have already experimented that in our areas internally and now we're in a position to also monetize that. So to help our enterprise or to put a disposition of our users data that will help them to have a better service or in the case of enterprises to create new areas of business for them. So I will say we're looking at both internally, how we create those products and then how we can expose those process to our partners customers to monetize that data. In the IO Ts space, we see with some of the enterprises in healthcare, in logistics, the data is quite valuable for them to manage their business and to simplify their business, but also to offer to the ultimate cost to add if they're doing B two, B2C, all that files.

We're at Future Networld in London. I'm with Fahim Sabir, he's director of Network on Demand at Colt. Fahim, great to see you again. Thanks very much for taking the time to talk to us. Now, in general, in the industry network APIs and the exposure of network capabilities has been a really big topic in the past year or so. Where is Colt in its network? API journey? I mean, this is something you've been working on for a while, isn't it?

Yeah, I mean, we've been actively involved in this topic. So a number of years ago, we actually started the initiative with at and t and Orange in meth. And since then we've been going through the whole exercise of defining the APIs, developing the APIs, and now starting to onboard customers onto those APIs. And it's been a real success. I think the work that's been done there has been really, really important, and it seems like they're now starting to get some traction and then a good number of organizations that are now starting to implement them,

Right? Yeah. But I'm sure it's not an easy process. You can't just go, oh, I'm going to expose some APIs now. It must take, there must be quite a big run up to this, quite a lot of moving parts as it were.

Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, besides defining the APIs, it's all of the implementation, all of the mapping. I mean, in our model, what we've done is because we've built it on top of our network on demand platform, we've been trying to enable full end-to-end automation. So theoretically somebody can basically use the APIs and they can have a live service within five minutes from starting that interaction with us, which is it's great achievement. But I guess the biggest challenge that you have with the whole API conversation is more with the partner. So when you go to a partner, you can't just tell them, here's a bunch of APIs, please start using them because on their side, it's an IT project. It has to be budgeted, it has to be planned. Business cases have to be written. So the run up to actually getting an integration live is actually quite significant.

But what we've seen is standardization has definitely made a lot of that project easier, because better if they've done a standard based API before, it definitely shortens the amount of time more about, well, actually let's just point it and then test it and make sure it works and maybe do a couple of tweaks to it rather than a full-blown six months, a hundred thousand euro project, which is obviously a lot more difficult to justify, especially depending on the volumes, because in the past, all of the integration has been done based upon volume. So I would integrate with a supplier that I'd buy 10 circuits from a day, and I wouldn't integrate with a supply where I buy three circuits a year. But now that balance has starting to shift. So yeah, fascinating area.

Okay, so what is the end result for the customers down the line? I mean, does this just make their life a whole lot easier and it must improve the customer experience in many

Ways? Yeah, I mean, that's the aim mean. Obviously there's two sides of this coin. So the operational cost is clearly one of the areas where we need to focus. We're in a market, which is the price erosion is a very, very big thing, but also from an end customer point of view, there is a massive difference in inexperience because there are no manual hands that these things have to go from. So they get an answer quickly in terms of a service that they want to buy, they can buy it straight away, and if there's automation within the partner themselves, it can get delivered in near real time. Yeah, I mean, it's great like

That. So you've mentioned automation there quite a few times, and that's a real big theme at this event, and this is something Colt's been working on for quite a few years, I know, and you started going down the cloud native route pretty early as well. Where are you in terms of automating your processes and to what extent have you been using AI applications to do that?

Right, I mean, yeah. Okay. So a couple of questions. So in terms of automation, as you said, we've been down, we've been going down the automation journey for a number of years. We have introduced our network as a service platform on call on demand. Our SD-WAN offering also is a co-managed offering, so customers can go online and adjust their sd-wan themselves. And yeah, it's been an interesting activity, to be quite honest with you. I think generally speaking, compared to the market, I think we're a little bit ahead. We've gone through the challenges. We can see others that are going through the same challenges, the challenges like data quality and trying to deal with different generations of network infrastructure and the such. Yeah, I think that basically you have to plan for automation in order to make automation easy for yourselves. Otherwise you can't just take existing processes, existing products, et cetera, and just try to automate them because every bit of work that telcos do have been optimized for manual work.

Yeah, and obviously I'd like the other side of it is the cloud native, which is an interesting expression in itself. I'm not actually sure what cloud native really means. I think, yeah, it means different things to different people, but I mean in terms of actual virtualized capability, in terms of last year, towards the end of last year, we launched our on demand virtual router capability. So you can basically stand up an internet connection with a router, which is a Juniper router in the background running on an NFE stack. And it's fully orchestrated end to end. The aim is to now carry on that path and just basically introduce more and more functions that customers can implement in the core of the network so that we don't have to deliver appliances. We take away the cost of that, and not just that, but the customer gets it the moment that they want it and they can resize it to bigger ones, smaller ones without having to worry to in terms of space and power and all the other fun stuff that customers typically have to deal with when you deliver hardware appliances.

So yeah, we're moving in that direction in terms of our software platform, fully microservices, fully micro service based, completely deployed on Kubernetes and CICD, and basically all of the appropriate techniques and tools that have been used from a software development point of view. I think we've established that pretty well, and it's working wonderfully for us in terms of AI itself. AI is another one of those topics that's always really interesting. So cutting through the fluff between the AI washing if you like, and actual ai, whether it's good old AI versus generative ai, I think we're pretty early in that journey. We're trying to feel our way around it. We've done a couple of proof of concepts. So we did one proof of concept that was based around a network on demand platform whereby we would automatically scale bandwidth of services based upon previous customer behavior.

So if we realized, let's say for example, that customer decided to, they maximize their bandwidth users at 5:00 PM every day. So we would actually figure out they would do that, we would tell them and why it would actually update the bandwidth or increase the bandwidth that time and decrease it, let's say for example, eight o'clock where usage kind of tailed off. So we had a bit of a play with that. It worked pretty well. We also have looked at some sort of predictive fault detection in our network, so monitoring certain characteristics of the network, like abnormal power usage in core network devices and the such lights to try to predict when something was going to break so we could fix it before it broke rather than after it break. So those are the two use cases that we've experimented with so far. Neither of them are in production yet.

Yeah, I mean otherwise, from an organizational point of view, we're in the process of rolling out generative AI capability to the employees across cult. So to help with productivity and the sites and all of the work that we're doing with regards to any sort of systems updates in terms of a, we have initiative going on at the moment called cult io, which is all around a refresh of our core B-S-S-O-S-S platforms. And the AI requirement is absolutely core in those activities so that the systems are helping to manage tickets and manage accounts and provide the right sort of advice to the users that are using them to help them basically make sure that we're doing what we can to delight our customers. So that's what it's all about. So we've got an industry leading NPS score, and our mission is to not sit on our laurels in that respect and just continue to basically push the envelope in that respect. Yeah. Mean, but relatively early in the journey. Lots of interesting stuff to look at. Yeah,

Definitely. Now, of course, the other side of the picture here, which you were mentioning before when we were chatting before this interview, is that it's not just how cult is using ai. You've got your enterprise customers are using ai, and that in itself has an impact on you as the service provider and partner.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think over the last couple of years we've gone through a couple of generational shifts. So obviously the first one is the move to cloud computing basically changed the whole profile of how the network was being used and everything was basically then starting to go towards the cloud. Internet connectivity became more important as one of the primary mechanisms for accessing SaaS type services or even ias, PaaS type services as well. So we had that step. We had another step, which was the covid step whereby basically the office, the enterprise building became less important as a center of users. So customers were being distributed kind of tied into the emergence of SSE and the such technologies like that. And I think AI is the next generational shift. So it's kind of interesting. There's a number of questions that need to be asked.

So first of all, who is going to own the GPU file? I mean, that's the key one. Are we going to see the likes of the hyperscale cloud providers that exist in the market today? Is it going to be them? Is it going to be a certain manufacturer that basically builds GP? Are they going to become a cloud provider in themselves? Certainly it's something that could happen. So are we going to see a shift in terms of where the traffic is moving in that respect? Expectation is the fact that sensors from an iot point of view are going to become more important because now you can actually start to do something useful with the data that they actually produce, processing that data. So rather than you could end up in a situation whereby you've got different types of data all the way from occupancy data, which is just like a numeric feed that basically hits once every whatever minute.

It's just a one bite every minute. Or you could go for a full four video that's being pushed over towards the cloud and all of that data needs to be consumed. Will it get processed locally on the provider edge, in the provider core in the cloud? So you basically will likely have different steps where that data will actually get consumed. And also you can also think in terms of generation of content as well. You say if you look at the gen AI type stuff, generation of text, generation of video, generation of imagery, the customers going to want to, our users are going to want to download that stuff back to their machines. So you have that requirement as well. So I think what we're going to see is we're going to see quite a lot of change in terms of where the hotspots of traffic are going to move to because of the whole way that AI is being used to process data.

Yes. And have you had any customers ask about GPU as a service or something like that because that's starting to crop up now?

So not in any conversations that I've been involved in. I'm pretty sure there's always conversations happening at Coles, so I'm pretty sure somebody will have. And then, yeah, I guess the question is where is that GPU? I mean, you can have it on the customer's site in, I am careful not to mention UCPs and the such because that turned out really well. But I mean, is it going to be the next generation of UCP type technology edge type technology or the such? But yeah, you can definitely see it happening because you need that sort of power to process that sort of quantity of data.

Yeah. Well, things are moving pretty fast. So just in the past year, the number of the use cases and business models around this have evolved pretty quickly. So I'd expect by the end of 2024, we'll have a completely new set of services, a lot of new ways of working and a lot of different demands from the enterprises as well. So look forward to catching up later in the year and finding out what's been affecting. Col of course, is a much bigger company now as well. There's a major acquisition, so you've got greater scale, more and more customers to engage with. So that must be pretty exciting in itself.

Yeah, I mean, at the moment it is pretty much all hands to the pump trying to basically move forward with the integration. I mean, the integration is at multiple levels. So there's a cultural integration at the people level, which is regarded in our organization as being the most important part. A lot of acquisitions, mergers fail because you've got two separate cultures coming together and not enough work is done to actually put it together. But then also at the technical levels, integrating the networks, integrating systems, well actually migrating data into Colt's core systems. So we have one network, one core set of systems, one team basically coming together. And as you can imagine, there is a lot of energy going into that activity, and I think we're making good progress. I think we're on plan

On that. Well, I think you've got a management team that's very focused on all of those issues and not leaving anything behind. So that seems to be the way things are working. Fahim great to talk to you. Thanks so much for joining us.

And let's speak again later in the year and find out how things have evolved.

Yep, let's do that. Thanks very much.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

Critical, but often overlooked – it’s time to talk antenna | TelecomTV

Hi, I am Tony Poulos and with me today for some antenna talk is Aleksis Anterow, who is the CMO of Huawei Antenna. Hi Aleksis, and welcome. First up, could you give me some background to the role antennas playing today's networks?

Sure, I'm happy to do that. I would like to take the opportunity to highlight the importance of antennas in the modern network because antenna has the single unique role of making a wireless network. Wireless. The antenna is the component that connects the base station site with the physical world, the smartphones or the cars or whatever it makes the wireless network wireless.

And what key insights can you share with us regarding antennas and the role they are playing in intelligent networks?

That's a very interesting question because intelligence is of course a trendy topic and people might not intuitively think that antennas as a relationship to ai, but my view is that AI will actually be a very fundamental key characteristic with a strong link to antennas. So AI and antennas will naturally fit together and be needed together in the future. But before digging into the ai, I would maybe like to talk a bit on a higher level in the industry about today's situation. And right now, today, green is a very strong focus of antennas. I told you when the start, that antenna has a critical role to connect the base station with the smartphones. And green antennas help operators get more results with less resources, better performance, better connections with less energy consumption. So this is, I would say today the strongest focus in the industry.

And what new key insights can you share with us regarding antennas and the role they play in intelligent networks?

That's a very interesting question because AI is obviously the key trend topic today, but people might not intuitively understand that antenna and AI has actually a very strong link together, will have a strong dependency on each other in the future. AI will be a central part of antennas in the future, but before moving to the future, maybe it's wise to look at where we stand today in terms of antennas. And today, green is really the key attention, I would say on antennas.

So what is the current state of green antennas in the mobile industry? Where are we at?

Green antenna or antenna as a very critical component in the network has actually been established the industry as a key enabler to make networks greener. And tens have a very central role in achieving green networks. And this can be seen on multiple levels. First of all, there is an operator alliance called n and N has provided a white paper called GFN Green Future Networks, where green antenna is actually one of the key recommendations for operators, how to make green energy efficient networks. And secondly, I meet operators, global leading operators on a daily basis in my work. And I can see with my own eyes that green antennas is really the main selection of operators today. It is the new baseline solution, I would say in networks because green antennas provide more results, more value with less resources. And the whole industry, all vendors are moving in that direction towards green antennas. Huawei, we are a pioneer. And our green antenna portfolio, I'm personally very excited to say this, but our green antennas were for the first time ever actually in the industry awarded by GSMA as the winner of the global best mobile network infrastructure. So in my view, this is really a key recognition of the important role antennas have in networks and the impact an antenna can have on the full network performance.

Well, we touched on the relationship between antennas and AI in the network, but can you tell me some more about that?

Sure, definitely. I talked first a little bit about green and that keeps being a very strong trend. So the question is how do we go from green to greener? What is the next step in the evolution? And right now, one topic that is very central and very critical is intelligence in networks and network intelligence will drive new requirements and new direction for antennas. At the same time, new antennas will enable, will become a fundament of network intelligence moving forward. So there is, let's say a cross synergy, a link between antennas and network intelligence. That's what I said in the start. AI antennas will be connected in the future. And right now we are in a point of time where 5.5 G is a key topic. So we have the standard there and we have the technology through AI coming together at the same time enabling things like native green networks, native intelligence moving forward.

And from an operator perspective, these things can enable, as I mentioned, greener networks, higher performance in the networks, not only at one point of time in one location, but continuously in every point of time, in every scenario, and everything done in a very cost efficient, very smooth and fast manner. And to come back a little bit on what is the role of an antenna in the network antenna is you can say that it's like the hand in the network that reach out from the base station and touch the physical world. And in an intelligent network, you need to make sure that the hand points in the right direction, you reach out to touch what you want to touch. And to do that maybe you need the ice. So you can see the environment. And today's and antennas, they are blind devices that are static devices. Without getting too technical, a traditional antenna is once installed and then it's forgotten. You can say we need to upgrade the whole antenna portfolio. We need to create a new generation, we need to make antennas that can be agile, that can be dynamic, that can provide visibility. So to make a long story short, in the era of ai, in the era of network intelligence, we need to move to introduce the next generation of antennas from first generation antennas through green antennas. And now we need to introduce next generation.

And what direction will antenna renovation take over the next few years?

I think you can already imagine what the direction is. The direction will be related to 5.5 G drivers such as network intelligence, native green networks, antenna, in my opinion, will become really a part of the fundamental for the modern next generation networks that is being pioneered, being started to deploy only today. And to do that we need to introduce a concept. We can call it antenna digitalization. What do I mean by that? I mean that antenna need to go from a simple mechanical device, a static device, a blind device to something modern, agile and with sensing capabilities, et cetera. So I would like to highlight three things that are important, the three key points for the next generation antennas. The first one is sensing antenna need to have capabilities to provide information about where is it located, where is it pointing, what is environmental parameters such as the climate, for example, what are the physical environments? Things like metal bars, new buildings might obscure or block the connection from the antenna. So antenna needs to become visible and to come back to ai. AI is about big data, a lot of data inputs. And with this input you can build models or create something new.

What we can talk about in networks corresponding part is digital twin. And in 5.5 G, we introduced something called run digital twin. And this antenna digitalization enables better, more accurate run digital twin models. So antenna can provide a better network virtualization. Secondly, we need to have the possibilities to remotely control antennas. You need to be able to move the hands as a metaphor in the network to make sure that the antenna points in the most useful direction, not only at one point of time, but dynamically, continuously. This is something that, for example, through AI or automation should be possible for the operator to automate. So we always at any point of time, in any location, get the best performance. And if I then look a little bit more into the future, the next step could be things like reconfiguring the antenna. Let's say you have the hand pointing in the right direction, but you need the right tool for each situation. You need to change the tool. Maybe the corresponding metaphor in antennas is that you need to change the pattern. For example, you need to go from a wide coverage to a very narrow coverage, maybe from a horizontal to a vertical. And this agility in the antennas enables operators to very efficiently automated with intelligence tailored antenna solutions for every single scenario. It brings modern agile networks with a significantly higher level of performance.

So Aleksis, so there are any final key takeaways you'd like to share with us?

Certainly. And to make a complex story simple, if you should only remember one thing out of this, talk about antennas and future network. It is antenna digitalization. Antenna digitalization will be the key to unlock the full potential of future network intelligence. And this will require a new generation of antenna solutions. So essentially today we are opening up a new chapter in antenna evolution moving forward. And this is task and opportunity not only for us but for the whole industry, I think to elevate network functionality in the future.

Well, I keep thinking that we've overlooked antennas for a long time. We're always talking about the network as a whole. So I really appreciate the time you spent with me today and letting me know more about antennas and what we are looking forward to in innovation in the future. Aleksis, thank you very much.

Thanks a lot. It was indeed a pleasure talking with you.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

Hi, I am Tony Poulos, and today I have with me Kalvin Bahia, who is the Senior Director of Economics at the GSMA intelligence. Kalvin is responsible for delivering economic analysis on a range of topics including spectrum policy, regulation and competition. And he's previously worked at ocom and the UK Competition Commission. Welcome Kalvin. The GSMA has launched the 5G connectivity index. What is GSMA's purpose in publishing the index and what do you think the 5G index means for the industry?

Thank you very much, Tony. Absolute pleasure to be with you today. Very good question to start off with, so just to provide a little bit of context, at the end of 2023, there are over one and a half billion 5G connections worldwide, which given that it launched in 2019, makes it the fastest growing mobile technology to date. We've seen a lot of policy makers, governments, as well as industry players doing their best efforts to launch and drive 5G forward. So the motivation and objective behind this index is to provide policy makers, governments, and also the mobile industry and wider ecosystem with a tool to track 5G development in each of their respective markets. We felt that an index was necessary because there's lots of different aspects to 5G. We can think of it in terms of 5G coverage, the use of 5G services, how affordability is, how good the consumer experience is. So bringing all of those together is what our objective was in designing and building this 5G index.

And what can policy makers and regulators find out from the 5G index?

Hopefully the way in which they can use this index is to track 5G development in their respective countries. So I'd highlight two things in particular. One, they can see how 5G is developing and performing in their markets compared to other countries, whether it's neighboring countries or others in their region. And also I'd say more importantly, because we've encompassed so many different elements of 5G, they can use the index to focus on the things that require particular investment or policy focus. So to take an example, it could be that 5G coverage in a country is very high, but maybe the adoption of 5G is limited or maybe the use of consumer 5G is quite high, but something like 5G FWA services are more limited. So the index can not only allow policymakers to track 5G development, but it can allow them to really focus in on where the bottlenecks are, where the areas that they really need to improve on.

And what were the key findings that came out during GSMA 5G index study?

Well, obviously there's many insights and so I would encourage any viewers to visit the 5G Index website, but I would call out a few in particular. So first of all, we see across all countries where 5G has been deployed, it's developing a much better consumer experience than previous generations. If you look at the countries that are in the index in many countries, 5G is delivering 5G is developing speeds that are more than 10 times faster than 4G often due to the assignment of new spectrum bans. We are also seeing 5G becoming more affordable, both for the 5G data plans and devices, which is really important if we're going to achieve the objective of making 5G accessible for everyone. So for example, if you look at emerging countries, the majority of 5G devices being sold are less than $250. So that's very important as well. Another particular finding from the 5G index is that 5G fixed wireless access, FWA services is a growing and important use case.

There are a number of countries where we've seen significant adoption in, for example, Australia, Germany, Q eight, and the us, and that's going to be very important in terms of providing high speed fixed services to those that are underserved by other fixed services like fiber and cable. So those are what I would characterize as the positive developments from 5G Index. I would however flagged that if you look at the 5G index performance across countries, there's room for improvement pretty much across the board. The index scores are marked out of a hundred, and the highest scoring country is Q eight, which is 68. Most of the countries are scoring less than 50. And so in every country there are at least three, four areas to improve.

We've obviously got the points that I mentioned before. So 5G is enabling better consumer experience, faster services, it's becoming more affordable. We're seeing some particularly with 5G FWA, some new use cases. But the reason why we find that pretty much all countries still have room to improve is that 5G is an evolution and we're very much in the first stages of that evolutionary process. So to give a few examples, a lot of the potential 5G use cases that could drive more usage. For example, on the consumer side, AR and VR use cases, they're still very nascent and still in their early stages of development Going forward, if we see those use cases expanding, then we'll see some changes in the 5G index. The other areas I would highlight in particular are if you look at one of the key expected use cases of 5G, it's really expected to transform the business to business segments.

So using 5G to transform connectivity amongst businesses. We've seen some early examples of that, China being a notable example, but in many countries that B2B segment is also still quite limited. So driving that going forward is going to be an area where many countries can improve and link to that. If we think about how to maximize the benefits of 5G, I'd highlight two parts in particular. So one is 5G standalone, which is required to really realize the full benefits of 5G in many countries or specifically in 17 countries. In the 5G index, no operators have launched 5G standalone. So that's going to be important going forward. And the other part I'd highlight is 5G advanced or what some call five point 5g. This is also going to enable some of the faster and more enhanced use cases that I've mentioned before, for example, on the B2B segment. And as those things are deployed in the coming years, I think we should definitely see some improved performance across the board in the 5G index.

I mentioned earlier about policy makers and regulators, but what are the recommendations that have come out from the index specifically for them?

Yeah, so I think if we think of the things that are required to achieve the things that I mentioned before, so driving forward and deploying 5G standalone, deploying 5G advanced services, delivering some of these newer use cases for consumers and businesses, these all require a number of things in common. So one is, for example, device support within the broader ecosystem, but one requires an increased and enhanced investment. Another aspect for operators is to try and achieve more monetization of 5G services. But what really underpins all of this is an enabling a policy and regulatory framework. And what we mean by that is, well, it encompasses several things, but it includes things like, for example, enabling small cell deployment, streamlining back call, ensuring that operators have access to sufficient and affordable spectrum given the increased data requirements, and also having a competition framework that drives dynamic competition and benefits to consumers. So all of those things need to be brought together if we're to realize the full benefits of the new 5G use cases.

Kalvin, thank you so much for giving us more insight on another great GSMA initiative. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Tony, pleasure speaking with you.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

The integration of artificial intelligence into telecom is shaping core facets of the network. And here to discuss AI's transformative power are Abhishek Shankar, president of Tech Mahindra, Raj Yavatkar, CTO of Juniper Networks, Hugh Crean, chief Architect at Three Ireland, and Jason Hogg, GM for AI ops within the Azure for Operators Group at Microsoft. Welcome to all of you. So I want to start with you, Hugh, because you are actually at the front lines of this process. How has AI influenced customer service and your operations? Yeah,

I mean, the whole area of AI is very exciting, especially for call center. Obviously there's a lot of hype, there's a lot of solutions in the market. Most mobile operators already have some sort of chat solution. Probably the first entry of AI is those chat solutions are now driven by ai. Next generation IVR solutions are, in my opinion, going to be transformative. Many, many of them come with dynamic menus, visual IVR capability and ai virtual assistance. So from a call center perspective, it is going to have a huge impact. It's not even so much having AI agents dealing directly with customers. It's human agents working collaboratively with virtual assistants and automating a lot of the back office tasks that an agent does today with typing up notes, summarizing cases, raising trouble tickets. A lot of that can be automated and the human can focus on, I suppose higher value activity.

So it's an exciting time from an architecture perspective. We are cognizant that we need to move, but move carefully. There's many cases of AI chats going rogue, et cetera. So we want the governance around it. We want control around it. We've all invested a lot of money putting a 360 view of customer in front of the human agent, we need to make sure we keep that for the AI agent. So we don't want different silos of ai. We want to keep it governed, fed with a common data set so we can control it. But yeah, definitely it's going to be an exciting, I'd say within the next year there's going to be a massive change.

So traditionally, if you look at network operations, telecom operators would use multiple dashboards to look at different aspects of the network and try to monitor and troubleshoot networks. That's a very manual labor intensive process. So what we have done is that we took telemetry from all the aspects of the network, starting from end users, network, fabric, network devices. We all collect that in a public cloud and apply machine learning to do correlations across us. So we can automatically find out any animal leads or any troubles. And before those are noticed by the operators, we actually are able to troubleshoot. So one of our customers has publicly stated that 90% of their troubleshooting tickets get self resolved. Nobody has to intervene. So that's the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning that we are beginning to see network operations.

And Jason, how does your company see AI impacting operations as well?

It's amazing. There's probably not an area of operations that won't be affected by ai. The story that Raj just described is very similar to the journey that many of our customers are on. The interesting challenge, of course, is that the journey starts with data helping operators break down the silos that have actually existed over the years by virtue of the data coming through different network functions, not necessarily having great adherence to common standards. And the cloud's a great sort of great tool for actually breaking down the barriers. Within Azure, we've released a new offering called Azure Operator Insights, which is all about helping operator scale of data, get ingested, moved into cloud, get managed using a modern data mesh architecture, enable and supervised machine learning techniques like anomaly detections. You can look for sort of idiosyncrasies and sort of patterns that you may not notice otherwise.

But most importantly, again, similar to what Raj was saying, take the tickets that usually existed in operating operations rooms or customer support teams and actually help validate that the actual issue is real. Make sure that the way it's prioritized is real, and then go back and look at previous RCAs troubleshooting content and actually have mitigation guidance integrated into the ticket so that then your operations seems so much more effective and they're able to actually start thinking about how to actually enable better customer experiences or ideally start thinking about sort of new offerings. Absolutely. So it's very similar

And you have a very unique view from the helm of the ship. How do you see AI impacting the competitive environment?

Sure. So from the helm of the ship, I'll probably throw some statistics to you. What I had an opportunity was to look at several AI proof of concepts, and I just want to differentiate and talk more generative AI and not predictive ai, which both my colleagues just talked about. From a generative AI standpoint, what we are seeing a competitive advantage is really around call centers and customer care. So seven out of 10 experiments today, the way we see globally at across our client base are in the broader customer care contact care space. And about three out of 10 are in developer productivity. But I do think that when we meet next year, at the same time, the conversations will be on generative AI on operations and specifically network operations,

If I may. Yeah, you're absolutely right. But generative AI is not necessarily only for call center. We are beginning to see that in network operations, for example, since you get a natural language interface, you can now talk to the network to query the status or give instructions rather than trying to understand the nitty gritty details of scripts, writing scripts, manual operation. So that's beginning to happen. We are already starting to apply that for our products. And like you said, in a year from now, we'll come back and admire the rate of progress is just amazing.

I think the natural evolution of that will be that the GPT based agents could actually be recommending configuration changes, for example, but you'd be mad to actually deploy them unguarded. And that's why sort of the idea of the copilot sort metaphor with the agent working alongside the AI based agents, maybe making a recommended change the network, but then ensuring that the actual deployment of the configuration change adheres to your safe deployment practices. You've got a phase where to roll it out, test it, stage it, and then deploy en mass. And that's going to be that closing of the loop that we've all been super excited about

For the longest time. I think that's big impacts on the OSS layer. So if you think of traditional monitoring architecture where you get alerts flowing down one direction and a human gets on the phone, raises the alarm, there could be an hour before you call people out. So now you can have an AI agent getting that alert. You can have a number of pre-agreed mitigations steps that can be done to mitigate rero traffic, restart process, kill a server if it's in a cluster. So you could have real time intervention, which would actually prevent the outage in the first place. So there's a lot of potential in the OSS side. So

I think the interesting thing will be to try to, how do we actually start to determine which of those automated tasks or which of those remediations can be done in an automated fashion versus those where you do actually still want human in the loop, so to speak. But

There's also learning component as you said, that it'll start acting upon those in a sort of proactive way. But the process to learn continuously, and if you're a network operator and if you have multiple networks, you can learn across multiple networks. So one learning can be applied to other, which is also very powerful

I think. And the real opportunities are, I think for operators is in general they've sort of operated in the regions that they operate in. And how do we actually take the learnings from one region, share that with operators in another region so that everybody's able to focus the new business opportunities, the new experiences they want to deliver to their customers, I think is the next opportunity. And that's probably something that you are thinking hard about, I believe.

Absolutely. And connecting the tissue Clarence to your question on competitive advantage for operators, I think doing it first versus doing it right, the latter might be more of a competitive advantage than just getting heads on with it. So I think building safety and security and the guard rails around it will be probably one key aspect of competitive advantage.

Probably on the competitive side of us, the campaign management is going to be impacted by ai. So today we're, let's say fairly standard campaign, you get an inbound contact, you've got a pre-agreed offer or next best activity that flashes up to the agent. But in AI that can be a real time decision making based on data history, even predicting what the customer could potentially want. So a lot of potential on the campaign side upsell, cross-sell. It's definitely something that we see happening. Also,

One application of generative AI in that context is today the sales process is through some mechanics like Salesforce where you put in the information you get on a customer call, you finish the call, and then you remember what to put in. But if you're generative ai, you can monitor the entire call automatically populate the Salesforce fields and also rate the call how successful it was. So you can use it for training again. So sales process is going to drastically change and become a lot more efficient.

And Raj, you bring up something really important. Have you contemplated what success looks like? Will that change the way you measure success? Because AI is just like Raj has given that scenario, has really changed the way you can look at data. Well,

My broader view on the industry is that it's a relatively simple industry. Success is adding new subscribers and controlling churn. So as long as we can drive a correlation between basic business metrics, which I think we are all in a very good position too, at least from my lens, from the operator side of the world, that is, but from a Juniper lens, you might want to,

Yeah, I think one change that could happen that you could measure is that today the operator is the way you operate. Suppose you want a new cable service, you want something done for a B2B enterprise connectivity, you file a ticket, it takes two, three days to get the result. But now with generative ai, with the kind of automation you apply, you should be able to do instant on demand service today. The public cloud operators provide that. I don't to Azure and a pilot ticket and wait to here to get a service where I do that with operators. It's not necessary. Generative AI will change that. So that's a big measure of success in market

When it comes to the ecosystem that you all operate in. Do you worry that your customers or partners aren't keeping up with AI and aren't going to be ready for this transformation?

I think it's the opposite. Every partner has the solution that what they're pushing and want to sell. So it's kind of like actually for us it's about actually deciding what is the best solution or is there a one size fits all? Or back to my point about do we have a single AI engine that's got a 360 view of all the channels or do you actually have multiple, we looked at some IVR suppliers recently and one of them comes with all the AI engines integrated in the back. So they found that some of the AI engines were better for sentiment analysis. Some were better for language, so they actually call different ones depending on the use case. So again, that's the potential there is amazing.

I think the interesting thing, I think when it gets to the core network, we've got lots of different network functions being delivered by different vendors. Unfortunately there's not great either adoption of or adherence to standards. And what that ends up meaning is that you end up in this segregated networks with siloed data that actually makes it quite hard. The value proposition for creating generalized AI models is just not there because the people that build AI models almost need to build them for each of the different variants of the functions. And I think unfortunately that's one of the things actually limiting the adoption of ai, traditional AI for operators. So one of the things I'm hoping with 5G, and as we start thinking about with six G, a big part of the movement has to be on operators in particular requiring their vendors to publish schemas, publish test data to enable the broader AI ecosystem to actually start to flourish in addition to the obvious GPT based scenarios that were basically starting to see early days for. And it'd be the combination of the data, the different AI models, maybe the generative ai, the multimodel, generative ai, being able to then integrate with other AI systems that have been built and create the unified view that everybody's hoping and hoping for.

Going back to your question, there's also fomo, fear of missing out. So people are jumping on the bandwagon very quickly, but some functions like call center are low hanging fruit, in my opinion. Some will be harder to achieve and that's where the competitive advantage will be. The people also start differentiating, but there's a lot more that Jason mentions multimodal model. There's so much development happening, the state is in flux.

FOMO is absolutely, you can see it and it's palpable in every conversation. But I think there's one thing which is different about generative AI versus traditional. I think traditional mist, for example, it has been doing machine learning for years. So some of this has already been there. But when it comes to generative ai, my son who's 10 years old, he tells me more about GPT four and its comparison with others. It's out there in the consumer's hand. So a lot of generative AI is ubiquitously present relative to traditional ai, which we didn't know existed, but it always existed in some way or the other.

Yeah, but it's something like MIS ai, which already uses natural language processing, has a head start to start incorporating generative ai because it doesn't take much to do that. That's an advantage and you have to maintain that. But I think to your earlier point, the whole bunch of industries are going to try to transform. I think it's a pace of innovation. We'll decide how quickly we do it.

I think the really interesting opportunity, I think we've talked about sort of the obvious applications making call centers, more efficient operations teams, more efficient, maybe even sort the dark narc and making operation teams more autonomous. The real question there will be the operators have got this incredible opportunity to actually start integrating AI into their networks at the edges of their networks within the RAN and start offering that to enable consumer devices to use AI that they may not have before. And this is where certain mobile Congress this year was the AI ran alliance was actually announced. And so part of their goal is to start integrating, ran into more parts of the network to actually create new business opportunities, new communication, what would you call it? Opportunities for operators to actually enable

And AI for ran the alliance you mentioned is important because RAN is a very expensive resource. People have spent billions of dollars to enable 5G, and they're not being able to monetize it. We all pay the same amount for our iPhone service plan, no matter it's 4G or 5G. So introducing new services that take advantage of AI is imperative. It's really important. And

The other opportunity is from a sustainability perspective, one option is to better understand where the power is needed and power down the cells. But a better option would be to actually be enabling new scenarios for consumers that you can monetize. So that's where things will get really exciting in the coming years.

Well, we are definitely at the beginning of something big and we're in good hands with all of you. So thank you very much for being with us today. Very welcome.

Thank you. Thank you.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

You are watching TelecomTV. We are joining from Future Net World 2024 in London. Now I'm delighted to be joined by Usman Javaid, Chief Products and Marketing Officer at Orange Business. Hi Usman, thank for joining us.

So you had a panel discussion earlier today on the role of AI in the telco industry. What would you say is the most important advice you need to provide to the telco industry about this?

Yeah, so I think first of all everybody believe that AI is going to have a phenomenal impact in terms of how we manage our operations and how we can create new business models. But I think at the same time people are cautious that it's going to take some time, but it's important to get started with the experimentation and that's what at Orange we are doing. So we have started on this AI journey for a long time ago and we are classifying that into two parts. What is what we do as everyday AI and what are the things that we need to do, which is more game changing every day, which is making us more efficient and more productive as an organization and game changing where we can create new business models and create more value for our enterprise customers.

So can you talk a bit more about the game changing ai? Probably this is the area where all of the telco industry is looking at at the

Moment. Absolutely. So I think there are two things. The first thing is we need to think about AI as a new internet. And the reason I say this is because we need to really democratize access to AI for enterprises and that's what we are doing. So what we did, we launched a gen AI trusted gen AI platform, which is making the AI available to enterprises to consume and that is the biggest challenge the enterprise are facing. They want to get on the AI wave but they don't know how to get started and they don't know how to get started in a trusted and a responsible way. So what we did is we provide GPU as a service and LLM as a service as part of our trusted cloud platform for our enterprise customers. Which means that they can either bring their own large language model to the platform which is hosted in our premises, it's fully secure, and then they can consume the LLM and the GPU services or they can fine tune the model where we have partnered with a company called Lights On, which is an LLM provider, a French LLM provider.

And then they can use the LLM from lights on and fine tune that to their specific use cases. And I give you two examples of different enterprises that we have engaged in this software. The first example is Eons region, which is the metropolitan region of Paris, which is 12 million citizens and they want to create a copilot like experience for citizens so they can ask any questions that they have about the city and we are helping them to bring all the documents and the data and make available to the live language model so that the citizens can interact with the different departments of cons. The second example is a large utility customer in France, which is having a lot of field force and once the field force finished their job, they need to do a lot of tapping onto the tablets or some paperwork to complete the documentation to finish the assignment.

And what we are doing is we are creating a natural language interface into their phone so they can just talk to their phone and say, I have been on this job, I finished this job. And that automatically, automatically create a work completion report that is submitted to the workforce management system. So these are a few examples of how we are democratizing access to AI for enterprises. So that's the first part. The second part is as I said, as I said, AI is so the new internet, which means that you need to make sure whatever you offer has got GENAI and AI embedded in your portfolio. So for example, in Orange business we have a history of helping customers with their contact center solutions and now what we are doing is we are creating genai as part of those solutions. So those solutions are way more rich in terms of experience as they were previously.

You mentioned GPU as a service as well as LLM, as a service. Are these already commercially available and what do you see as a response from enterprise

Customers? The response is enormous, right? A lot of enterprises who are really struggling to get started with the AI and gen ai now they're taking their first steps. We have already engaged a number of customers as I talk about EEF cons and the utility customers and we have some other retail customer, we have another customer for example in the retail and they want to understand their customer sentiments and they get a lot of data and feedback from their customer, but they want to really summarize that into some key actions and we helping that to do it. But I think what I really want to talk about is always we have seen that the small medium enterprises are left behind in all those technology waves and mostly the large enterprises benefit from that. And we have seen when it was the wave of mobility cloud, the small medium enterprises are always behind and we want to change that with AI and gen ai.

So what we are trying to do with this trusted gen AI platform, we are creating some package solutions for SMBs. For example, one of the common problems that SMBs face is document management and knowledge management. One employee takes almost four hours a week to find the right document and we are creating some solutions such as a document management solution with gen AI powered. So you can talk to the application and say I'm looking for an invoice for this particular customer for this month, and automatically the invoice pops up. So it saves them a lot of time in terms of doing their day-to-day jobs.

You're also using AI for coral reef restoration. Can you share a bit more about this?

Yeah, that is my favorite example. So just to say a little of background on this, so we are working with a nonprofit organization called AKA and we have launched an initiative that's called Let's Revive. And if you know that 30% of the carbon emission in the world is actually consumed by the ocean and if the oceans are not healthy, we will not be able to consume that much carbon. And by the way, the oceans consume more carbon than actually all the forests in the world. So we work with Tanaka on this coral reef restoration project where historically Tanaka would employ a diver who would go deep in the ocean and take some pictures and come out to understand the health of the ocean. We changed that completely with technology and we are deploying underwater research stations with cameras. They have capability with AI to be able to do image classification and they are able to take the pictures of the coral, they are able to take the picture of different species, different type of fish, and based on that data which is real time connected through our IOT platform into our connectivity platform with hyperscaler.

In this case we're using Microsoft Azure to be able to do end-to-end analysis, the health of the ocean. And that is something that we are really proud of

And it sounds very interesting indeed moving away from AI network, APIs are obviously a very big topic as well at the moment. Could you share some examples of how Orange is opening its network?

I think it's very important. Then maybe we step back and think about our point of view with regards to the generations of technology. I think we have all talk about 5G and then there is sort of everyone has at the back of their mind, okay, what is six G and when it's coming and so on. We have taken a very different approach. We want to move away from this big bang generational approach of technology evolution to a continuous innovation approach, which is where we want to turn our technology into platforms and we want to offer Tesla like experience Tesla car-like experience where you have the best car but then you can deploy software in order to create new feature set within the platform. And that's what we're trying to do is to really ize our technology and then make sure that we can do small upgrades and there in order to offer the right experience.

So within that, as you become a platform play, it's very important to integrate your platform with the rest of the ecosystem, which is where I think your question about APIs comes in and you need to integrate on one side with all the network operators in the world, which is the open gateway is helping us to do. And at the same time, you need to integrate your ecosystem with the hyperscaler ecosystem so that you can open up your APIs to the developer community. So there are a number of use cases that we are developing. I think the more prominent one is using location information to be able to understand any frauds scenario. For example, in the banking sector or on the insurance sector. Maybe my favorite example is for the gaming users using network API, you are able to deploy an end-to-end network slice irrespective of which service provider that the mobile gaming user is using in order to provide a specific treatment and low latency experience to the gaming user in order to have the best gaming experience.

And you mentioned six G, do you think the industry is ready for that conversation?

Well, I think industry is ready but with a different approach. I think wind should come out of this big bag approach as I talk about. But rather we should be ready to ize our technology. And when I say platformized actually it means three layers. The first layer is the automation. We need to make sure that we can create end-to-end automation in our network so we can adopt our network to the needs of the application. The second layer is the software layer. We need to make sure that we can deploy software on the fly in the network for specific needs of the consumers and the enterprises. And the third is the digital experience layer. And I give you the same example of the gaming user. For example, if you're a gaming user, how about imagine you get a popup to say, we noticed that you've been using a lot of gaming experience on our network, we can offer you this new service which is based on network being intuitive to understand your experience. And then based on that we give you a network slice, which is a software deployed in the network to create a new experience for you. And that is only possible for me. This is six G and we haven't talked about any radio upgrades yet. Right? So this six G is about value creation and value creation through a platform and open ecosystem approach.

Thanks Yani. It was my pleasure. Thank you.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

Welcome back to the Digital Support Systems Summit, part of our DSP Leaders Coverage. And it's time now for our live q and a show. I'm Guy Daniels, and this is the second of two q and a shows. It's your final chance to ask questions on the future of OSS and BSS solutions for telcos and especially their integration with cloud services. Now, earlier today we held a panel discussion that looked at deploying NextGen OSS and BSS on the public cloud. We have already received a number of questions from you, some of which were held over from yesterday's show, but if you haven't yet sent one in, you still have time, just use the q and a form on the website. Well, let's now meet our guests who are going to help answer your questions. And joining us live on the program today are Amir Mehmood, director of Solution Engineering at Optiva and Andy Tiller, EVP for Member Products and Services at TM Forum. Hello, it's good to see you both again. Let's get straight to our first audience question because we've got a number of them to get through today. So our viewer asks is the long-term plan of telcos to bring together their siloed OSS and BSS platforms under one partner or hosted service. Andy, what are you seeing in your position at TM Forum? What are you seeing from telcos as what their longer term solutions are?

Well, in general, I would say no, that's not the strategy of most, certainly not of the larger operators. We've definitely seen some very big partnership announcements dating back five years or more. So I remember in 2019 that at and t and Microsoft announced a partnership where at t's IT workloads have been migrated onto Azure, for example. And we've seen many similar announcements since, but those are not exclusive by and large. I would say that all the bigger operators are working with all the hyperscalers and in various capacities, not so much just hedging their bets as taking advantage of the different capabilities that each of those partners provides. And so multi-cloud is very much the order of the day, I think.

Great. Thanks very much. Andy. Amir, what are your thoughts? I mean, the view obviously thinks, are we seeing a consolidation down to one partner, host the service or maybe it's a reduction in numbers?

So see, I agree with Andy to the part of multi-cloud is a reality and I've seen a lot of operators deploying their workloads on a range of cloud operators or cloud providers. But what I want to add here is that for the OSS and BSS vendor space, most tier two, tier three and MVNO operators, they are going for preintegrated solutions. There are still tier ones or group operators who have big armies and they want to develop their own things or they want to choose the best of breed solutions. They have big pockets. But I've seen that most operators, tier two, tier three especially, and MVNOs obviously, they are going for pre-integrated solutions, if not exactly just one vendor solution and hosted on the same cloud. And OSS and BSS sometimes requires specialties, which are with one of the vendors. So we have seen also the partnership model where a couple of vendors are leveraging each other's specialties. For example, Optiva has joined hands with an OSS player, GDI, they are experts in the geographical solutions and the network inventory and field force automation, et cetera. So a lot of times vendors or the RFPs are asking for pre-integrated solutions who have references of joint deployments and pre-integration. So I kind of agree with this statement that the long-term vision is, at least for the tier two, tier three and MBNO space is one vendor or a combination of multiple vendors preintegrated and deployed on hosted on a single platform.

Great. Thanks Amir. Because the question was talking about partners and hosted services, so we've covered both there, but Andy, I'd like to come back to you you'd like to pick up on some points.

Yeah, I think the pendulum does swing backwards and forwards on best of breed versus fully pre-integrated or single vendor and has done for 20 years in our industry or more. But I think there are potentially advantages of both of either option, what the industry really needs, I think is easily integrated, best of breed, and still in our industry that integration is a challenge. And so preintegrated removes the risk of having to get new solutions together and make them work together. Of course, in TM forum, one of our primary missions really is to ease that integration challenge. So the work we're doing with the open digital architecture is really designed to create a composable IT ecosystem, plug and play software components which are very, very easy to integrate. So yes, I think Amir is right that we're not there yet as an industry. So the pre-integrated solutions are very attractive. But once you've built that, having the flexibility to swap pieces out rather than change huge chunks one at a time is something that I think certainly TM forum operator members are very keen to establish.

Great. Thanks very much, Andy. It's going to be interesting to see how these trends emerge and develop over the coming next couple of years. Right? Let's move on to our next question. This one's about use cases. We always get a use case question from our audience, and the question is, can you highlight a practical use case of OSS and BSS data integration in the public cloud and its impact on the customer experience? Amir, have you got a use case or two you could share with us?

Yeah, so I can surely talk about a couple of use cases. So firstly, in the area of customer support, unifying the BSS and OSS data provides insights into potential root causes. And it can also, even using AI and gen AI now it can preemptively take actions to avoid customer issues proactively doing the analysis of the network trends and taking actions that customers don't face the issues which are potentially their issues. And by combining the BSS and OSS, you have a bigger pool of data and you can of course do much more based on that data. Combined insights is a big thing and you can do some real time monitoring real time. And this links to my other use case, which is by doing this digital support systems, by unifying the OSS and BSS, we can significantly improve the customer experience talking about realtime network activation or service activation, realtime billing, realtime view of the customer's tickets, a single view of the customer's tickets. So not having to create, let's say multiple within the operator not having to create multiple tickets for OSS issues or BSS issues. All of these things are much easier when we have a unified OSS and BSS system.

Great. Thanks very much for sharing those use cases. Amir. Andy, did you want to come in on some extra observations here?

Yes. I mean, I think it's to say that public cloud is part of most operators strategy to use to a greater or lesser extent. So there are a very large number of use cases. I chaired a session at TM forum event last year where we had a representative from BT who've been very, very keen and announced publicly the strategy to migrate as much as possible to the public cloud that we also had Deutsche Telecom and we had Orange Poland and all of them were talking about different motivations for doing their transformation migration to public cloud. But generally I think what was coming across was the need to experiment and to work it out as you go along, particularly around the costs. So finops was a big topic. Once you've started to migrate your IT workloads or network workloads to the cloud, you then need to figure out what it takes to optimize the cost. And so it's a gradual process. It's not something that it's a one-time decision and then you put those use cases on the cloud and you're done.

Absolutely, Andy and DTW is certainly the place to be if you want to hear more use cases and up to the minute use cases, strongly recommend it. Next question from our viewers then. What are the main obstacles that are preventing operators from simplifying their BSS and OSS solutions, which in turn would lead to reduced spending and a better service for users? Amir, could I come across to you? What challenges are you seeing?

Yeah, sure. So I would say the foremost issue is the legacy architecture. The applications, the BSS and OSS applications are mostly customized and they have been in the operator landscape for like 5, 10, 15, 20 years. People are used to using it. So oftentimes when we talk about simplifying the BSS and OSS and unifying and migrating to public cloud, the organizational change management is required to basically create a strategy and then follow through and get the benefits people need to change their mindsets. A lot of time just lift and shift is not bringing the benefits so people can get frustrated. The real value of the public cloud or any cloud native architecture will be when all of your applications are running in a harmony and they are using the new architecture framework, they're using the TMF APIs, the ODA architecture, the streaming between the different applications, unified data models. So all of those things are key contributors, and if you don't follow it, that will become your preventing or the obstacles in the journey to the public cloud. Cost is another factor sometimes. So simplification does not come for free. You need to plan some upfront costs, which will eventually lead to the long-term cost saving and operational efficiencies. So I think these are the two main things. Yeah.

Yeah, I'll take that first if you like, guy. Well, I think fundamentally AI relies on data. So access to the data that's stored in those OSS and BSS systems is essential for AI based automation to really work effectively. And that's a challenge for a lot of telcos today clearly. So there is really a need to modernize data architecture, and that's a fundamental aspect of the transformation of legacy OSS and BSS towards more cloud native approach. The technologies are there, event streaming, semantic representation of data, these can all be built into the two B architectures in the transformation projects. Of course, data quality is an issue that has to be addressed as well. We've seen examples where TM Forum members have assumed their data was good and created some gen AI applications, which turned out to be not very helpful because the quality of the data that they trained it on was not really very good. So data quality is a separate issue and data privacy is a separate issue, but in terms of enabling the AI to work effectively, having the data accessible is a key part of the future architecture.

Great. Thanks very much Andy. And as you say, the quality of the data, data security and just getting data that maps with each other as well, that's come up several times during this summit. Amir, let's come across to you and your thoughts about building O-S-S-B-S-S around AI capabilities and what that means for especially gen ai.

So specifically talking based on my experience. So we came up with a gen AI based application for plan optimization and plan creation. Now, gen AI had two angles. One is the data on which you are training the AI model, and as Andy suggested, of course, we need to unify the data and we need to feed the OSS and BSS data in a standardized way, in a structured way, which can be consumed by the gen AI model to come up with the best offering or to come up with the next best, let's say, suggestion to the customer or even let's say provision services provision, let's say network services and do some optimization kind of actions. So for example, if there is an outage going on, provision more resources in the surrounding areas because there may be some higher traffic or underutilized areas can be routed to a different area. So these are different possibilities and unifying this under one system, which is let's say visible to the gen ai, we will basically open a lot of our possibilities.

Great. Thanks very much Amir. This is absolutely fascinating. Let's see what happens over the next 12 months or even less. We still have time for more questions. So here's our next one. From the audience who will be the first to achieve the new DSS digital support systems architecture. Will it be large or small telcos? Will it be greenfield or brownfield telcos, and which types of partners are best placed to help them and do any thoughts from you and your members?

Yeah, there's no simple answer to this one I think, but clearly a greenfield operator has an advantage, at least for a while because they can build their network and their IT systems using the latest technology. So geo in India is a very good example of a TM forum member that has built a cloud native network and cloud native IT systems that enabled them to really be very, very successful. That advantage lasts for a while until their technologies begin to date. So that's only a temporary advantage, but it certainly can give you a really good headstart at the beginning, large or small, that depends really. I mean the larger operators tend to have more resources, for instance, more capability to bring in-house, the expertise and skills in new technologies, software developers, AI skills. You tend to find these more in the larger operator groups. Smaller operators on the other hand, can sometimes be more nimble and get things done quickly. Often you'll find that a larger operator will try new things in one of their smaller opcos. So potentially if you're a smaller operator you haven't lost, you can take advantage of your flexibility to make decisions quickly and move forward with new technologies faster.

Good to hear. Thanks very much, Andy. So yeah, depends on the telco. Great. Let's move on because there's another question that we have received today. Now the question is, the topic of mergers was briefly mentioned yesterday by one of the guests. Yes, it was. What has been the impact of mergers and acquisitions of both telcos and vendors on OSS and BSS development? Have they just added to the complexity? Good question. Andy, can we come across to you first and then perhaps Amir we can come to you?

Yeah, we continually see mergers and acquisitions taking place both on the operator side and also on the vendor side of course. So on the operator side, I would say that whenever there is a merger, you end up with the potential to reduce cost by consolidating the systems and of course to improve customer experience because you want a single view of the customer you want to remove or reduce the number of IT systems that are being used. And there's an opportunity there to design a new architecture to rationalize, consolidate, bring in new technologies, bring in new partners potentially. And that's continuously happening. I've myself worked on projects where in the middle of a project, a merger and acquisition has happened. One of the partners or one of the opcos that we were working with now belongs to another company. So it can be very, very disruptive in the real world, but it is also a motivator for change. It provides an instant business case. You've just got to do it. So I would say overall it it's a fact of life and can be very positive.

Thanks very much, Andy. Amir, what are your thoughts on mergers and acquisitions? And I guess especially from the vendor perspective?

I think m and a is an opportunity for everybody. Speaking based on my own experience within optiva, Optiva has gone through a lot of mergers and acquisitions and it helped optiva, and this is a fact that we have unified our architectures and our portfolio. We have taken the best pieces of the different acquisitions, and finally we have a much better final product, which we are able to offer as a pre-integrated modular stack. So I'm sure even on the operator side, when merger and acquisition happens, there is a lot of opportunity to simplify and to keep the best pieces and to streamline the processes across different organizations. So it's always an opportunity. I think there is no, it is complexity, but that at the end of the complexity there is a big opportunity.

Great. Thanks very much, Amir. So yes, it's complex, but there's opportunities here. It's not negative, all negative. There's positives here as well. Great. Well thanks both of you for those answers. Let's see what else we've got here from the audience. Here's one, what are the best ways to drive innovation in BSS and help deliver efficient new digital support systems? Big wide question there. Andy, do you want to take a stab at that first?

Yeah, I'm going to make a shameless plug for the TM Forum Catalyst program as one way that we really see the industry driving innovation. Catalyst projects are where TM four members come together and they build a proof of concept for some common business challenge that the industry has show how new technologies be applied to solve complex challenges. And it works very nicely because you bring operators and system integrators and software solution providers and consultancies together in a common project where everybody just rolls up their sleeves and gets to work. It's a way to share the cost of that innovation to share the r and d dollars across a wider group. And then the industry presents those at showcase events. And so you can wander around and you can see what others have done. You can go into quite a lot of technical detail about how the solution was created. So we find this as a very important way that forum members work together to innovate together and co-create. So shameless plug, admittedly, but please join TM Forum, join the catalyst project. It's a great way to innovate.

We're fine with shameless plugs on telecom tv. Don't you worry. Thanks Andy. Amir, it's a big question, innovation, how to innovate, how to do better. What are your thoughts?

So I would like to step back a little bit. Innovation at a grassroots level means that you don't have to wait and bringing new pieces of software or new pieces or the new enablers to basically launch new services, you're easily rolling out those changes and so on. So I think the first and the foremost is adapt the new cloud native architecture. If you are running your BSS systems on a legacy architecture where you had to pay hundreds of thousands for a CR and you were doing every four or five years a major upgrade and a hardware replacement project, that does not mean innovation. When you are on the cloud native architecture and when you are following the CICD updates, you can continuously get new features and new CRS delivered in a much easier way, in a much cost-effective way. I think that will bring efficiencies in delivery cycles and bring innovations. Of course, rightly said by Andy, the industry forums like TM Forum, catalyst programs, these are all contributors, but the way vendors are software developers are delivering those innovations to the operators on the architecture wise and on the delivery methodology wise using the CICD, et cetera. These are equally important as well.

Great. Thanks very much, Amir. Well, I think we've got time to squeeze in a couple of quick questions that have just come in in the past 10 minutes. So thanks very much everyone for sending in these questions. We do appreciate it. And there's a question here, Andy, I think I may put you on the spot and come to you first on this one. You may or may not agree with the premise of the question, but let me read it out nice and clearly. Why are many operators who are embarking in digital transformation still looking to keep all their existing processes, products, and models? Does this mindset need to change? Andy, is that a statement you agree or disagree with?

Great. Thanks very much, Andy. Appreciate those comments and insights. That's great. Well, we've covered a wide range of questions on this q and a show. I think we could just squeeze in one quick final question, one quick final comment, hopefully, Amir, let me hopefully put this towards you. And this is a question about cloud providers in latency. We've had a couple on the subject of latency over this past couple of days. DSS on public cloud is a good idea, says our viewer. But are there steps being taken by public cloud providers to reduce latency from the operator's core network to the DSS that's running on the public cloud without that being taken care of, any migration to the public cloud would not be successful. Amir, any thoughts on that issue?

Great advice and good answer. Great advice there. Amir. Thank you very much for that. Well, we have reached the end of our program, so thank you both very much indeed for joining us on this live program. And that is a wrap for this year's Digital Support Systems Summit. Thank you to all of you who submitted questions. We got a lot of questions this year. We tried to cover the most representative ones in the limited time available to us. And if you missed any of our programs featuring all of these industry experts, then you can watch them on demand from our website. We will be back next month for our long running open run summit as our DSP leaders coverage continues. But until then, thank you so much for watching and goodbye.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

So we're at Future Net World 2024 in London. I'm here with Francis Haysom, principal analyst at Appledore Research. Francis, you have been really involved in the agenda here, up on stage obviously in a lot of the sessions. Overall, what's been your main takeaway? What has surprised you or enlightened you at this event?

I think the biggest, biggest thing is actually this show grows from strength to strength. I've been at this event since its first one, I think back in the Inmarsat building, before Covid.

And I think it's always had this wonderful dynamic of a realistic agenda between people are taught, not afraid to say the difficult subjects and the things that work and are not working and to have a dialogue in the industry. And this one, just like last year, and the previous ones has kind of built on it. It's much bigger. I think it's approximately one quarter, one and a half times the bigger as last year, which is great. And the dialogue's been great. Some old friends here as well, and also some new entrants here. As you know, I was at Q con a month ago and it's great to see some more of the kind of software development, software development places, not just Red Hat, but now GitLab as well coming into the fold here. So that's a good sign. So conversation's been conversation has been great. Lots of dialogue, lots of CSPs here. That's actually the key thing. And lots of CSPs not just at the C level, but at the kind of doing level and operational level as well. So that all good.

Now, a lot of the conversations here have been around automation and of course the use of AI in that. It's very noticeable here that a lot of the companies from the vendor side of the fence are the kind of companies that we would normally expect to see at TM Forum events. They're companies that have come from the OSS and BSS world. And for me, I think that's really good as well. But have you managed to get a sense from this event about where that particular part of the sector is going? Obviously automation doesn't happen without the software to enable it. Is that software coming from that traditional telecom software sector or is it coming from elsewhere? Because I've heard more and more from more and more here as well that they're having to do quite or more stuff in-house these days. They can't get it from the vendor community.

I think there's a little bit of the answer as with all good questions. It's a little bit of both on that area. Definitely the vendors that are in the room here are really quite pushing the boundaries in terms of what can be done. As I've already mentioned, you've got the industries, other industries coming in from outside. I think the tension is actually quite a lot of it is do you see yourself as A CSP as being unique and you have unique requirements that need your unique solution. And I think there's always been that sort of tension between you to take something out of the box and use it or do you customize it to your particular, that's been decades old problem in OSS and BSS there. I think that the challenge is to recognize how do we start to use common features? How do we actually do both the CSPs recognize where they are really different and that they're really investing in where they are different and how do we see that they can use common capabilities either from their traditional vendors or from new entrance along the way.

So I think it's neither black one way or white completely the other way. The second thing I think is I think everybody's wanting to do quite a lot at the same time. You've got ai, the generative AI is the next best thing coming in here. And again, there's a lot of demands. I think as we haven't quite worked out, where does gen AI sit within this one? Many in the industry will be looking for standards to define what it is that they do. And again, that naturally lends itself to a kind of bespoke or customized way of doing things. And I undoubtedly believe the industry will start to see more repeatable methods that many of the vendors here might start to adopt. So I think we are in a kind of a difficult business. Lots of pressures on the industry, lots of things that need to change at the time, and that does drive towards a kind of customized view of the world. I think over time the market will mature. You'll start to realize actually I can buy a lot of that capability from the existing vendors or the new vendors. And also I think the important thing is actually realize the CSPs need to be innovating, but it's not necessarily innovating by replicating what vendors can bring them all today.

Right. And do you think in general, because we've been talking about shifting IT workloads, telco, IT workloads onto public cloud platforms for quite a long time. Have we reached a point now where that's just a given for a lot of these companies or is there still work to be done?

I think there's work still to be done there, but again, I don't think it, it's another technology issue, both a business model and a business thinking, operational thinking on it. I think the industry is still not, we are used to building networks for boxes and as we move to cloud native, and we've seen this with virtualization in a lot of cases, we recreated those boxes. But now as virtual virtualized boxes, cloud native means more than box. It means that a function that is here today could be over there. Tomorrow, could be a hundred over there in 10 minutes. It could be down to two tonight. And that's a very different way of thinking about the model. And I think that plays a lot into the way that telco seeds, public cloud.

But something in the industry say, look, public cloud is just far too expensive. And in one sense, they're right for a network that is very pre-planned known capacity, no number of subscribers that will be using a certain area known services, et cetera. The model of telco already knows how to capitalize that now capitalize as a data center or an edge data center. They're very good at doing that one. I think the public cloud, if you look at a lot of where public cloud has really taken off in other industries, it's where you don't know which services are going to be, you don't know the type of capacity you will need today, tomorrow you could have a service. It is the old TikTok. TikTok starts as a small thing and suddenly it's billions of billions of transactions. That thing cannot be done on a CapEx maximum size problem. That's where the elasticity of the public cloud comes into. So I think there's a lot of thinking that needs to go in where we're a steady state, we're probably going to end up as hybrid and private cloud because that makes absolute sense. But where we want, we are uncertain we need that and we're going to get a business benefit from paying. You are paying for that elasticity, but if you can work out what the business benefit that comes from having that elasticity, it's a very different business model, business success criteria.

And we've got quite a long road ahead of us in that. I guess the industry will follow in due course. Okay. Well Francis, great to talk to you. Good to see you.

At this event. And it won't be long before we are in the same place again for a few other industry events.

Look forward to seeing you soon.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

Hello, you are watching the Digital Support Systems Summit, part of our year round DSP Leaders Coverage. I'm Guy Daniels, and today's discussion looks at the issues around deploying NextGen OSS and BSS on the public cloud. What are the technology and business drivers behind this move? What additional support capabilities does the public cloud offer to telcos? And is there any value in creating a unified cloud-based layer? Well, to answer these questions and more, I am joined on the program today by Ling Li deng director researcher at China Mobile, and also vice chair of the Etsi NFV Solutions group. Amir Mehmood, director of Solution Engineering for Optiva, and Andy Tiller, EVP of Member Products and Services with TM Forum. Hello everyone. It's really good to see you all. Thanks so much for taking part in today's discussion. So first of all, I'd like to ask why should telcos even consider deploying their OSS and BSS on the public cloud? What are the benefits? Amir, can we perhaps start with you and get your thoughts on this?

Yeah, so I think telcos, like many other commerce and entertainment industries must consider the benefits that the public cloud offers. O-S-S/B-S-S systems are critical IT systems and they're often the best candidates for quickly moving to the public cloud because they are sitting more in the data plane, sorry, in the control plane. Whereas some of the other network elements which are sitting in the data plane are comparatively harder to move because there's a lot of bandwidth and back and forth involved. And public cloud surely brings a lot of benefits like scalability, flexibility, effectiveness, you can benefit from the investments that these hyperscalers are doing in terms of security and compliances, et cetera, et cetera. So these are all the benefits and we have seen most telecom operators have started the journey already, at least in the North America, in Europe, almost all operators have some assets on the public cloud and the rest of the world is also following. Yep,

Great. Thanks very much for that introduction, em, we've been following the telcos moving to the public cloud for some time now on telecom tv and this is all part of this transformation. So Andy, lemme come across to you. What are you seeing at Team Forum and one of the benefits that you advocate for such a move?

Well, I think Amir is right that the industry has decided that public cloud is a safe environment and is now really getting engaged with the big hyperscale cloud platform providers. The involvement of Microsoft and Google and AWS and other public cloud platform providers in TM forums. Work has increased greatly over the last three or four years or so as those big hyperscalers have seen the opportunity in the telecoms market. And I think from the point of view of the operators service providers that are migrating to public cloud, it's not just about cost efficiencies and other the traditional benefits of moving to the cloud, public cloud, but it's also about access to the skills and expertise of the hyperscalers, particularly in AI because now a lot of OSS and BSS is being automated through the use of ai and more recently gen AI as well as machine learning and other predictive analytic techniques and the hyperscalers really are bringing a lot of technology that can be plugged in and a lot of expertise in how to use it. So I think that as much as anything now is really driving the relationship between the telcos and the hyperscalers.

Great. Thanks very much Andy. Amir, let's come back to you because I know you want to pick up on some additional thoughts there.

So just to add to what Andy just pointed out, I think public cloud is more of an ecosystem. I don't want to look at these three big players, but it's basically they're enabling a whole ecosystem where there are modern tools coming up using all of these different technologies, analytics, ai, data management, gen ai, they're almost, a lot of them are only available in public cloud, but they're always optimized to run in public cloud. So people may think that we can run those tools in private cloud, but cloud, they're not designed and they're not optimized for private cloud operations. And that's what I think will be a key differentiator. Those operators who are adapting to the public cloud will benefit from these ecosystem third party systems and the others will lag behind.

Interesting. Amir, thanks so much for that. We've heard that assumption before over the past few years. It's interesting that we bring that up now. It's good. Okay, so we talked about benefits, but how should Tecos actually go about this process? Because as we've just heard, I assume that shifting legacy software across is not the perfect answer and that we need to take more of a cloudnative approach here that would appear to be an important element. Andy, what's your advice to telcos? How should they go about this move?

Well, you're absolutely right. That lift and shift on its own doesn't really bring the benefits of using the public cloud. Of course there may be some cost benefits for large scale operations and the ability to scale up and down as needed and those sort of traditional things associated with the public cloud platforms. But I think really lift and shift doesn't give you the full benefits of a cloud native environment. And our industry has been migrating towards cloud native for quite a while now. Most OSS and BSS systems on the market are microservices based and designed for deployment in, for instance, containerized modules on Kubernetes platforms and so on, running in public cloud or private cloud. So the shift to cloud native has been happening in TM forum. What we're very keen to encourage the industry to do is to go cloud native together rather than everybody doing their own flavor.

The tools you need and the ways of working have been quite well established now, but in our industry, unlike the big hyperscalers who have tens of thousands of software developers all working to the same standards and company approaches in our industry, all of our systems and processes are built from many different parties. So multiple software vendors and system integrators and in-house systems. And so if everybody goes about cloud native migration in their own way, that will still lead to a lot of customization, a lot of future legacy to maintain. So we've been developing with our members the open digital architecture ODA, which is a blueprint for the industry to go cloud native together and it provides some standards, not just the open APIs which are now widely adopted, but also the actual specifications of the software building blocks and the abstracted environment in which they run, which we call the ODA canvas. So that's something which has very wide scale support from CSPs, also from our software vendor members and now the hyperscalers who all have their own ODA canvas.

Good to hear. Thanks very much. Andy Lingli, let's come across to you now because if a lift and shift approach doesn't work and a more cloud native approach is required, as you've just heard, there's different ways of going this and telco's got to ensure that it takes the right approach. What's your thoughts on how telcos should go about this move?

Yes, I think going cloud native is actually a new change towards software development and thanks to TM Forum's collaboration platform, we are now actually also in the process of making the ISS and BSS going to collabor native. And especially for these highly customized software system like these supporting systems, I believe that going to cloud native could effectively reduce the development and also the operation costs for these software systems. However, I would also like to point it out that adopting cloud native paradigm does not mean that we have to also move to a public cloud deployment pattern for CSPs, I think especially in my opinion, they need to choose between private, public or hybrid cloud deployment patterns according to their own requirements and also taking into consideration about the local regulation requirements as well. So for example, right now we can see that for some areas around the globe, while the regulation requirements are not that strict, especially for data, there are cases emerging calibration between CSPs with public cloud services type scalers, they're collaborating with OSS and BSS software deployment and even including data and analytics collaboration.

And it is quite advanced and very aggressive I would say. But if this pattern is also applicable to other sales PS or would be prevail in the near future, I think it is still yet to be seen because as I said earlier, the regulations for data management and also service assurance requirements and especially the cost and efficiency like factors actually all needs to be taken into consideration when sales base are choosing the deployment pattern for their OSS and basis systems, even their now cloud native paradigm. And I think for the form two data and service guarantee, these two factories are quite easily comprehended. But for cost and also efficiency factors, there is I think hidden costs from moving into public cloud that are usually hidden by their technical advantages is that by moving into public cloud deployment, it usually means extra cost that needs to be covered in terms of data transmission because you need to transfer your data from your local spots to hype to the public cloud, the data center usually at a remote location there is cost for these data transition and there is also an integration of different processes and also collaboration between different operational teams because public cloud operations stuff and CSP operations stuff needs to collaborating together and these are all the costs that needs to be taken care of.

Absolutely. Thank you very much for that. We have a whole day of finops later in the year as part of our cloud native summit if we feel that's a really important area we need to do more work on. And as you say, every telco has its unique set of considerations here. Amir, let me come across to you because you'd like to pick up, I think on some of those comments.

So basically I kind of agree with lingli and this is exactly the discussions that we have been having with all of our clients in the last five years or so, but I think there are two key aspects to be discussed here. So first of all, public cloud benefits outweigh the kind of, let's say regulatory conditions because as I said, the ecosystem that is enabled on the public cloud, the kind of services and applications which are available on the public cloud are not available on the private cloud. And secondly, the way Optiva has dealt with this, and I think there are other vendors doing the same stuff as well, but I think our journey has been that we are kind of advocating cloud optimized. So our BSS and OSS software is optimized for cloud. While it is cloud native, it can run on a private cloud and public cloud.

In the same way we are trying to reduce the dependencies to basically move the same application from a private cloud to a public cloud, kind of a hybrid deployment where we can have a production on-prem if the local regulation allows or does not allow. And if there is a DR to be done, the DR can be on public cloud. So these different types of hybrid models we've also seen, especially in terms of the 5g, when we talk about ultra low latency kind of use cases or industrial IOT use cases, there's always a discussion about deployment near to the customer premises. So in those cases, again, the hybrid deployment which we are supporting is very handy.

Great. Thanks very much everyone for all those comments. I want to move it along, but emea, I'd like to start with you first if I could. We obviously hear a lot about AI at the moment, but also its associated data aspects. Would a public cloud-based solution create better data integration, perhaps removing data silos and offering a more unified approach for better analytics and for ai? Amir, what do you think?

Yeah, I think a unified data approach is a key element of optimizing the operations and making it so-called digital support systems and not having the silos. So telcos are sitting on a gold mine of data and only by integrating this and unifying the approach, this can become a foundation on which the telcos can benefit the true power of the public cloud ecosystem. And again, I want to talk about this ecosystem because there are a lot of these application providers and we work with a lot of them now who can manage the data in a much better way and there is a continuous innovation going on. You cannot have that continuous innovation in a private cloud or in a siloed environment. We've seen a lot of modern AI and ML tools which are most optimized for public cloud, especially now the gen AI based network optimization, customer support chat Botts are just a few real life examples. And Opti has also recently announced our own gen AI based smart catalog and customer support and customer segmentation tools, which are enabling the market marketing team of the telcos to just talk to the BSS system in a normal natural language. And that system can suggest new plans based on a contextual trend analysis. And this is only possible because we are on a public cloud and we leverage the AI applications from the likes of Google are similar.

Great. Yeah, thanks very much Amir. Andy, what are your thoughts here? Let's come to you.

Yeah, I mean it's right that there is a gold mine of data there, but I think the typical case for most of TM forum's members is that that data is not structured right and it's not accessible in real time, not ready for AI if you like. And so the migration of applications into cloud native environments is a good opportunity to rethink data architecture. The old approach of having master data management in applications and a big data lake for the data scientists to run BI and operational data stores for other purposes, I think this all needs a rethink. AI needs data represented differently semantically in knowledge graphs, we need to use event streaming architectures so that the data, large amounts of data can be accessed in real time by AI running training itself as it works. And these kinds of things require new approaches. There's a lot of experimentation going on at the moment.

Many operators are beginning to use Kafka for event streaming and beginning to explore knowledge graphs. A lot of our TM forum proof of concept projects are using these newer technologies, but I think it's time for the industry to really move to that model. Gen AI is revolutionizing the world because the internet has trained AI to speak, but that's because largely the semantic web has been developing standards from the worldwide web consortium, have enabled data structures on the internet that have enabled AI to speak the data. And telecoms isn't really fit at the moment to train the AI to speak telco. And that's a challenge for us all as an industry to overcome, to move to common ways of structuring data that's really optimized for ai.

Yeah, absolutely. Andy, I think a lot of different industries are struggling with this at the moment. Aren't they getting data schema to work across different data sets? Lingli, let's come across to you this whole issue of data and its application here. What are your thoughts?

I think from a technical perspective, public cloud at present time, yes, they're actually offering the cutting edge, I believe technology that needed to improve our analytics and also JN ai. But as I said earlier, adopting those technology solutions does not mean that we have to necessarily to transfer entirely to a public cloud deployment. Even if some CSPs are actually trying public cloud deployment, it does not also necessarily mean that they will be delegating the data analytics and data mining tasks entirely to the public cloud service providers for data integration especially I think it is obviously for those under strict regulation requirements like CSPs, they must taking the full responsibility for their data. And also there's other type of CSPs, I think some of them are also made announcement and they're getting alliances with each other to actually develop their own industrial adapted big models because they see that their network and service data is actually at the core for their service innovation and for generating more revenue. So for that case, they might also having other types of technology or solutioning collaboration for different type of deployment patterns. For example, introducing toolings at the local sites or collaborating together for introducing foundation model, but with a private cloud deployment pattern to use their Arial data to do the fine tuning for their applications. So I think these are all possibilities. So I believe that the answer to this question is perhaps yes from technical perspective, but not the only way. Perhaps we have better ways and it depends on the circumstances.

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. Lingli, as you say, it depends on the circumstances of the particular telco, but if I can stay with you because there's a related question I'd like to ask here and that is, where do you think the value is in aligning the OSS and BSS technology to create this unified layer, this digital support system solution, and is it even possible to do this on public cloud deployments?

Well, I think everyone would agree that if we have a unified technical stack for both OSS and business would do a lot of benefits to the CSP because more or less, these are typical IT software systems as Amir has rightfully and pointed out. And so by sharing a unified technical stack, could I think considerably reduce the unnecessary expenditure from the CSPs and in terms of hardware, software, operation and costs and also making it more easily and rapidly to do technical innovation because they don't have to taking care of different stacks and having to worry about when to upgrade which and how to get it synchronized. So it will be huge, I think benefits to have a unified technical stack. And I think if a CSP consider moving into a public cloud deployment might very much likely to accelerate this process because migrating to one single public cloud, which says that those hyperscalers actually providing a lot of common infrastructures past services and toolings and that to say that it'll left much less for the CSPs to actually consider taking care of about the rest of the OSS and basis stack, which is typically the cloud native applications only.

But I think that migrating to public cloud is not a necessary requirements. Other deployment pattern could also do that as long as we are moving towards cloud native paradigm and TM and also at CNN, these standards guidelines, and this could also be possible. And also moving into public cloud paradigm is I believe also not sufficient to unify these two technical stack consider the case if the CSB choose to migrate OSS or BSS into different public cloud service providers, different hyperscalers, we all know that they have different technical stack and their ecosystem is actually not compatible with each other. It is quite different from what we have usually do with the standardized sector of the city industry. So if the SB choose to work with different hyperscalers or moving different parts of their systems to different hyperscalers, it won't necessarily help with accelerating the unified stack between these different systems.

Great. Thank you Lingli, great questions raised there. I'm sure Amir you want to respond to some of those, but let's first of all go to Andy and Andy, let's get your take.

Yeah, I was just going to say the traditional layered separation between BSS and OSS and then the network systems underneath was really fine in a world where the network systems change very slowly, but now the network is much more dynamic. It's built from software and so complex services like network slices, the expectation is that those can be provisioned, ordered and provisioned on the fly and assured automatically in this kind of environment that can only work really if there is a holistic design top to bottom. I mean not just OSS and BSS, but integration into the network systems as well. And so really this is one of the fundamental principles in the ODA, the open digital architecture is to think holistically about the design of all of the software systems that are running the business and the network. And especially as the network becomes software, really how that's deployed into as cloud native network functions into cloud environments, whether public cloud or private cloud really it's no different from other software in terms of the lifecycle management of those software components. So using a common approach to deployment, common approaches to site reliability engineering for the network software and the OSS and BSS software just makes sense. It's efficient to do it that way.

Great. Thanks so much Andy. Great insights then. Great work you're doing on the ODA Amir. Let's come across to you, I promise to come across to you on this question. What are your thoughts here? You brought up earlier the digital support systems and the unified layer and that's what we've been exploring here. What are your comments?

I just wanted to add a couple of topics, but firstly what Andy suggested because TM forum is playing a key role here. So most operators, sorry, most vendors are adapting to the TM forum ODA and open APIs. And I think unifying the OSS and BSS stack is a key element which most operators when they're getting the OSS and BSS from two different vendors, this is a big pain point and ODA and the TM forum open APIs. These two things are streamlining the integrations between the two different systems. But again, I just want to look at it from an end-to-end customer lifecycle point of view as well. Because think of gone are the days when a customer walked into a shop and then he ordered a service, maybe the service would be activated in a few days and then he is happy, but now customers are more agile and digital.

So right from the digital marketing to target and attract the correct customers through their preferred channels. And then the customers doing the self-registration via the digital channels of their choice, order management, service fulfillment, network inventory activation, device logistics. So all of these different elements of the service enablement and service fulfillment and even going into the billing and the payments and the customer care where the customers are getting the care from, not the traditional CSRs but more from a gen AI or let's say the contact center AI kind of tooling. So all of these different things work much better when the O OSS and BSS are working together and they're much optimized when it is really running on a public cloud and actually on a single public cloud because we talked the hybrid deployment as well, there is cost involved in moving data from one cloud provider to another cloud provider. So I think the best way is that we have a single vendor who is doing the OSS and BSS deployed in a single cloud platform. That's the most optimum way.

Great. Thanks very much Amir. Thank you everyone for those comments. Brings us to our final question. We've heard the benefits and the reasons why and how to perhaps go about this, but what are the potential drawbacks or difficulties to migrating digital support systems to the public cloud? What should togas be aware of if they've decided to go down this route? And also could a TOCO still run an efficient and modern O-S-S-B-S-S solution locally? And indeed, perhaps we could come across to you for this final question for your thoughts.

Well, I think addressing the second part of the question first and the answer is absolutely yes. As NG Lee has mentioned a few times that whether it's a public cloud platform or a private cloud platform, if it's cloud native, then that's, you're going to get very similar benefits. I think the challenges and potential drawbacks of migration to public cloud are really the same as for any transformation project. The challenges are always about how to do the migration efficiently. There's increased cost initially because you are running the old systems and the new systems, you're trying to create new business value through the migration transformation, you're trying to also reduce cost typically and improve customer experience. So these are the three drivers normally for any transformation project. And the temptation I think is often to focus on the cost because you want to switch off the old systems as quickly as possible.

And so the temptation is just to try and reproduce everything you have in the old system in the new one and then you end up as that being the main driver. I think that the trick with any transformation project is to keep your eye on the new business value and those are the things that are going to drive growth in our industry. The real challenge for our industry at the moment, of course, that the existential crisis almost is how to reignite growth. And so I think in particular, AI offers an opportunity to at least ignite profitability, but potentially also reignite growth with new types of services that are just not possible with manual processes and systems. So I think this is where the cloud migration, the cloud native migration in particular needs to focus. It's how we ensure that we stay focused on the new business value and not just on the cost.

Great. Great advice. Thanks so much for that. Amir. Let's come across to you for final thoughts on this topic.

Yeah, so I think what I have seen personally is there is two things. So one of course Liny also mentioned regulatory and data localization kind of requirements in certain countries. And secondly there is the challenge is resistance to change. Public cloud is a different paradigm and people need to change the way they have been working for many, many years. So I think in order to get it right, the business objectives of this cloud transformation has to come from the top. I have seen in many operators where they try to do it without having a final or an executive sponsorship. That is not the best way. I think the senior management needs to decide that we are doing this and we'll do whatever it takes to do this because there are key benefits and it needs to be a measured approach. We should not just do a public cloud migration because for the sake of it we should know and we should know the benefits and we should measure the success and even make it incremental success.

So bring some benefits today and then in three to five years we'll be in a much better position where we leverage the rest of the benefits as well. And just one more topic, I think the key element of public cloud projects is also the kind of scalability and in let's say the growth. Because in private cloud, you need to replace your hardware every few years and you need to scale the environments because if there is a cyclic or if there's a seasonal traffic pattern in some operators they need to prepare for the full, let's say, full capacity for the peak season where the public cloud is more scalable. So these are some of the key benefits which are only possible when they migrate. But as I said, I've seen a lot of times those operators who don't migrate, they rely on middle management or the lower staff where there is a lot of resistance to change.

Great. Thanks Amir. Transformation project. It's a journey. Keep your eye on the benefits. Lingli, let's come across to you finally to wrap up our discussion and some final thoughts from you because as you've already said, it depends very much on the particular telco and their set of circumstances. And what I'm getting for you also is so long as it's cloud native, that's the most important aspect here.

Yes, thank you. I think I've already said something about this topic. So to summarize, data regulation, service assurance, and especially cost and efficiency, those are the factors I think really needs to be verified. Before that, we could see that public cloud deployment could prevail and just getting more information and for you guys to take away is that, for example, in China, in addition to traditional telecom network services, all the three major telecom carriers are actually leading the market for public cloud in mainland China. But so far as we know that none of them actually considering migrating their own OSS or BSS into the public cloud or even to their own public cloud. I think these are some cases that could also bring to further reflections or other service providers to consider, at least within these cases, our local deployment must have been doing something good or beneficial.

Yep, there's going to be a reason for it. Absolutely. Lingli, thanks for that and to remind you, us about what's happening in China, we're going to leave it there for now and I'm sure we'll continue this debate during our live q and a show later today. For now, thank you all for taking part in our discussion. If you are watching this on day two of our digital support systems summer, then please do send us your questions and we'll try and answer as many of them as we can in our live q and a show, which is coming up a little later. The full schedule of programs and speakers can be found on the telecom TV website and that's where you'll also find the q and a form and our poll question For now though, thanks for watching and goodbye.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

You're watching TelecomTV. We are joining from the FutureNet World 2024 in London, UK. Now I'm delighted to be joined by Jeroen Verbruggen, Director of Architecture IT Strategy and Program Management at Proximus. Hi Jeroen, thank you for joining us today.

So first do you consider your company as a digital service provider and what are your ambitions in this area?

I think yeah, the answer to that would be of course, yes. I think if you look historically, we of course incumbent telecom operator in Belgium. I think already in the past I think we've made significant progress in diversifying that business, growing that business towards some more digital search provider type of company. For example, I think to one of the operators in Europe, which I think that was able to compliment the telco business with a big IT business for B2B and I think a bit more in recent years, I think we've also been to acquisitions, growing a lot our international business, especially in digital identity and communication solution as a service, VR affiliates, big TeleSign. And most recently we also announced our intention to acquire linear CPAs company with mobile. Think also in our domestic markets, especially for consumers, we try to diversify as much reach as much offerings with. Very recently we launched a new app approximately pu, which is really going away from the traditional telco app to a real companion app that consumers can use to manage their telco with actually a range of other digital services to manage their day-to-day life in terms of mobility, their house energy and so on.

Great. And would you say that 5G investments have already made a significant impact on your revenue possibilities and what else can be done in this area?

I think as also I think voice by many periods on the conference, I think the challenge of 5G monetization is still ahead of us. I think we are today where I think many other peak made very significant progress in the rollout of our standalone network leading with that in Belgium, I think we start to see a very interesting use cases around 5G sizing quality of amount in different industry verticals that are very interesting to cool technology, very relevant of our society as well. If you look at the use case in healthcare, in agriculture, in logistics and so on. But I think now the challenge is how do we scale that and make that scalable. I think if you look at today the opportunity for 5G slicing still a very customer specific lot of specific implementation. So the aspect of standardization, scalability, that is still ahead of us.

And could you share some examples of using open APIs in your solutions?

Well, exactly what we are looking at. I think we are convinced to really fully leverage the full potential of 5G and especially slicing and quality on amount. We need to address many different segments from SMEs to S. They can go to markets, maybe they consume directly with us or via their same system integrator or via the hybrid scales. And in order to do that, I think the ability of operators to expose network APIs based on command standards that basically anyone can use to integrate advanced communication services and connectivity in their business applications, I think for me is one of the best ways to make sure we can drive a scalable business from 5G. So very concretely, we're working very hard. I think we already are able to expose some of these camera APIs, for example, quality on the mouse, but we're now mainly working on a platform on how to allow developers where in which context they work to use these APIs in a very frictionless way. And so it's about the right commercial platform, it's about the right tooling for developers to be able to use that in their applications to enrich the experience of their customers.

And obviously AI is the hottest topic right now in the telco industry. And not only what are your plans to implement AI in your operations?

I think we are, thanks to our affiliates at proximus, I think we have internally very big compete incentives on AI and generative ai. So I think we already have plenty of use cases implemented across operations, customer operations, internal operations, network and so on. I think what now, of course workflow on this, what can really make a difference in terms of really shifting the needles in terms of customer experience and profitability via ai, origin ai. I think there especially, we're seeing quite a lot of potential in really transforming the interaction with the customers and really making them allocate our experiences much more efficient. Interaction of customers. Thanks to Gene AI, they say the first results are quite promising on that front.

And what shift do you see in customer demands, especially enterprise customer demands and needs nowadays?

Yeah, I think what I think you see is that I think that we're really in that evolution of we were providing telecommunication services, basically allowing people to communicate with each other, have to at some point get some information from the internet to really a need to integrate advanced communication services in all business applications, in all business processes. So I think that needs to be able to have access to the network in a very flexible programmable way, for example, through 5G slicing. That is really what we need to work on and what I think customers will expect from in future.

Great, thanks Beth. That's very interesting. So possibly a mixed bag so far, John, lemme come across to you. Do you see similar things from your perspective?

Great, thanks for those alternative ideas there John. We might develop those in a future program. Well worth exploring more. Soumava, would you like to come in on this point raised by our viewer there about you are our vendor representative on the panel today. I guess you're going to say yes, you understand the needs of the telcos with next generation and systems, but it is complicated, isn't it when you're faced with entrenched legacy silos and equipment.

I totally agree with what Beth and John came up with and what they set the points that they set forth. I just wanted to add or build two things on top of it. The legacy already has a database and like Beth said, it's the biggest chunk where CSPs are layering on top of it year on year and it has grown to such huge lengths that it caused arm and a leg or even more than that to even replace it. So CSPs just cannot take a bulldozer and just crash it all out. They need to take a scalpel approach and take chunks of it. Now, based on that approach, we can see an hybrid option coming into the picture. Now what do we mean by this hybrid option? It's leveraging a hybrid model between both where the data resides on the cloud or on premise. It's not just extracting the data, it becomes like part of the data, but you have a middleware return on top of it which gives you that option, which gives you, builds that flexibility so that you can come to the newer stack, newer scales that helps you grow. Next piece is the API LED connectivity and that's how the modern systems are getting built and that's how you talk to someone which actually don't want to talk to you, but at least will give you a placeholder to have a communication between the old systems and the new systems which are coming up.

Great, thanks Soumava. I like the hybrid approach there. Beth, do you want to come in quickly to give us some additional comments here?

I do. Soumava brought up a point about the hybrid stack and the fact is is telcos are already experiencing that because of mergers and acquisitions over time. So I know that Verizon has several stacks that have come in from various mergers that have happened over time, and so we have already experienced that need for a bridge and I can tell you it is extremely difficult. We are struggling with that every day.

Great, thanks very much Beth. It's interesting you've mentioned that because we've just had a question in the past few seconds about the impact of mergers on OSS and BSS. We may not get range of answering that today, so we will look at that for tomorrow. Also to our viewers, any questions we don't get to answer today, we will consider them for tomorrow so they're not wasted. Right. Let's move on quickly to our next question and our viewer asks, do telcos now have a different set of vendor selection criteria when they look at new digital OSS and BSS solutions? How have the requirements changed over the past few years? John, I wonder if we could maybe pop to you for this one and with your tracking and insights into the wider picture here, what are you seeing changing over the past few years?

Great. Thanks very much John and interesting perspectives. Let's go across and hear from other guests as well. Soumava, let's start with you and then we'll go across to Beth, but Soumava, let's hear from you first.

Thank you guy. I would like to agree on some points with John make, but typically one point which caught my attention cloud does helps us experiment faster, but it depends much more on the application and how the application is built. If the application is not built with a multi-cloud approach where I can lift and shift it to any place, then it doesn't matter on where the application is hosted, right? So at the end of the day, it depends on which use case I'm driving towards and how I can get a better TCO, even if I drive it on-prem, if I have an hybrid approach or if I don't build my application geared towards specific cloud for all the other points. Like John said, I do agree that experimentation and the way the landscape moves does help us syn getting to this DSS journey much quickly.

Great, thanks Soumava. And Beth, let's come across to you for your thoughts about how this relationship has changed over the past few years.

That's very interesting. Thanks very much Beth. Thanks everyone for those answers. A lot more questions to get through. So let's look straight away at our next viewer question. And this one is as follows, report suggests that Telco investment in OSS and BSS is outperforming other network areas in an age of cost savings. Why this focus on customer engagement investments as well as automation and orchestration tools? And I think this question refers to a report that came out from an analyst firm around MWC earlier this year. Soumava, let me come across to you for your thoughts on this one, please.

I totally do agree with the report. That is what I would start with Guy, not only Mason's report, I think ARO came up with their own analysis of similar output with fiscal 2028. I think OSS/BSS subsystems in their digital transformation journey is trying to grow towards around 78 billion in term market revenue spend. So that's a huge lot from where we are today and why the question said why this trend is emerging, if we understand our thought process, we as consumers, if we see that, okay, where we get the best bang for our buck, if I see a customer or provider is going to give us some bundled value, which brings my charges down for the month over month, I would tend to go and ship. So what the operators are doing is they are engaging heavily to ensure that the experience, the customer who is already a part of their ecosystem is having the best of the experience that they can get and they do not look for other offers, they do not shop for other offers if they don't have to, and hence customer engagement becomes paramount. That's reason one. Next pieces, the oss, BSS subsystems, the digital subsystems itself, it helps in operational efficiency like the OSS systems for efficient management of the telecom networks. We are in the era where we are talking about network slices, we are talking about digital gaming platforms and on basis of user subscriptions and how do we achieve that? It's based on this next generation digital subsystems that we can have and that's where the investment needs to go in so that we can enable those use cases. It's all depends on the use cases.

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks Soumava. And you're right, I think there were a couple of reports came out about the same time on this subject. John, lemme come across to you next and then we'll hear from Beth. But John, let's hear your thoughts.

Good point because it's not one or the other, is it? It's definitely both. Thanks very much for that John and Beth, let's hear from you.

I do. So what struck me about that and I answered the poll myself and I did not put those at the top. Again, I was putting, I'm an operator, so I put it in from the operator's perspective and I'm wondering that it might have more to do with the audience than it would, I would look at the audience and who's answering the poll because I'm a little surprised that ai, which is really nascent is so high. And also I noticed that cloud native is also at 40%, which is pretty high as well. So we're really talking about people who are responding with a very much next generation point of view and maybe they're not living the day-to-day reality of dealing with 45-year-old systems.

Good points. Beth. Yeah, you could be onto something there. John, did you want to quickly come in on the initial observation of those results in progress?

Sure Guy, as you pointed out, gen AI is no surprise. I think that's partly because there's a lot of focus at the senior leadership level of telcos to try and translate an AI into value within the organization and the teams are running around trying to look what best way to do that. And that's probably reflected in that survey outcome there. New revenue creation. I think that Kui telling, isn't it? We just spoke about all the different types of transformation, different ways, how it's evolved and so on. And I think from a telco perspective, it's bad news. If the reason, if the only reason or the biggest reason for transformation is just some efficiency gains, there has to be clear, tangible, new revenue opportunities that they can embrace that was not accessible to them previously. That comes out of just having these transformations and there's clearly a big factor there because a lot of monies being bet to transform some of these legacy systems and operators hope that they won't just be talking about how much cost they save, but they'd also have a story about how much money, new money made through that exercise.

Yeah, absolutely. And it'd be interesting to see if the results or the trends change this time tomorrow, but tuning again tomorrow to find out. Okay, let's get back to our actual viewer questions. We've got a few more I'd love to get through. Let's have a look at our next one. Infrastructure management appears to a key driver more so than revenue assurance. For example, are we seeing a renewed interest in network wide support improvements? Beth, could I please come across to you for your thoughts on that? Are we seeing a renewed interest in network-wide support improvements?

Totally, yes. And among other things we're looking at improving the efficiency of the deployment operations end to end billing efficiency. Also, more importantly, I mentioned mergers and acquisitions earlier. Verizon was created as a merger from its beginning 20 years ago. And so we still have systems that were from the previous companies, so we still need to make sure that those systems are smooth and fully integrated with each other and it cannot affect the customer to say, well, this used to be an MCI circuit, this used to be a GT circuit. They don't care, totally don't care. And so we are doing a lot of work around making sure that the customers, it's just a single, it's rising.

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you very much, Beth. Moving on, I think to another viewer question, and we've already seen in our poll results the importance of ai. This is a question specifically about gen ai. What are the breakthroughs we are expecting from Gen AI for OSS? So what are the breakthroughs that we should expect to see from the implementation of GenAI with regards to OSS? Soumava, could I maybe start with your thoughts on this one?

Indeed. And thanks for those comments. I like this question because you could ask it in a month's time and the industry has moved on so much and there's so many advancements it's going to change, it's developing at a rapid rate of knots. Unless there's any other comments from our guests on this question, Beth would like to come in.

Yeah, absolutely. There certainly are. Thanks very much, Beth. We just about have time for one more question. I think from our audience. Let's see if we can get this one in. As part of the move to cloud native architectures, some of the DSS vendors are also pushing a move to a SaaS model, a software as a service model. What are the pros and cons of this approach from the DSP point of view? And John, I wonder if I could start by getting your views on the incorporation of SaaS here.

Great. Thanks very much, John. It is certainly an interesting approach. Well, I do believe we are out of time now. Very sorry about that. But thank you to all three of you for joining us for this live program. And do remember to send in your questions for tomorrow's live q and a show as soon as you can. Don't leave it too late. We've already got a number of questions that have come through during this show that we're going to consider for tomorrow's q and a show, so tune in for that one same time tomorrow. And please take part in the poll. There is still time for you to have your say. Right Here is the agenda for tomorrow day two of the summit, and among the highlights we have panel discussion for you on the merits of deploying next gen OSS and BSS on the public cloud. Until then, thank you so much for watching and goodbye.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

We are a future network 2024 in London. I'm here with Mark Duesener. He is EVP of Mobile Networks and Services at Swisscom. Mark, thanks so much for joining us today for giving us your time. Good to see you.

Let's start with finding out about your 5G progress and your 5G strategy. Where are you with your 5G rollout right now?

So on 5G, let's say the radio part of it. Right. We've been pretty fast once we started in 2019. So right now we have on spectrum sharing more than 99% population coverage outdoor. And on the 5G plus, so to say, on the 3.6 MEGAHERZ gigahertz, we have more than 80% population coverage. Okay.

Alright. So that's a really good reach. What's your standalone strategy? Have you started that yet?

No. When I joined we had a debate whether we want to be first in Europe. Again with standalone, we decided against it mainly for two reasons. First of all, we didn't see a demand from a customer perspective back then, and secondly, we noticed that this is a unique chance of something like a greenfield deployment, implementing the first time cloud native functions, network functions, and therefore using that time to really change the way of working the way of operations and applying cloud native principles and therefore we on purpose took quite some time to rebuild our ourself.

So you are basically in a embracing cloud native strategy at the moment? Yes. How's that going? I mean that impacts the skills and the staffing and just the way you think about the way you operate networks.

It really dramatically and fundamentally changes the way of working. So we started our transformation without calling it transformation first. We started with a big skilling problem, really about skilling, really about applying, redefining the roles that we have. Instead of you need to know three HP standard X, Y, Z, you need to be able to code Python, you have to understand cloud native principles. So really redefining the skillset that are necessary for the future. That was the starting point. And then really on the journey, understanding that we get rid of CLI. So really let's say managing the workload directly, but orchestrating it. And that is a fundamental change. It requires obviously, which we luckily started beforehand a change. So a classical plan, build, run doesn't really work in a cloud native environment. It needs to be a DevOps, the truth, and we have that, but we were still in its infancy and we now get further down the road. We're not done, we're not finished. And I think we'll never be, a transformation will never stop.

But you've started the journey and that's a good place to be going down that road. Now, how does that kind of process impact what you are able to do, what you are able to offer as services and functionalities? I mean, there's a lot of talk right now about exposing network APIs and developing telco as a platform or network as a service capability. Is that something that Swisscom is looking at or starting to use as well?

We're definitely looking at that, and I'm a strong believer in we should sell what we use. So it's really drink our own champagne, therefore adhering to that principles that we access platforms via APIs. So if we create new features, new product features, we try to aim for using APIs instead of integrating it into core, enabling better lifecycle, faster speed of developing new services on top. So for example, on that one, I think it was now one and a half or nearly two years ago, I split my mobile network team and those developing services like mobile private networks became a new team. And the mobile network itself, so the core platform, voice platforms, access, transport, became the old team, the old in the sense of they're running platforms with a much longer lifetime. Whereas services is about innovation, is about testing, is about try out fast, fail fast, and this is what we aim for. And then we applied Conway's law. So build an organization like the architecture should be alike. And on that journey we are right

Now. Now what about Swiss comm's relationship with the public cloud companies? To what extent are you working with the AWS's Google Cloud platform, Microsoft Azure? What role do they play in your strategy?

I think it was roughly three years ago when we decided that we want to engage in a strategic partnerships with one of them, and we decided for AWS. So from then onwards, we started our joint journey. And I think I always like to emphasize working with the hyperscale is not about just changing an infrastructure to run services applications for top. That is really in changing the way working once again. And secondly, tapping into an innovation ecosystem. I think the innovation ecosystem of the IT network and whatever industry in the past have been the hyperscalers and everything around that. And therefore I think it's a must have to be part of that ecosystem. And therefore we started this strategic initiative and a partnership and we're embracing it right now.

How is that manifesting itself in the way that you are developing your operations? Are you running analytics with AWS? Are you shifting OSS and BSS functions onto AWS platform? Is any of that happening?

That is our strategy and we started that strategy. So we started with the basic fundamentals. So we early on or as a prerequisite decided we will not do a lift and shift that every application that goes onto public cloud will have to be redesigned to really make use of the cloud native principles. And the same applied on data. So we said, yes, the data growth is immense. We don't want to invest in a team managing infrastructure, a team minutes in tools where let's say all of that is there as a service and therefore our strategy is to go there. But we looked into how do we deal with compliance, how do we deal with data ity and really implemented that. So not only as let's say a set of rules or a set of governance, but really implemented the governance into truit.

And where are you in this kind of evolution of OSS and BSS? Is this something that you are working with your vendor partners now on evolving the tools that you need and that you need to evolve?

We are, and it's a mixture, right? It's partially the vendors, it's partially in-house, for example, looking to five Gs a. So our first big, let's say large scale deployment of cloud network punches the orchestration of it. We didn't find anything on the market that suits our needs. So we started to develop it on our own based on source tools that were available. And in other cases, yes, we embrace tools from the hyperscalers and others to really make use of the new capabilities and changing the working mode, the operational model.

So has this really broadened the scope of tools and platforms and partners that you can work with now as opposed to previously? In terms of the management and the BSS capability?

I think it is not a quick run. It's not a sprint. It's more, maybe not, hopefully not a marathon, but definitely a longer haul. But I strongly believe this change of environment and mainly the change of the ecosystem will lead to a more heterogeneous vendor landscape. Yes. And therefore we need to be prepared, right? We need to have different skills in order to manage that.

Well, it sounds like you are laying the right foundations to be able to enable that rather than going the other way round. So finally, in terms of where Swisscom is right now, and given what you've said, what do you need most from the vendor community that would help you right now? What can they bring to your table that would help to make you accelerate your strategy in a positive way?

I think this journey that I've laid out roughly sketched isn't this Swisscom journey. This is an industry journey and means on that journey we will make mistakes, we will fail, but we need to walk along jointly. We need to explore jointly, we need to fail jointly with our peers as well as jointly with our vendors. It doesn't serve as if someone is, let's say the lonely bull that will not survive, but we need to move and that will disrupt business models and we create new ones. Even that is something we need you to drive.

And do you feel that that's more possible now than it might've been five years ago? Do you get a sense of there's a greater sharing of knowledge and insight and greater collaboration within the community these days?

Definitely. I think we already learned quite a bit. I mean, on the journey that I described, for example, on the orchestration part, we deliberately took a break of, I think it was eight months, because we saw, okay, in a certain aspect there's so many movements in the industry, let's wait to consolidate. And once we saw a consolidation happening, we moved on again. And I think it's not about technology. Technology is there, we could exploit it today. It's about us, it's about people. We need to get accustomed to it, we need to understand it before we can embrace it. And that takes time. But I believe taking the time really makes that more sustainable than Russia. Well Mark,

Thanks so much for joining us today. Great to hear about what Swisscom is doing and look forward to chatting with you again in the future.

We both thank you.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

So we're in London at Future net World 2024. I'm here with Nazim, Benhadid. He's the CTO at Telus, the Canadian operator. Nazim, thanks so much for joining us today.

The big news for many this year from TELUS is that we've committed to an open ran deployment. Can you just give us the overview of exactly what TELUS is doing here?

So. It's interesting that you mentioned the performance aspect because there's been a session here at this event on open ran where there were speakers from the operator community and they were like, it would be nice to have exact performance parity, but we don't think we're quite yet there yet. But the partners you have, do you think that because they've all been doing this for a few years already, they have experienced at some of the other operators that they're a little bit ahead of the game in terms of how they're working together?

So I think there's a bit of that. There's an ecosystem view, there's a compatibility, an affinity view that is important. But I think the most important part is the partners have to be committed. It has to be in their vision that the most open, the better it is because if it's open and they transparently share internal performance details and fine tune each other's performance through constant feedback loop, it's going to get better. But if the provider is actually trying to keep a portion of the ecosystem that they're closed that they don't want to share what's happening inside their systems, then it's going to be very, very hard because they don't have end-to-end control. So in order to be performed in an end-to-end non homogenous system, every one of the components, each one of the components has to be very, very transparent. And that's what we have. So for example, HPE and Wind River and Samsung work very closely together. They send their own engineering team into each other's location to work on this. And there's other carriers who follow this exact ecosystem that we're in. And of course with scale it allows you to fine tune, but as I said, it starts with the desire to be both open and have exceptional performance.

Okay. Now you mentioned earlier that you wanted to go fully open, not go halfway, because you are thinking of the future of the bigger picture. What is that bigger picture? What is this going to mean further down the line for telus?

So programmability, so fully automated network openness gives you that innovation. Now that it's open, more players can get into the ecosystem, the barriers to entry go away. We see very small companies innovate in this world, especially if you look at SMO and non realtime Rick and all the athletes that can go and attach to the ecosystem. Huge opportunity there. And for too long you had three, four choices for an OEM and once you made that choice, swapping or substitution was very, very high. Now we can swap any of these components very, very quickly. The software components by clicking a button and the hardware components. Since hardware gets obsolete since into three to four years, the opportunity for swap becomes more frequent. And that brings innovation, openness, and competition brings innovation. We're convinced of that.

So at what stage, you mentioned the management layer there and the round intelligent controllers and there's quite a few companies developing the R apps and the X apps that can run on those Rick platforms, but that seems to have got stalled a little bit. We don't seem to be, or the industry doesn't seem to be too much further than it was maybe two years ago. Where are you at the stage of testing or trialing or finding capabil?

Okay. Well it's going to be interesting to track the TELUS journey. I know I've been hearing about Canada's going to be the next market where there's going to be a big push and 50% of the network. That's quite a commitment. You're not going tiny, you are going pretty big.

Yes, we're confident. I mean you need scale to have an impact and that's what we're looking for. So.

Yes. Okay. Excellent. Nazim, great. Thanks for joining us today. Great to talk to you.

Thank you. Thank you for your time.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

Hi, I am Tony Poulos at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Today I have a very esteemed panel of people that are going to help me understand the adoption of O Ran or open RAN and its benefits. Gentlemen, welcome. Let me introduce you first. Sandeep Sharma, who is the Vice President and global head of portfolio 5G and O RAN networks at Tech Mahindra. Thank you for being here. Next we have Wei Yeang Toh, who is the general manager Ecosystem Development Organization Network and ED Solutions Group at Intel Corporation. You must be very important with such a long title I'm sure. And last but certainly not least, we have Harkirit Singh who is the CEO of Ascend Digital Solutions Limited. Gentlemen, thanks for being here and thanks for putting up with my very long introduction. But let's get right onto the subject. So Sandeep, let me start with you if I can. We're seeing strong momentum and progress with carrier's adoption of open RAN and it's taken a while to get there. I know, but what are the key takeaways and what are the next steps to continue enabling service providers to get this ecosystem running overall?

Yeah, right, you're right. Tony O-ran is now shaping a well really well and you know that Oran is actually providing an ecosystem to the operators or to the carriers who deploy a flexible solution the way they want to be. It's an inevitable change that will changing, that will change us changing the transforming the RAN industry as a whole. We as a techman involved in almost all the large scale deployments in Open ran, including small scale trial as well and the POCs of the new age solutions around it. At the same time, when we evolve ourselves as a system indicator in this domain, we realized their set of pillars or learnings that can be leveraged or that can be replicated for a successful or journey and few of them includes importance of interoperability. You need to make sure the different systems components interop. At the same time you need to look at the lab ecosystem place so that you can create a pre integrated pre-production sort of in a stack ready for the operators. At the same time, importance of automation as well because you are bringing layers of AI and cloudification virtualization, making it work for the customers, you need to put a lot of automation around it. And finally the importance of security. Since you are moving towards ization virtualization open interface, you need to make this networks more and more secure additionally of security from the IT world and telco world together. That's how I summarize it.

Wow. That was a good summary though. Wei Yeang, I'm coming to you now. How do you see the progression of O ran and how is Intel helping accelerate O ran adoption? Because a lot of people are wondering where Intel fits in this.

I'm very interested firstly to find out a little bit more about your company Ascend Digital Solutions. Let me know about that.

First, Tony Ascend Digital Solutions, a company which is based in Ghana. We are actually looking at doing large scale digital transformations. So over the last few years we have taken up a lot of digital infrastructure and right from the backbone infrastructure, fiber, the data centers, wireless infrastructure and we are transforming the entire paradigm to bring more and more digital connectivity to reduce digital divide and increase financial inclusion. So our mission is to actually create ubiquitous seamless networks to provide universal access.

Well this question is aimed for you then. The rate of new technology development and innovation has significantly increased over the last few years. Can you shed some light on how open RAN plays a crucial role in driving digital connectivity for places like say Africa and even India and Asia? How is it happening? How's it rolling out?

Very well explained. For somebody like me, I sometimes grasp with all the layers that are involved with open ran rollouts and I think that was very well put, but I'm going to come back to you at a moment about new networks. New networks are also getting more complex, right? What role do you see AI taking in furthering network transformation? We have to talk about AI because that's the subject that's been hitting us here constantly, but what role do you see AI taking in furthering network transformation journey by addressing things like automation, manageability, and of course that awful word sustainability. It's coming up every day now.

Yeah, honestly speaking, the values that Oren is bringing in in terms of virtualization and having a common data lake across the different layers of network functions brings a lot of applicability of ai. Now you need not to worry about someone else looking into multiple domains. You can have your AI engines running, you can take observability end to end across right from hardware infrastructure layer to the network function functions layer and bringing a meaningful observability out of it so that network can take a meaningful decisions at the same time. There are two versions of AI is like traditional AI and the Jan ai and you can use Jan AI for more operational efficiencies as well. Taking all the customer complaints and all faster resolution. All those things can be better handled and most important thing, the sustainability part of it, sustainability is not new. It was there in the traditional network. There was need for that and it'll remain as long as we are operating on natural resources. But if you look at the AI part of it, AI once helps you in taking meaningful decisions out of how the network is operating, where the power consumption is happening in a higher level where you can optimize it. AI brings a lot of flexibility. Having a software virtualization done with open ran interfaces, you can bring different models and achieve efficiencies out of it in terms of lower power consumption or optimize power consumption across the networks.

I can see Wei Yeang going. "Oh, oh it's also important for us". He wants to let us know.

I think for ai, what we're looking at largely from a sustainable perspective, our goal is zero bit zero watt. So what it means is that if there is no traffic on the network, I don't want to power it up because see the challenge, what we are seeing in Orran is there is a lot of decoupling of interfaces and opportunity to bring course hardware, but it is also increasing what we have seen so far, the power consumption in the data centers because the amount of CU that you need to deliver the similar line of capacity and the amount of interface that you need from the fiber to the back hole is huge. So from a perspective of power consumption, it is a bit higher. But I think overall from an AI perspective, what we really want as Max said, is we need to have the models which are trained because we want something which is plugin. We want something that something comes up and says, guys, here it is, and we will have a 30% power saving. We don't have to wait for six months one year to have those train models. We might have a localization impacts like how much of the sites are running on the electricity, how much of sites are running on the solar and how the local operation is working. But those trained models, if they come pre-trained, then we actually save a lot of times to grade that efficiency gain. That efficiency

Makes a lot of sense. In summary, I'm going to ask you one question and I want all of you to give me a nice concise answer on this one. From an O ran perspective, how do you envisage the network evolving in the future? How you do that in a short time? I don't know, but have a go.

So network's going to be more and more autonomous day by day. As we evolve further, AI will play a more important role and the systems will be native AI driven. We need not to create additional layer of AI and how fast we can do or better we can do is as we evolve in the industry, we all will see it. But that's how I see it is happening. With the Rick evolution happening with the accepts and a reps coming in, evolution ultimately to six G, AI is going to drive how things should happen.

Yes, I knew someone was going to say six G and it had to be you. Wei Yeang. What do you think?

Well, few things. We were going to see more innovation coming up within the edge computing and 5G converge together become a bigger market. Right? Partner will come in and collaborate. We'll see the interfaces will get defined better and better, right? Interoperability will getting better and better as well. The partnership among the ecosystem will be better as well because they are all those key learning will get shared across the ecosystem. You encourage, we all encourage the more ecosystem to come and participate in this, grow this business, grow itself is very healthy and of course AI will come in a progressive way and any key learning will help the others here. Network networks function as well. So to simply put the Oran going to be pretty positive in the future the way I look at it. So if we make progress and the only things that we see is upside right now,

That's good to hear. Ah, Harkirit, what's your opinion of the Future Network?

I think we want Orran to be embraced with a larger ecosystem. The likes of Ericsson, Nokia's really, really need to actually embrace it because so far they've been resisting the whole thing. It has been driven by new age operators likes of Rakuten Mobile, which has done an excellent work on bringing all and live, but these other big vendors needs to embrace so that the cost of ownership and the TCO gets lower. From an innovation perspective, it's the best technology any telecom operators will have. And if you see from what one in one has done with about 500 of edge data centers and stuff, they're opening the interfaces and bringing the content closer to the user. So today, if I have to stream a very high quality video, I don't need to cash from the dollar center and I can do a local stuff. I can break out there. The user plan doesn't need to go back into my core. So that's the advantage of bringing us, as Max said. And Sandeep is saying is that the innovation power of open ran is humongous to transform any telecom operations world where it'll bring the benefits of a local content and distribution, mobile edge computing to the users.

Gentlemen, thank you so much. I now think that Ran has a big future. You've convinced me. Thanks very much, very much for your help. Sandeep, Wei Yeang and Harkirit, thanks for being with me today.

Thanks Tony.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

So we're at FutureNet World in London. I'm here with Dr. Hartmut Wittig. He is a VP at Magenta, API, which is part of Deutsche Telekom. Thanks very much for taking the time to join us today. So can you just tell us about Magenta API? What is this part of Deutsche Telekom doing?

Yeah, so Magenta API consists of two parts. One is our team is called Magenta, API. Because we are developing this market further and approximately a kernel of 50 people in Deutsche Telecom organization and plus 200 people which are collaborating very closely with the other, for example, folks from the T-Mobile, US folks from telecom Europe, folks from telecom, Deutschland and Magenta API stands for a very customer oriented set of APIs where we try to do the next best thing and the new thing in the market because we are a very strong believer of standard APIs of exposing them, giving all developers and customers the power of telecommunication. In your hands,

Where is Deutsche Telekom in this process of opening up its network APIs to enable developers to develop new applications?

Yeah, so we are a very strong supporter and we are very strong key enabler of various standards. For example, in the Kamara ens in the GSMA, we are pushing extremely hard to get one standard because we are a strong believer. If you think about a global networking story we have to provide to our clients as telecommunication companies worldwide, we think the first thing which has to be done is the same standard format. And this helps really the developers not to develop for the Deutsche Telecom customers only and the Vodafone customers only. And we are on the same page because we think on a global telecommunication market and the better we are doing a external communication industry, the better is it for our customers and for the developers also. And I compare it always with think about the hyperscalers, what they have done in store in compute, the same as possible to do it now with networking.

And so are there any early examples of services that have been developed from these standard APIs? Are you at that stage yet?

Okay. And these are all based on then standard APIs and you mentioned the GSMA there before. How important is that the GSMA open gateway initiative in terms of enabling this and helping more developers to understand what capabilities are available?

I've been a developer 20 years of my life. That's why I know from the other side also what I'm talking about. And a developer has always in mind a certain software and normally the software is not constrained by a certain country or by a certain telecommunication company. He wants to have in their customer audience as many people as possible. And that's why it's very important from a technical point of view to have one standard. So in this one standard enables them to program everything against one API and we are a key, we are convinced with our hearts that these standards in a technical sense are necessary to convince the developers and based on the developers, also the customers and also the open gateway initiative is one piece of it coin to get it more standardized. Will it end up in the standardization of a technical basis? I do not believe because think about the developer having contracts with 700 tecos around the world to make this possible. I think a piece of bitcoin must also be commercial models which are somehow also a keen enabler but not each and everybody has the contract 700 tecos.

So in terms of how magenta API is developing, what are your roots to market? How are you engaging with the developers and the companies you want to reach and who are those companies or developers? What are the target users for what you are doing?

And in terms of these direct relationships, I'm sure those are probably the optimum ones for magenta API. How involved is your magenta API team in the process of working with that direct sales team? Because they need to understand what you are doing, they need to be able to communicate it to the enterprises. How tricky is that or do they all get it?

So it's really hard daily work because of it. I have to leave tomorrow because I have tomorrow my next four or five customer meetings. But it's a very direct response to what we are doing in VI mentioned the API arena. And we are knowing so much better than what is the pain point of a customer, what is the challenges, how to address and transform it not only into our APIs, we are also extremely helping us in our roadmap. So what comes next, because you might know camera is now published over 50 APIs and the next best API to be implemented is in our organization always driven in the mixture of what is our own capability to expose on the one hand side. On the other hand side, the customers are saying which demand he has for certain APIs and always based on standards. So that's one paradigm or mantra I would say to do it based on standard means with not only with Doche telecom and their customers in the game, but also all core petition partners as for example, Telefonica and the others. And for me it's an activity for market development and business development similar to in the IT arena the hyperscalers are doing.

Do you think that the understanding of the opportunities is that people are grasping this quite quickly and understanding the opportunities and able to communicate that? Is this happening quite quickly?

I think so from time to time we have some challenges. For example, in the US we are the first having a standard architecture for 5G in Germany. This is coming now approximately in October. And that helps very much because the bandwidth is growing and as we have no more bandwidth, more reservations can be done without suppressing public customers for example. So that's one key enabler we have in mind. On the other side, from the customer side, we see use cases which have the potential to explode. Think about our tests we are doing with the car industry. So we have 20 million cars on the road. So the complexity is not to have bond test and the next test. So the car industry and especially in automated driving is very close to go to the market. And to do so you at least have to have a view camera. And for example, if you think about cranes or cars and lorries, you need to have the ability to hook on the current video stream to see what's happening there. For example, it's not completely autonomous as in other countries, but at least in Germany it will be a hybrid mode of operation, but for sure not for the next 10 years when a driver is in the car who could use and interrupt and take over the control. We hope that this will be done by video over the network and that's also one target we have.

Wow. So a lot of learning going on here with the different opportunities. Now of course at the end of the day nobody is doing this just for fun or because they can, this is about growing business relationships and driving revenues and making money. So who in this ecosystem is going to be able to generate profitable revenues from the exposure of network APIs?

And so if I understand correctly, it's still kind of being figured out if you are engaging with the application developers through the hyperscalers, that it's still being figured out well who's going to make the share of the revenues from the resulting service? Are things still flexible there? It's still being figured out. Is it?

Yeah, so I personally expect half the majority of our key customer applications will come from a direct approach from a B2B customers. And the other half is for sure the developers out of the ecosystem. As soon as we have more standard APIs, as soon as we have standard business models which appeared more attractive than one by one by one, we accept a very high expect, very high acceptance also from the developer side.

Excellent. Well, Hartmut great to hear about Magenta API and great to see a specific unit within a large network operator focusing on this and helping to develop. So great to hear your story and thanks very much for joining us today.

Thank you very much and it was a pleasure to meet you. Thanks a lot.

Thank You, Hartmut. Thank you.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

5G transport networks - foundation for the monetisation of B2B services | TelecomTV

Hi, I am Tony Poulos and I'm at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Today I have with me a very special panel powered by Tech Mahindra, and we're going to be talking about transformation in transport networks, IP and optical convergence. In particular, I have with me today Gaurav Sehgal, who is the vice president and head of Europe for network services and 5G at Tech Mahindra. Welcome Gaurav. Next to him I have Alex Foster, who is the senior director of partner managed services at Cisco. Welcome, Alex. And last but certainly not least Nitish Nanda, who is the VP of core and transport at Tech Mahindra. Gentlemen, welcome. Let's get right into the subject because it's quite a heavy one to cover today. Firstly Nitish, I'm going to start with you. How important is transport modernization for transfer service providers and what are the key tenants to achieve it?

Sure. I think that is one of, as we move to 5G now, and that is the buzzword which we see from a couple of years back. Now the discussion is moving more towards AI and six G, but 5G monetization is still important, right? And to have that monetization, you need to upgrade the network. On the network side, there is obligation needed with regards to the kind of bandwidth needed coming from your RAN and also at the core side, but the transport needs to handle this bandwidth also on the latency part. And then automation of all these network functions. So I think a lot of modernization is needed on transport to achieve this. And what makes it even a bit more complex is the fact that transport is not virtualized. Your RAN and core can get virtualized and it makes it easier, but transport is not virtualized. So I think what we are seeing, the IP optical convergence part, yeah, IP optical convergence part becomes important. The SDN part of it, where your data pane and your control pane is bifurcated, that becomes very important. And apart from that, as I mentioned, the bandwidth increase on the bandwidth side coming from ran, everything has to be 10 gig. Your core has to be more than like a hundred gig, 400 gig. So all of those modernization aspects and tenants become very, very important.

Absolutely. I mean, I think transport is the foundation that the B2B services are built on that ultimately drive modernization for the provider. And I think if you look at it, there's really three themes that I see in provider modernization of the transport layer. One is around agility. How do I get more dynamic provisioning capabilities, more ability to drive rich services efficiently. The second one around sustainability, certainly as you look at converging these two platforms into Ron, you get the ability to take out a duplicative layer, which has huge benefits in terms of power efficiency, space consumed, et cetera. And then the third is really efficiency for how I deliver services. So there are tremendous opportunities I see operators advantage of to be able to compress the provisioning cycle to be able to tie in the provisioning of the IP layer at the same time to have a common platform. And then of course, the efficiencies around supply chain sparing a single layer that they can drive with routed optical networking convergence. So a lot of opportunity there for the operators that I see them seizing.

Well, in what ways this partnership between Tech Mahinda and Cisco assisting service providers in modernizing and simplifying their transport networks? How are you going about that?

Yeah, thank you so much. So basically what we are doing here is that Cisco is building great stacks, great technologies, but at the end you want a partner who understands the complete plan, design, implementation and managed services. Part of that, what customers today need is a very fully automated, a fully modular solution, and hence, which has to work and the up times needs to be met, hence a partnership is becoming very, very important. More importantly, we have built a automation stack called NetOps ai, which kind integrates downstream with all the different components of Cisco technology, be it ip, be transport optical as well. And that becoming is more like a single pane of glass, right from day zero, day one and day two. It's a complete lifecycle management of the complete modernized transport networks is what we are helping our customers to go after.

Now, I'm also interested in what's happening in the Brownfield area because given that Brownfield have a multi-vendor transport ecosystem, and it's usually very diverse as well, how do you see the adoption of transport SDN in those environments?

I think pretty much because what's really happening is that all the Brownfield operators may have, let's say a third party components. And we as TE chem really bring a lot of value in third party integrations. So adaptor being built for a customized, let's say third party Juniper, Huawei, Sienna, and Cisco as well. So customer sees TE Chem as an agnostic si, which works with different OEMs like Cisco as well as a partner and brings a complete integrated solution stack for them. So I think this is very, very relevant and in more so in brownfield opportunities where you need to have it has to be run across IP and optical.

It's very challenging. Isn't it also for you Cisco, I'd imagine, because you're up across it as well with your equipment partnering with others within the Brownfield environment?

Absolutely. And so we've built in capabilities in the crosswalks automation platform that are able to handle third party optical layers. We also have very robust capabilities at the assurance layer that are supporting multiple vendors. And then of course we have our NSO platform. That's the automation layer for the ip. And I think this is really where a lot of the value in the partnership with Tech Mahindra is. There's a number of different components that ultimately have to come together to be able to deliver those B2B services on top. And when you also look at the assurance layer, there's some very unique things that can be done tying in assurance across the stack and making a more compelling proposition for the SP to their enterprise customers to give that end-to-end visibility. So lots of opportunities for Tech Mahindra in this space to be able to help us tie all that together and add the NetOps AI platform capabilities on top of it.

Well, while I've got you on that subject, how prepared is Cisco in the IP optical convergence market, and what are the new innovations as part of those solutions? Because you must be coming up with stuff constantly to keep up, and how has the partnership in Cisco and Tech Mahindra expected to benefit those customers?

Absolutely. So I think we're incredibly prepared. This is a market transition. We've been driving from the beginning. We spent over 6 billion in acquisitions in this space. We're currently the leading provider of coherent ports, so we have a market share leadership, and then I think some of the investments we've made in other areas like Exceed Dion and Skylight to be able to drive assurance on top of this are very powerful for our customers. And then of course, most importantly, one of the key benefits here is really building on top of the foundation we built with iOS XR is our IP routing platform. So you really as an operator and as an ecosystem partner for Tech Mahindra gaining all the technology advantages from that IP routing layer and now able to apply that to the optical layer in a very seamless way. So lots of innovation in this space. We recently launched our ability to also have a simplified module for dark fiber for enterprise customers, many of which will I think ultimately consume tech Mahindra managed services to be able to have a very simple way to provide Ron over dark fiber without the need for a lot of the intermediate components that have historically been in those networks.

It sounds like almost the perfect marriage already, but let me come back to you for a moment. nid, what are the key challenges and considerations in transitioning to the transport SDN for the service providers with those Brownfield networks and how can they effectively manage the coexistence of legacy and SDN enabled infrastructure?

I think that is a very relevant question. More so because a lot of it is legacy technology. So the service providers are used to having their IP and optical networks completely separate, and both of them are being managed completely separately. All the work being done, there is two different, very different teams. Investment are completely different. That is how the thought process is for CSPs. So for them to first accept that now with SDN and for example, with the product, the Cisco on product, which is there, it is market leading, there is a possibility to bring these two domains together. I think that mindset change itself, we have seen it is taking a bit of time, they're opening up to it, and just as a couple of our customers move into this direction, we see this moving very fast in the industry.

That's quite a challenge indeed, I would think, and convincing them, and also look co, I'm going to come back to you for a moment. Can you provide insights into the specific benefits and use cases of IP converged solutions in those brownfield networks and how Tech Mahinda and Cisco's partnership facilitates the adoption and integration of those solutions?

I think most importantly, for example, IP and Optical always have two different departments, so from people, processes and stacks. Now what's going to happen is that once you converge both these things together, you have convergence of people, culture, behavior and the future technology adoption.

Biggest challenge, because it's all about people, right? At the end. If you have great skill sets, how do you manage them? How do you run the governance around that? That becomes a real key for any success. That is one. Second is the moment you put an IEP or an optical de card in an IP router of Cisco, you save 40% power savings because you're one single form factor doing both IP and convergence, it's a clear direct opex benefit for any operator. So people, culture, technology is something which is very, very relevant. Now, challenges, obviously the change mindset, number one. Number two, adaptation is not easy, and the IOT is between Multi-vendor is obviously complex, but if you do it right with the right adaptation, right skill sets, I personally believe we have seen a lot of success. We have customers who have developed even open daylight based microwave SDNs. They are customers who are deploying the multi-vendor M DSOs for the transport layer. I see a very significant advantage of having IP optical converged in the near term.

Alex, come back to you. Hearing all that, what's the value that Tech Mahindra brings to the partnership to you?

Yeah, well, there's certainly a cultural transformation element, as GRA alluded to, so certainly that's an area that they're very well equipped to drive in these operators. There's also a significant amount of managed services being provided to the operator to help them with the technology transition, and most importantly, integrating the service delivery in terms of the automation, the systems and platforms, which I think is always one of the things that's the long pole in the tent for operators to get the value and the agility that they're looking for out of this. Really being able to compress that time and be able to unlock the ability to more dynamically provision new services in a much more agile way.

Well, gentlemen, I'd like to thank you very much because you've opened my eyes up to something I didn't realize was such an issue in terms of the departments getting back together or working together, but it's something we've had to live with in the telecoms industry for many, many years. Thank you Nitish. Thank you, Alex, and thank you Gaurav for being with me today. Thank you so much.

Thank you all.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

Vodafone UK’s Andrea Donà talks 5G SA, slicing, Open RAN | TelecomTV

So we're at FutureNet World in London. I'm here with Andrea Dona, he is Chief Network Officer at Vodafone UK. Andrea, thanks for joining us again today. Good to see you.

So could you just give us an update on where Vodafone UK is in terms of its 5G rollout, not only in terms of the capacity and the reach of it, but also in terms of where you are with 5G standalone.

Okay. So you mentioned a few things then just to clarify, the merger you referenced, that's the merger between Vodafone UK and free UK just for some of our international viewers. Now, slicing being talked about for years, for some people slicing was a bit of a red herring, but now we're starting to hear about actual UK use cases, but mostly in specific verticals. So broadcast appears to be a bit of a low hanging fruit for slicing. Is there going to be a use case do you think, for network slicing across lots of verticals and even in the consumer market?

Will the real power of this opportunity come to the fore? Let's assume Vodafone UK three UK come together. You've got greater reach, more spectrum, more capacity because if enterprises are going to use it and gamers are going to want to use it, they're going to be able to want to use it absolutely anywhere. Exactly.

Ray, you're absolutely correct. The challenge I have today, the limitation of unlocking some of the enterprise revenue we talked about this morning is if I go to a logistics company and say I've got this great 5G SA capability I want to sell to you. I can't limit them using it only in the cities. They're a logistics company. Their trucks go to the outer Hebrides, for example. They go out to the Highlands and island. They need to have that capability today. I do not have the capital intensity to be able to invest the merger gives me the scale to do that. I will be able to deliver much more. We are planning to reinvest 11 billion of the synergies that arise from coming together as a company into the network in 10 years. Five of those ones 6 billion in the first five years. Right,

Okay, alright, strong message there for the CMA. Absolutely. So Vodafone UK as part of the Vodafone group is obviously part of this transition that's been talked about from telco, what telecom operators used to be to TechCo a more sort of cloud oriented organization. How's that going for Vodafone UK and what does that mean for the way you are building and running your networks?

So you are moving there but it's step by step sort of whatever makes sense in the immediate term.

I think when we talk about telco to TechCom and beyond connectivity, I think we need to remind ourselves, and a couple of analysts and panelists talked about it this morning, must not forget, we're not forgetting connectivity, we're building on the connectivity. So we're going beyond that but not forgetting that we are the trusted partner on the connectivity front. We don't want to lose that. We want to build on that and go beyond that strong from our heritage of good connectivity providers.

And part of the big thing about this transition is the kind of building new in-house capabilities, developing new skills. What has that meant in your team? Have you got more developers within the team you have and how much of that is impacting the way that you are able to build, run, and then expose that network?

We took a strategic decision that for certain things we need to be owners of our own destiny. We need to be the ones owning that competence because otherwise what are we? If you want to become a technology company, which we do, we need to start producing our technology now. We can't do that across the board. Partnership is important to augment, to enhance what we are trying to build internally, but we can't just give away our crown jewels. So we've done a process of insourcing of certain capabilities. So we're owners of our destinies. We're not subject to the fluctuations of the market. We can actually own it and we can also steer it in the direction we want. We are insourcing a lot of our development where it makes sense to do so and we're partnering where it makes sense to do so. You've heard me in the past Ray talk about it depends. It's a full spectrum of insourcing outsourcing depending on where we're not dogmatic in our choices. We are practical in our choices to ensure that we make the right choices.

So alongside that, of course you're developing your own cloud strategy and I'm not talking about offering cloud services, I'm talking about using the cloud as part of the platform that you are developing as a network operator. Can you just talk about that you have a relationship with Microsoft as part of this. How much are you building as a private cloud? How much are you building that with Microsoft? Are you using public cloud for some capabilities as well?

And as part of this sort of evolution into a new platform that you can use, how does what you are doing in terms of your early open RAN moves play into that? Because this is a new kind of infrastructure, it's more IT based as that develops. Will that become part of a sort of broader IT capability that you'll be able to use in other ways as well? Not just for the ran?

And just remind us where you are in terms of the open ran rollout. You've had the cluster down in the southwest of England where you've been almost proving what is possible, but what's happening in the rest of the voter?

So we've passed the proof of concept. We've met the criteria to enter into mass deployment. So we've overcome that. It's ticked all the boxes, it's met the minimum criteria in terms of performance, the radio performance, et cetera. And now it's an option on the menu. So I can choose open ran in the same way as I can choose 5G in the same way as I can choose additional carriers on 4G. So when I do my capital allocation review on a yearly basis, I can decide, well how much ran do I need to do? How much 5G do I need to do? And it's only a factor of the money I've got. I'd love to do more open ran, but because of the return on investment I have and the fact that the cost of capital is greater than my return, I only have that amount of money to spend in over. If I had more, I would do more and I swap it out faster and bring more into the market.

But you see this as a real learning curve, something building for the future, providing experience. Absolutely. Otherwise wouldn't be

Able to get, we took the role to be our own system integrators. We're trying to stitch together Samsung, NEC, Dell Wind River. We have got partners like Keysight and Capgemini. So we've got a good ecosystem of technology partners. We have to get them to work together. And also in the future world where as I said earlier, we have to wake up to the fact that the world in which the whole pie is mine has gone

Yeah. We have to work together to collaborate so that we create that pie and there's a big opportunity out there, but acknowledge that we will only get a part of that pie. But if that part of the pie is part of a big pie, then we're all winners. You can sit there wanting the whole pie and not get anything or work together to create that opportunity and have our fair share of that pie.

And scale brings a lot to everybody, doesn't it? Absolutely. And just one final thing, obviously we've been talking mostly here about cloud platforms and the mobile, the RAN network, but of course fiber plays an absolutely critical role not only in supporting the ram, but also as a service enabler itself. What does Vodafone, UK's Fiverr network asset look like and how are the partnerships you are developing around that working for you in terms of what you can deliver to customers?

I wish, again, I had the capital to continue expanding on my current footprint. I do that, I do that to a good extent, but not as much as I would like. Therefore, had to be realistic and our strategy had to be a asset light strategy partnering with the likes of city fiber and VT open Beach. At the same time, I need to be very careful at my ongoing OPEX cost per every new circuit I order to service my network. It's additional opex. So I've got this constant balancing act to say if I've got the CapEx, I will invest the CapEx to introduce my own circuits. And this year has been a successful year. The year just completed, been a successful year in rolling out the highest number of fiber connections for my own purpose, for my own build and for my enterprise customers. If I had more money, I'd do more. Acknowledging that on the consumer side, I don't have the CapEx to meet the demand of consumers. So we've partnered very successfully with city fiber and Openreach and now we have the biggest fiber footprint in terms of FTTP fiber to the premise customers. And we can sell fiber to the consumer and we're the fastest growing HPV provider because of that. But I'm playing different games on the network side and on the enterprise. I'm also connecting my own file. I'd love to do more though if I had the money

Hey, I'd buy some more coffee machines if I had the money as well. But that's another story. Andrea, great to catch up with you. Thanks very much.

Thanks very much, Ray. Thank you.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

Orange group CTO on the telco’s progress with network automation | TelecomTV

You are watching telecom tv. We are joining from Future Net World 2024 in London. Now I'm delighted to be joined by Laurent Laboucher, group CTO and SVP of Orange Innovation Networks. Hi Laurent. Thank you for joining us. Hello. So first off, how important is automation for network operators and where is Orange integrating automated processes?

Yes, so network automation for us is extremely important. We have started this journey already years ago. We are addressing different aspects of network automation, very focused on the way we do change. Change is about how you can bring DevOps and DevSecOps into the network operations and this is a big challenge as if we're progressing. In order to make it very concrete, we have implemented what we call a network integration factory, which is in fact instantiated in the different countries today and all the different network integration factories are working together in order to automate testing, integration and then deployment of network functions. There is a second part of network automation, which is also extremely interesting. It's about how you can leverage all the data that we get that we ingest from our network in order to automate some of the monitoring fault management anomaly detection processes. And we've started to do that with different countries. We already have some very interesting and very good first result. Now the question is how we can create this capacity at scale and how we can empower our network operating center to transform the operations into fully automated operations. It is a journey. So we are in the middle of the journey.

And you mentioned the six level model for autonomous networks based on TM forums scale and you mentioned that orange is on level two at the moment. What does this mean for the company?

Okay, so basically we are leveraging TM four and in T form there is this notion of measuring how autonomous the network are. We're using this scale of zero to five, which is very similar to autonomous autonomous car driving car. And we have assessed all the countries in all our geographies. So we have looked at all the different processes and looked at how automated we are today. So when I say we are at level two, it makes that so it's average, but it means that we have already started to implement the right processes. We have done the first key automation, for instance, the network integration factory is there, but we have not yet implemented AI at scale for the different use cases. In some areas we have implemented AI for root cause analysis for also predictive network managements but only in few places. So now we are trying to really bring those capabilities at scale, but then there are some challenges. The most important is to make all the data accessible. We call it data democracy and how we can bring the data in a data lake and hopefully we want to bring it to the cloud and then leverage that capability and implement with ML ops techniques and with our partners. We are working a lot with Google. We want to implement the different use cases to close the loops and bring automation.

You mentioned the importance of data. What are some other challenges to network automation?

One of the challenge is to bring the skills to upskill all our workforce at scale. So it's a lot of upskilling in my team within the different countries. It's also a lot of reskilling and we need to bring in the same teams, people who are very knowledgeable about data, data engineers, data scientists and people who are really extremely good at network operations, who know the business and who are ready to drive what is interesting in order, what can we automate. Something very interesting. During the past year we've watched very carefully the big progress made with generative AI and it's impressive to see the kind of capacity that we can get with generative ai and now we start to see how we can leverage in some very concrete use case to make our network very easy to interact with almost in using native natural language. So we are working on the first use cases to do that. So it's very exciting but at the same time very challenging to bring the right people together.

And during your session earlier on, you mentioned a backwards approach when it comes to use cases, finding the right use cases and monetizing the network. Can you share a bit more about this?

Thank you Yani. I like to see that as there are two sides of the coin. We are very focused on a automat the engine. But the reason is why are we doing that? We are doing that because we want to transform ourselves into a platform. We want to monetize our network. We want to find the right use cases where we want to be very, very focused. So as you say, we need to work backwards. That means that we don't want to bring, let's say all the bells and whistles at once and say, okay, now all the developers, you can use it. That doesn't work at all. What we want is really to be focused on key problems. One example is how we can leverage identity API in the network in order to help banks to mitigate fraud. Another example is how we can use the short latency of some networks on 5G, five GS, A in order to address some very specific industrial problems. Like for instance, if you need to control a GV in a factory, if you need to control the cranes in a harbor, how can we be very focused on those very specific use cases? We don't want to boil the ocean, we want to select a few of them and be very focused.

How important is it for you to partner with the right existing players?

We will not make it alone. It's a industry journey. So first of all, we need to leverage our peers. We need to work together. At the same time we are competitors, but we are co competitors and we share the same foundation on the foundation on the basics. We need absolutely to create scale. We need to create scale on the telco cloud. We need to create scale on the basic network APIs and we need also to bring other partners in the ecosystem. I strongly believe that hyperscalers partners are very important. We need to leverage them at different level on the telco cloud for some workloads. We need also to work with them on ai, how we can use all their very powerful capacities. We are working very closely with Google as an example, but we are also working with AWS in order to deploy 5G cloud network. So we want to work with all of them and each cloud provider today has some advantage and we want to take the best of each one. I think with hyperscalers we also have to play in their marketplace because they have a very strong and very powerful marketplace where they can attract developers on some verticals. This is not our DNA and we can leverage their capacity and really work very smoothly with their marketplace.

That makes perfect sense. Laurent, thank you very much for speaking with us. Thank you very much.

Hello, you're watching telecom tv. We are joining from Future Network 2024 in London, uk. Now I'm happy to be joined by Tony Geheran, COO of Telus. And Jamie Tatis, chief Insights Officer at Telus. Hi, thank you very much for joining us today.

So the trend of telcos becoming TechCo is getting stronger. Tony is, tell us on that transformation journey, and if so, what does this mean for the company?

Very much so from a combinations of avenues of approach, actually, we've been leveraging supervised ai, predictive AI in our core networks for years. The recent general utilization of generative AI presents a lot of opportunity but also some risk. So we're evaluating how it will be part of the automation journey that we're on. And then as our business model evolves from being a legacy telco, typically looking at voice services connectivity, a little bit of TV entertainment to a much more expansive service provider model where we're layering on capability on a broadband network ecosystem. The opportunities for us to evolve the way we reach and interact with our customers is rapidly expanding. And I think the technologies of convergence we're seeing in the IT and network space, the general F AI capabilities are really opening up many avenues for us to explore how our business model should evolve.

Automation is absolutely essential for network operators in the future. Jaime. What kind of progress is tes making towards automation?

Well, we've been automating for the last decade through different technologies. So it was analytics, big data coming to ai, and now most recently, gen ai. Our culture is to always innovate and I find that on today's world and technology that we have available has never been easier to innovate as it is right now. So across the company, through all the business units, we're looking at ways that we can enhance the automation to be able to provide better customer experiences, but also make life easier for our employees. When you look at networks, networks has been getting far more complex than before, and it's a must that we actually automate and provide platforms and tooling that allows the different team members to not only make their own life easier, but actually being able to navigate the complexities that we have on the network in a more successful way.

And you mentioned AI a few times, Tony, to what extent has tell us embraced AI applications in its operations?

So pure, simple network management leverages a lot of predictive AI and scripted AI tool sets. But what we've done since the general awareness of chat, GBT and generative AI came to the fore 14 months ago now practically, we've really undertaken a very expansive look at how we would govern within the business, the utilization of these tool sets, how we would create a framework so that we can ensure that data integrity, ethical usage are paramount, factors of consideration, and then how can we create access the tools and to the utilization of Gen FFA across the business in the widest possible context so that we can really leverage every part of our business. The kind of innovation ideas that will come from people that are at the forefront of the business models that we're evolving to really bring these tool sets to work. And Jaime's team are really there to create a fabric framework that we can then create fast track tool sets in a general framework of consistency and then allow the business to explore how best to utilize them.

Jaime, what kind of impact has AI made on your AI strategy and operations?

Massive. So we actually are tracking for hundreds of millions of dollars of right to the bottom line on cost reduction. Not only that, but looking at opportunities to enhance revenue streams as well. When you think about gen AI is an ability to be able to fully rethink how you operate and how you can transform how you do business. As Tony was mentioning, we have a multi-front approach on the way we tackle that. So one of them is provide a safe and secure and reliable tooling for our team members across the entire global footprint that we have so they can create their own use cases without having dependencies in other teams as much as possible. And for some of those more complex use cases, we have multidisciplinary squads composed of machine learning engineers, software engineers, and the business itself that actually tackles some of these more complex problems. To date. Since GPT came out at the end of 2022, we have over 15 enterprise grade use cases that are helping transform the company from how we operate the network, on how we dispatch technicians on the field, how we share knowledge, how we equip call center agents to be more effective. And it's across the broad spectrum of businesses and how we approach customer experience and how we improve constantly, how we evolve the products that we offer.

A pleasure to be here. Thank you.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

How the telco industry can transform itself for growth | TelecomTV

Hello, you're watching TelecomTV. I'm Yanitsa Boyadzhieva, deputy editor, and as part of our DSP Leaders Council Industry Vision Report sponsored by Intel, I am here to discuss some of the key takeaways for the industry today, I'm delighted to be joined by Werner Schafer, Vice President of Sales and Marketing Group, and General Manager of Network Communications Sales group at Intel. Hi Werner, thanks for joining us. So let's start off with sustainability. This was key to respondents in the report with 98% ranking it as being of high or the utmost importance of the back of MWC. Can you tell us more about what you are hearing and the work that Intel is doing in this area?

Yeah, happy to, and thanks for having me. Definitely. Sustainability was a big topic in Barcelona and it has been before and it has ever since been a big topic in the conversations we have with the operators and we're responding to it. Like in Barcelona, we talk at length about our infrastructure power manager, our IPM, which provides tremendous power savings and not just in new generations, it's actually perfectly fine for Brownfield. So whatever is in existing infrastructure, we can save power of that. And beautifully, Nokia actually showcased IPM as part of their solution bringing up to 40% CPU power savings in the 5G core. So real world use case, real world application of this tremendous solution that we've already got into place. We know there's other ISVs that are planning to implement IPM and their offerings. And then on top of that, we also obviously talking about new generations of silicon coming from us that brings tuna half, 2.7 times the performance on a rec level. So a lot in Barcelona that we were able to discuss all the way to obviously savings, not just on CPU level, but then overall in the RAN and in the way that we architect together to bring lower pouch, better utilization, and also in the design of the networks, making sure that we really utilize the capabilities that we have today. We don't build anymore for peak performance. We build to manage networks dynamic dynamically and make sure that we power down what's not in use.

And AI has been recognized as a pivotal technology with a significant impact on the telecom industry's future. What do you think are AI's biggest opportunities?

Clearly when you think about performance, when you talk about efficiency, when you talk about management, those will be great areas for AI to gain a deeper foothold into the operator's networks. To a degree, I mean, we've been doing this in the industry for many, many years, but with the new algorithms, with new solutions in ai, this will be even having a bigger impact there for the operators to really utilize AI as something that will help them drive down cost, bring better efficiencies and better services to their customers, and also obviously on the internal side, lower cost and help them just manage overall better. So very excited to see that this has been taken up in Nepal and that the leaders do think that it has that big of an impact to them in the next years.

Yes, indeed. It appears that AI will transform many aspects within the telco industry and bring significant opportunities. On that note, what is your advice to DSPs and CSPs to streamline AI development and its integration into network operations?

Well, my advice is maybe to start to say, Hey, take a deep breath and look beyond the hype that we currently have maybe, and really think about what is there that you to, you want to get out of your AI deployments and shy away from the conversation about what GPU do I need in my infrastructure. And there's important other areas that we'll need to look at as well, data availability, security compliance, the skillset of the employees that are supposed to bring this all in, all the way to what is the ethics about that and the usage. And quite frankly, for some of the things that want to do, the infrastructure may already be there because quite frankly, it depends on the workloads. And if you, for instance, look at inference, 90% of that today runs on your trusted X 86 infrastructure on Xon, right? So we'll need to look at where the operators want to go, what the workloads are. And we're not standing still, obviously our next generation silicon coming out specifically for the industry. Granite Rapids D is going to have AI accelerators also already built in. So I would say my advice is let's look clearly where the implementation is supposed to take place, what the workloads are that the operators want to use AI for in, and then we should have a conversation and see what can be done best to design that.

Aside from ai, the geographical imbalance in the supply chain is also a hot topic with hardware becoming increasingly regionalized. What is Intel doing to mitigate supply chain risks for DSPs and CSPs?

Well, I think it starts with our IDM 2.0 strategy, right? So we are actually investing heavily in more capacity, specifically more capacity outside of a PJ region. We have announced and we're building new factories in the United States. We are building new capacities overall in the European Union and Germany, France, Poland, and Ireland. So we definitely want to help just from a geographically diversity there. But it's more than that because supply chain stability and sustainability also depends who are your suppliers underneath. So really making sure, big learning obviously from the covid days that your supply chain is not dependent on just one region or that you're not depending on one supplier, then somewhere that may be based and you still have the challenge doesn't have the factory in the US if your supply chain underneath is affected by other regions that may not be able to deliver to you. So that's a big part of us. And it's also a big part that we discuss with our customers and saying, look, it's not enough to look where the box comes from that you may put into your network. You really have to go down into the supplier level and then component level to make sure that you have a secure supply chain.

And you have mentioned the critical role of ecosystem collaboration in the success of 5G and beyond. At MWC, we saw the wide breadth of Intel's partnerships in the industry. Can you tell us how these collaborations will contribute to advancing network innovation and scalability in the year to come?

Yeah, I'm happy to. I mean, it was a quite impressive wall of ecosystem and all the partners, there's so many more. We literally have hundreds of partners in our network builders, as we used to call it. And the ecosystem is something I believe that we've done very well. And not just ecosystem per se, but industry changing ecosystem. When we think about the N of V days, we're replicating that now on the RAN side with virtual, ran, our contributions with our customers, with our partners, and really building stages and building areas where we can all come together, talk together and collaborate, and really help solving an industry problem. And if we look at all RAN v ran, the configurations that we have there, that's very much so in the tradition of driving the industries to better cost efficiencies, new technologies, new innovation that is only plausible with a broad ecosystem and eventually democratizing the technology that's being used and allowing new players also to come into the market and showcase what they can. That's true innovation that you only will see from a group of like-minded companies that are open for innovation and that really have a bigger and greater good in mind than just a single outcome of their own company.

Yes, there is plenty of scope for innovation across the ecosystem. Well, we've covered many topics during this discussion, and unfortunately, Werner, we have run out of time, but I certainly look forward to seeing how Intel and its partners will continue to advance network innovation in the coming year. Werner, thanks so much for joining us.

And if you'd like to know more on the DSP Leaders Council and download the DSP leaders reports, please visit telecomtv.com and you can find them under our reports section. Thank you for watching.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

Accelerating the journey to autonomous networks in telecom | TelecomTV

Autonomous networks offers significant benefits to telcos. But where are we on the automation journey here to discuss our Manish Mangal global business, head of 5G and network services at Tech Mahindra, Tomek, Gerszberg, head of Axiata Group Future Networks, and Tammy Whyman, global head of telecom partnerships at AWS. Thank you all for joining me today. Thank you. In our industry, lots of people have definitions of what automation means. What does it mean to you? Start with you Manish.

From my perspective, I think it's important that we're witnessing a step change in the industry now we've have automated networks for some time and now we're starting to talk about autonomous networks and I think there's still some variations around what that means, what the benefits are, but really for me, when you get into autonomous networks, it is about the ability to learn. The network is able to understand the context, make a correction and learn from that so that it does not repeat the same thing again. And that's where you start as network operators. You feel like you might be losing the control of this. And so I think there's a culture shift that needs to happen at the same time, but the technology is in place to have autonomous networks and we're starting to see some early implementations of this.

Yeah, actually I don't have much to add because I am just in this opinion that autonomous network needs to be, needs to be aware of the services of the users on the network. It needs to be able to change itself, optimize how to heal and so on. So this is sense. Yeah, I agree. This is also a big mindset change because we are now moving to this kind of declarative approach that is already well known in the cloud world, but due to the telcos, because very often telcos still follow the process, they optimize the process, they automated the process, kind of like robotic process automation. But now this new approach with the declarative way cognitive networks is changing a lot. And I'm very much dreaming about autonomous four zero network in my workplace.

But you are where a lot of companies are right now as well. For the two of you who are maybe further along on that journey for a network to self configure, self heal, what components are necessary for a company that may want to start down that journey?

Yeah, well I think they're kind of basic components. So one is the ability to think and that is using gen AI to be able to put that brain behind it and give it the ability to think. But then once you have that, you need to be able to detect what is an anomaly, what is something that's business as usual, what is the scale of this? And then once it detects how quickly can it detect, that's where you get into latency issues. And I think that's been one of the major impediments on autonomous networks to date has been solving the issue for latency because milliseconds can create major catastrophes and network operations and then once you have that ability to quickly detect, then the network needs to be able to heal itself and reroute. So all of those components together really are what enable an autonomous network. And so we have the technology that's available, especially with gen AI and a lot of the large language models which are being created by some of the announcements here like telco alliance, what's bringing together network data from different operators using the open brand standards. And I think we'll be seeing more and more data that's available to help make better decisions when we're looking at the decisions that the model is making. But there's still a lot to do around the processes and the enablement of the field force.

Mission. I'm not so much concerned about this part because the telcos, they have a lot of data, they see a lot of data. Over the years we've been investing in observability and this kind of businesses already, I would say well established. We can monitor every level of the network and in fact we are throwing more data away than we are really keeping. One of the reasons is because at that moment we can't really get use of those data. And I hope you know that the gen AI will help us to filter out what is important and how to turn it into the knowledge and into actionable tasks. My concern is rather related to the ability to execute because we may have the knowledge about the network status, root cause analysis for any topics, but how to execute it if you have a lot of legacy that simply does not tuck in your language. So actually the right path for the evolution of the networks to get benefit of the technologies. As you mentioned, it's like the technologies are just in our hands, we could use it, but how to do it in the way that those networks and this equipment that is still now in use and has not built to be automated or it has been not built to be a part of the autonomous organism. This is the challenge.

And along those lines, on the other end of the spectrum, what strategies are you using to deal with partners or providers that are coming to you with different kind of strategies or different products that then you have to try to create this end-to-end ecosystem? What is the strategy for getting through that?

Process. It'll be built step by step. Yeah, that's obvious because it'll start with the use cases probably that are now the most urgent ones, how to reduce the energy consumption. So with those things, because on the other hand we also need to remember that networks are very physical. There is a piece of fiber, optical waste, there is a piece, there is an antenna, there is a connector for this antenna, there is a corrosion somewhere. And my, so it's like there are a lot of things that always will be physical and there will be always kind of manual, but a lot of the services like the service creation, this adaptation, this can be I believe done in the first step.

Yeah, I think that it's a really good point about the ecosystem and I see in the industry we're moving more and more towards ecosystems where we're coming together, but particularly in this space or even to the point where we're seeing the telcos themselves come together to try to solve, so as I mentioned before, the global telco alliance where we have different operators coming to bring their data together to make a stronger, more accurate LLM initially for customer experience, but also using network data for that customer experience. And then you also see a lot around network APIs at this show and it's telcos that are opening up their networks to developers so that they can probe and create applications to help make networks run more efficiently, to have better inspection of them. And truly, there's a lot of innovation that's coming from the outside world of developers into the networks.

Yes, this is the pressure actually that we need also to feel to evolve ourselves because with the pressure, hopefully there will be also money coming and the evolution towards programmable networks that we can give this experience to the developers that they also, that we can build on their creativity. This is something what we really need and for this we need to have the autonomous networks. Without that, this change will not happen. Yeah,

How do you see the intersection of machine learning and AI evolving in autonomous networks or how do you wish it would evolve?

It is indeed a great question and I don't know if anybody can predict yet what scale at which the AI and the Gen AI will actually evolve and play. One thing is sure for though it will have a very significant and important role to play today we are starting to see some very specific use cases that are enabling a specific problem solving. One of the things that we have brought to life is an ability for gene AI to take the data in the operations and turn that into what we call the ticket resolution advisor so that when the tickets are getting formed, people with gen AI capability can start asking questions. The incident managers can ask the question through gene AI in terms of what likely is happening in the network and what should I do. And that becomes a lot more adaptive standard operating procedures rather than rigid ones and gives a little bit more intelligence in solving the problems as you've seen in the network. But that's just a very small incremental first step. I do see that it'll take its shape three, four years from now when we'll be talking today or just like we're talking today, we will not be talking about what role AI will play. We'll be really talking about the amount of disruption the AI and gen AI has brought in in terms of the management of the end to life cycle.

I'll just add one thing that the progress, what we have seen in with Jet GPT or with other tools, it's coming because this information to be processed was available. Telcos networks are still pretty closed. We don't share the information building, let's say strong models require access to the information. Right now, let's say we can charge GPT can program because GitHub was open for years and this is the knowledge that we share. I believe also building open ecosystems in the telco and open access to some of the data can accelerate this progress very much because like, okay, consumer data, this is one thing, we don't need to share it, but the information, how the network elements behave, but it's nothing competitive behind it. This is kind of common I would say if we can share it for the common benefit

And then in the telco industry, look, we're a year, a year and a half into the gen AI revolution here. And I think you'll see the telco industry continue to be very productive with the relationship with the customer. So now we're seeing most of the gen AI use cases to be more internal, whether it's employee facing. And then with networks, certainly the challenge, as I mentioned before is around the latency. So it's a difficult use case, although it is internal facing a lot of data, a lot of systems to bring together and it needs to be real time. I think we'll see a lot of evolution towards autonomous networks. And I would say eventually we'll be seeing a lot more consumer application, so digital human interaction and retail environments. And that will be a stateful interaction that you bring with you as you have an interaction with your provider on the phone, whether it be in a digital environment. So I think you'll find that it becomes more pervasive with the consumer.

Well, thank you very much for your insights. This is an exciting time in our industry and you all illustrate that. So thank you very much for being here. Thank

You. Thank you. Thank you.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

Hi, I am Tony Pulos and I'm at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. And today I have with me Harpinder Matharu, who is the senior director product marketing, the Wired and wireless group at AMD. Harpinder, It's great to catch up. I'm really interested to hear about what you are doing here, particularly around AI because everyone's talking about AI and how does AI fit into the RAN and the open ran market?

Yeah, so AI should look at it as a tool in a toolbox, and there are three aspects. First of all, within the base station you want to find avenues to improve the capacity of the base station. So AI comes very handy there wherever we have estimation. Channel estimation is one aspect of it. Wherever you have heuristic algorithms like scheduler, AI can do, marvelous. And when you look at a cluster of base stations, how you manage them, AI is a great tool for that. And then if you go to Edge or where you host your services, that is another area where AI tends to be a very good tool. So from that perspective, ran and open RAN is trying to define some use cases in context of Rick and I think they're going to expand it to other areas of RAN as well. So we are looking forward to its use cases and three, GPP is now defining it as part of their release 17. So it's getting covered at all aspects of standardization and industry lines as well as we are seeing that these tools can be leveraged today in context of 5G and then leading into six G.

So would I be right in presuming that the AI could help produce a more efficient RAN system and also, but is there any power or performance degradation? We keep hearing about these GPUs being really power hungry,

I dread to ask this question, but can you elaborate more on AI and six G and how do those two correlate?

Wow, it's a very good question. In fact, as you know, six G requirements are being gathered in three gpp standardization will happen. But that three GPP was already putting AI as a very important element in the specifications. So we believe that just like 5G introduced the cloud native concept, we believe that six G 3G PP and the proposal that we will see in three GP, we will move it towards being AI native. So leveraging AI as a tool and on all aspects of RAN deployment in the signal chain within the base station to how you optimize it to how you instantiate services. We do believe that there'll be a core part of 60. And another important thing to highlight here is for 5G, for example, release 15 started with enhanced mobile broadband as a main use case targeting consumers. And then subsequently we have other use cases coming into picture like ultra reliable, low latency and massive machine type communication. We believe that six G needs to look at enterprise and other services first so that we can scale and we can enable help operators to monetize their networks so that they can pass on that benefits to the supply chain. So the supply chain could be a little bit more being productive, beaming with lot more innovations coming in. So we believe that 60 will be more enterprise centric and will open up more use cases for the RAN deployments.

Right, if you look at AI concept is first of all, some of the AI elements have already been introduced, have been implemented an existing base station implementation. So they're not something completely new. But if you have to incorporate some of the new developments that we have seen in ai, obviously we have to find a way to introduce them in the existing infrastructure. So I would say that a lot of radios are already existing, they're installed. The first place where we can introduce them is the DU or the base station and as we're seeing V ran instances are getting introduced. So it's much easier for us to introduce AI in a v ran instance in ddu. And obviously as newer base sessions evolve, they'll be much more planned. If it is a proprietary box, they'll have some functionality already incorporated. So we do see that beginning will be DU and gradually as new radios are deployed and you introducing those radios and likewise you provision those in the edge sites as well.

In closing, 6G is stated to be deployed in 2030. So why are we talking about it now?

Yeah, first I would like to correct that we look forward to seeing some early deployments in 2028 as part of has been the case. Olympics will trigger that it'll be early deployments, but if they're early deployments, think 2028, you need to have systems ready by 26, 27 tested. Okay, there'll be standardization, may not be quite there, but still you have to have some systems tried out and if you have to do standardization then you need to have some proof of concept. Some test beds in 20 26, 20 25. So we as adaptive S-O-C-F-P-G-A provider play a significant role right from the beginning. When you have an idea, you do a proof of concept to prove it out and then that becomes one of the contributions to the standard. And then you do the take the proof of concept for early commercialization, early introduction of the products and then subsequently mainstream. So you have to basically look from 2028 backwards and therefore I think it's about time we are in 2024, so not much time remaining for us and

I agree. I think 5G still more deployments need to come and we do see that many of the sites, they are going to hit capacity given every year we have a growth of 30% more traffic. So I think 60, just like 5G introduced these mid bands. We expect that 60 will open up seven gigahertz to 24 gigahertz. Again, which specific band that has to be decided as within the industry. But so for these bands it's potentially possible that we'll look into new transmission schemes, new frame structure, and new coding. Right. So from that perspective we do see that 60 G discussion will start in parallel replenishing the 5G infrastructure.

We will never stop moving forward. Harpinder, thank you very much for being with me today.

Thank you Tony.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

What is the current state of O RAN and sustainability in the ran? Well, to discuss this topic, let's engage Christina Rodriguez, VP in the Network and Edge Group and GM of the Wireless Access Network Division at Intel and Geetha Ram, global head of Telco Infrastructure Solutions at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. And Matteo Fiorani, head of distributed Unit infrastructure and security at Ericsson. Welcome to all of you today. Thank you. So Christina, just to start with, where are we today with RAN and what progress has been made so far?

We are in the middle of a massive transformation. There's been a tremendous progress. We have today major operators deploying commercially at a scale. We have operators starting to deploy and we have pretty much everybody saying that they are going to take this journey one way or another. So really tremendous progress, tremendous momentum. You see, for example, just to be more specific and just throw some examples, we see Verizon that have already deployed more than 15,000 virtual cell sites and they have said, we wouldn't be doing this if it wasn't equal or better than the way they had before. You have Vodafone, for example, also deploying commercially after finishing a trial where they resulted the results show again that the majority of the measurements were better equal or better that the legacy that they were replacing. You have, for example, an at and t made an announcement that we all got our attention.

Of course we have Telefonica, Deutsche Telecom, Rakuten and Dish of course, and Telus recently announcing to. So really tremendous progress. And what we have seen is that the industries embracing, again, is embracing these software defined network architecture based on server architecture with CPUs underneath that architecture that can give them all the capabilities without compromising the KPI. And then back to the sustainability point, again, a lot of these type of architecture benefits, their sustainability goals that we're trying to reach. We have with HPE, they Gen 11 using the device at which the SOC that we launched last MWCA year ago is our fourth generation of Intel C on a scalable processor with V ran boost and fantastic because with that you have everything that you need to run the entire workload, run workload. So you don't need any external component, any additional component. And by that you get double the capacity, but you also get an additional 20% of energy consumption and they have a, HP has their Gen 11 featuring this CPU and giving that to the operators and then we stop there.

So I would say one more thing. This year at MWC 24, we are announcing the Future Gen for also the brand workload is named Gran Rapid D. And again, it will bring significant performance, boost energy efficiency, new features and new enhancements and including AI built in additional AI built in acceleration. So you can have everything, you can run the entire workload, the run, and the AI without having any external component consuming power. And then finally, I would say that Ericson has already done a call, a first call in the Gran Rapid deep platform. So fantastic just getting better and better.

So there's a lot going on. And Geetha , how does RAN help operators meet their sustainability targets?

Well, the sustainability parents is a team effort. It's an ecosystem effort, right? So you start off with the silicon itself, and Christina spoke a lot about the Intel's participation in this and the CPUs and all of the things that Intel is doing. So we start by taking the best silicon and she spoke about everything from the current generation. We've been doing this with Intel for several generations and you spoke Christina about Verizon and we've been doing it for generations from Cascade Lake, right, improving from Cascade Lake, ice Lake Sapphire Rapids, to now Granite Rapids D. And so you pick the right silicon and then from there, along with that partnership, we build a very nice workload optimized server that basically caters to the RAN workload and addresses the sustainability issues. And how we do it is along with our ecosystem partners, including Ericsson and the OS CAS vendors, whether it's any one of the OS CAS vendors, red Hat, wind River, et cetera. And we build what we call the vRAN reference configurations. This is where we optimize not just the hardware but all the way up through the stack. We make sure that everything is optimized for the bios, the firmware, and all the way up to the workload. And when you optimize everything for performance, for power, et cetera, that's how you address the sustainability. Once again, it is an ecosystem challenge that we all have to work together and we are working together to address it.

And speaking of working together, what Mateo is the future of these companies working together and what's in the plans to make this grow even more?

I think that there is a bright future for this company to work together. The collaboration so far has been outstanding as Christina and Gita also mentioned cloud and is an ecosystem. So we need to bring it together. It's not just one company. It's many company that need to collaborate, work very tightly together to bring competitive solutions to the market. We actually at Ericsson have a name for this type of collaborations. We call them pre-integrated solutions. One of the challenges that comes with cloud and an open brand is actually that it disaggregates the different layers, the heart, the cloud infrastructure and the software. And we together are bringing them back in a single system. So this is where our collaboration, it's fundamental that collaboration with company like HPE and Intel is totally fundamental to bring solutions that are easy to integrate, easy to deploy, efficient, and can always deliver to the maximum performance.

So this is the great advantage of having this collaboration that we can build together pre-integrated solution that are ready for the customer and always deliver on the best performance. We also think that another important aspect is of course standardization. Because with standardization we can have a base reference with all the companies developing against that base reference so that it can help to smooth out and easy, the pre-integration work, leaving the opportunity for the operator to also select different options and give flexibility, which is one of the idea behind Open Run. So I think that the collaboration is great. There is a bright future ahead for the three companies to work together. As Christina mentioned, we have just now achieved the first call on Integra Rapids and soon we'll start into integration also working with HP on it. So to make sure that we have a full end-to-end solution. So I see a lot of opportunities in the future.

It is one of the most exciting partnerships in our industry today. So thank you all for your insights. Thank

Thank you very much.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

Good morning guys. How are you? Everyone? Well, anyone stay out too late last night? Yes. Yes, yes. So my name's Adam Kennedy. I'm the consulting engineer for global service provider at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, but more specifically the Aruba networking arm. Anyone familiar with the Aruba brand or the Aruba products in the audience? Yes. No, nobody you are. I'm going to pick on you, sir. Can you tell me when Aruba was founded as a company? Aruba was actually founded in 2002, and the reason that I bring that up is experience in this space actually really matters. We were a cloud first native company founded in 2002. So we have a long longevity of providing security solutions to organizations, to communities, to global service providers. And I bring this up because we've always been focused at Aruba on three main things. The applications that users like yourself are using in the network, the devices and your credentials as a user that permits you to do your job.

And also all of the influx of the devices that are on the network Now, the massive devices that you're seeing around this venue, sensors, iot sensors, cameras, even the devices that you're carrying in your phone. But we've always been very, very centric on providing something called Role-based access control for all these devices. So security has always been part and paramount to what we do as an organization. We were actually acquired by Hewlett Packard in 2015, and we now lead actually the networking arm of Hewlett Packard Edge Networking. So all of the leadership from Aruba was brought on board to lead that portfolio go forward. So we've got a longstanding history of experience to provide secure applications across the board in our entire portfolio. Of course, all of this is now being ingested by our broader GreenLake portfolio and more specifically Aruba Central. Aruba Central is the cloud native networking program and platform that terminates connections and configuration for all of our networking devices, our access points, our switches, our gateways, and also provides that central point of policy and enforcement for all of these devices within the network.

And why is that important? People like yourself require connectivity. Your network operators and your providers and your organization want to provide that to you. People demand it no matter where they go, but of course, security is always a concern within that space. What we want to do is ensure that we're providing the least amount of privilege and ensuring that your actually privileges are mapped through your duration in connection through the network. Regardless if you come on board to the network over the wire or over the wireless, we have a means to profile your device to ensure that we're actively providing a common user experience and a good user experience on the basis of your credentials. And the concept is zero. Trust is talked about very, very frequently, but it's actually more difficult to provide than what you might think. Anyone out in the bar last night? Anyone go for drinks, stay out too late. So what I'd like to talk about when I talk about zero

Trust is a couple of different facets. When you get to a bar or a restaurant, they check your idea at the door, they make sure you're of age to order sangria. But if I get in, clearly I'm old enough to have sangria, I get in, they can say that I'm actually allowed to be in the bar because my credentials match what I'm saying. But after I've had four pictures of margaritas, my persona may change. I might start to act a little bit differently. So it's not just about getting your security at the door, it's about providing that pervasively as you continue to move through the network. So we continuously monitor people's personas and their devices, and of course, all of that information is ingested into the GreenLake data platform. So when you connect to Aruba and Aruba Central, we're not only profiling you and your devices against your network and your company, we're harnessing the broader power of the GreenLake Data Lake to compare you to other devices in that space, looking for anomalies, looking for things that should require remediation.

If we see deviations, we're actively able to change your role, to change your persona, to quarantine you, or even remove you from the network on demand in real time. It's a system that we call dynamic segmentation. We do this regardless of, again, if you come in over the wire, if you come in over the wireless, if you're a headless iot device or it's a corporate laptop, if we notice that there's an anomaly and a device is suddenly uploading large amounts of data in the middle of the night, we know that that triggers and we action that information using our AI engine in AR Central to provide remediation and also positive experiences for the network operators that are providing the network connectivity. There's a lot of things that make up zero trust. You're probably familiar with many of the acronyms on this screen, and we're very cognizant that there's a lot of islands of people out there.

We're very cognizant that we're not the only vendor in this space. We've recently made a couple of acquisitions. One was a company called Silver Peak. It was done in 2018. That is our full fridge enterprise SD WAN platform. More recently, we've acquired a company called Access Security natively. Aruba did things very, very intrinsically from an east west perspective securing devices. We were very focused on premise security, but with the recent acquisitions, we're now able to extend that type of security in the cloud regardless of your cloud provider per application, per user, and per stream. So again, we have the ability to provide a full stack solution, but we're also very cognizant that there are many islands and we actually have by way of a few of our acquisitions, a couple of products that will help you get off of those islands. In 2011, we acquired a company called Aveda, which has now been rebranded as Aruba ClearPass.

Aruba ClearPass is a third party vendor agnostic product, which is our secure NAC policy engine and AAA enterprise grade radius server. And it supports a multitude of providers. We support and have actually large deployments of our competitors on ClearPass without a single piece of Aruba hardware. So we have vendor agnostic solutions to help you get off of some of those islands. And of course, at the time that you're ready to have a conversation about full Stack, we would love to have that conversation with you. So what should it really look like? It needs to incorporate all of the things that you do. So again, I mentioned earlier the applications, the things and the users and the credentials that actually provide that network connectivity. Of course, it has to include a unified portfolio. At Aruba, we have one singular portfolio. There is not a separate S skew depending on how you want to deploy our service. Any one of our products can be deployed in a multitude of ways, whether it's small office, home office, a regional campus, or a large venue such as this. It also needs to operate anywhere. So we have on-prem solutions, of course, our cloud-based solutions probably the most predominant. And the ability to, of course, acknowledge that some people are accessing client and connectivity in the data center and their own environment or cloud providers. And we also have the ability to actually deploy on-prem.

The real crux of this is providing a single point of construct for your universal visibility. And again, that is Aruba Central. Aruba Central provides you that central point of policy management and enforcement for all of the devices within the network. And of course, we have now the ability to provide global policy across the board. Again, regardless of your device, whether it's a headless iot device or whether it's your corporate laptop providing a unified policy. And we're constantly monitoring your user session to provide that quality of experience throughout the lifespan of your time on that network. And again, providing that information northbound to our data lake, comparing anomalies in real time to ensure a good user experience. And also ensuring that any anomalies are remediated and removed from the network Edge cloud enforcements, it's across the entire portfolio. All of our access points actually have a staple firewall built in, as do our controllers.

So we're very much a security first company. All of our products inclusive of SD-WAN have unified IDS and IPS and Unified threat management. So again, we take security very cautiously and close to heart at Aruba. Of course, it's not complete without AI automation. Part of this is also providing that rich telemetry to vendor operators and global service providers to help them understand how to remediate things when things actually go wrong. Sometimes it is the wifi, but most times it's actually not the wifi. It's something in between that is impacting that user experience. But with Aruba GreenLake and Aruba Essential, we're able to provide that in a single stack. But again, also want to help you get off the island that you may be on. And with that, I thank you for your time.<br><br>Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

Mission critical connectivity for public sector, safety, defence applications with private 5G | TelecomTV

As my friends say, Athonet is part now of HPE. One years ago it was announced at our acquisition and I would like now to speak a bit about what we are doing in the mission critical market. Mission critical means wherever our necessary telecommunication for mission critical purposes. Could be public sector, could be public safety, could be army, could be any other circumstance when the communication are really vital for who is leveraging on. So typically the mission critical market is looking to defense and public safety. As you can imagine in this moment, it's under the radar, this topology of communication because our strategic during situation that are not so comfortable for several purposes when some corps have to intervene somewhere where there are intelligence activities and as well where there is collaboration between the public and the private sector.<br><br>(01:18)<br>Mission critical communication network enable a lot of very important application and services. In this slide I'm showing very quickly why private 4G private 4G are really necessary in this environment because more and more versus the past when the real focus was voice and messages. Now the needs is really to have multimedia capability in any situation, in any circumstance, in any location. And so to have the opportunity to have a dedicated bubble enabling this topology of services from video communication, geolocalization sharing of multimedia contents, managing of drones or whatever is really strategic and at and HPE act in this environmental supplying our solution for fixed mobile network, what we offer on the market different topology solution. So we are working with the public safety environment for instance, creating network that are able to cover the full territory, leveraging also the access of the MNOs. With MVNO approach, we are working also creating a fix network 4G or 5G to cover strategic asset.<br><br>(02:49)<br>That could be military port, could be airport, could be Barak, polygon, wherever you need due to the fact that you are or your customer public sector or army reliable dedicated solution not linked to the MNOs network. And on top of that we are able also to create a tactical solution that you can move and bring on the field wherever it's necessary. All this solution are under a unique single umbrella for management and operation. We are showing here, there is a demo of our tactical solution. Tactical solution means product that are tailored on our customer needs working in different band working in 4G in 5G, that you can transport or move on onboard a vehicle and so on that are able to create an umbrella, a broadband wireless umbrella with very low latency with the capacity to create a communication in the area. And the area is several kilometer radius for voice, for video, for machine to machine wherever you need. And we are able to create a different setup, transportable, portable or installable on onboard of vehicle like sheep, tank, Navy, whatever you have in mind.<br><br>(04:17)<br>Not only, we are not only producing tactical solution, but we are able also to create solution that can cooperate and create more complex network that are vital in this public safety and government scenario. So as I was saying before, we are able to cover different ology of purposes, tactical coverage on for instance ships and the port. But we are able also to federate such solution means that a different bubble that are in some way interconnected via satellite link, via microwave, via whatever you have in mind become a unique virtual bubble. And so people or soldier or whoever is under this bubble can move under this virtual coverage. And we are also able to create a hierarchical architecture means that we have a master live approach. Let me make an example. A port is a master for several ship and ship are master for several vehicle that can move from the ship this permitted to create dynamically hierarchical architecture that can be completely governed by defense, by public sector, by any organization. So not only single bubble by a full complex architecture covering the needs of this vertical.<br><br>(05:53)<br>And this is the story, this is the story. The fact that we are offering this market not single bubble or fixed coverage, but a full picture that permits to minister of defense, minister of interior and so on, to create a complete network fully organized with the management of the subscriber top down with the capacity to integrate a different topology of network and dynamically interconnect any users that you want to manage. On top of that, of course we are going to enable several topology of services and I have more or less synthesized in this slide. The first concept is the federation, what I just explained to you. Of course, we are going to enable mission critical push to talk communication that are the most common application in this environment for one-to-one or group communication, multimedia content division and so on. We are capable to enable also integration between new generation network with mission critical push to talk and legacy network based on TE R and so on.<br><br>(07:18)<br>We are able to rehabilitate voice over LTE over new radio communication. So video and voice communication using native dial of your smartphone, providing a very simple management tool because typically the customer that use these typology network are not expert of telecommunication. So this solution must be really friendly. And last but not least, the slicing concept. The slicing concept permits to many corp to use the same broadband wireless network with a dedicated approach. So each one see the network has dedicated for them, but in reality they are going to share. So multiple corp can share the same infrastructure. This is in a nutshell our proposition in this mission critical market. We have several demo around these topics with our solution tactical and not. So feel free to visit the booth and take a look. Thank you very much.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

AI inferencing at the 5G connected edge for video analytics | TelecomTV

Welcome back to the Telco as a platform summit, part of our DSP leaders coverage. A time now for our live q and a show. I'm Guy Daniels and this is the second of two q and a shows. It's your final chance to ask questions on APIs, gateways, platform services as a service models and so on. It's an extensive and somewhat complex topic as we found out earlier today when we held a panel discussion on how APIs and middleware can support vertical applications. Now, we've already received a number of questions from you, but if you haven't yet sent us one, then please do so now and use the q and a form that you can find on the website. Let's now meet our guests who are going to help answer your questions and joining us live on the program today are Beth Cohen, SDN Network product strategy for Verizon Business Group. Paul Miller, chief Technology Officer at Wind River and Petar Torre principal engineer with Intel Corporation. Hello everyone. Thanks so much for returning for this q and a show. Let's get straight to our first audience question and this viewer asks, which is better between these two options and why an operator specific API marketplace or a telco industry level API marketplace? Paul, can I come across to you for your views first?

Great, thanks very much Paul. And yes, it's an interesting choice, isn't it, and lots of factors to consider there. Beth, what about you? Do you favor one approach over the other at Verizon or are you looking at both?

Great. Thanks very much Beth. And as you said, there were a lot of organizations working at different aspects of this, right. Let's go to our next question because we are getting quite a lot of questions coming through. So this next question says, given the different components that are built into various platforms, how will CSPs distinguish themselves from the many platforms that are out there? Petar, can I come across to you for some thoughts on this one?

Yeah, thanks Petar. Thanks very much for explaining that and giving your views on, that's great. And Beth, did you want to come in as well with some thoughts on this one?

I did. I think we overlooked the fact that there's actually multiple different types of APIs that have different functions. And I'll use an example, we have something called the digital enablement platform, which is a set of APIs that are specifically designed to work to be used by our customers to integrate with their ITSM systems. So these APIs essentially expose the data lakes associated with their services, their network services that they're buying from us and so that they can incorporate information about their network's behavior. But it also incorporates a lot of operational API type activities like ticket coordination and the ability to interface allow our customers to interface with their applications. So event correlation and those types of things. Those are very different types of APIs than are the type that are used like in math where the APIs are designed specifically for telcos to peer and the telcos to peer with other telcos or peer with cloud service providers. So those are to a certain extent orthogonal and much more really require standards than the APIs that we use for our customers. And we do provide some standard APIs for our customers as well, but mostly these APIs are designed to interface with our own internal systems and make it easier for our customers to consume that information and that those just don't lend themselves to standards in the same way.

Great. Thanks very much Beth. And yeah, I guess the view here is also asking service differentiation. It's always been front and center of telcos and if we're providing a common platform approach, how does that happen? Paul, did you want to come into this question as well?

Yeah, very clear. Thanks very much Paul. And Beth, did you want to come back in and pick up on something there?

I did. So I wanted to pick up on Paul's talk about the automotive industry. That's an area that is particularly growing with the 5G cars are no longer mechanical devices. They're really, if you will, 5G or they're wireless devices. And you're absolutely right that there's a lot of work around providing APIs that allow these systems to interact with our network. And yes, they are unique to our network. I was actually in a call where we were talking about a new product and somebody mentioned, well, the devices, anybody can get onto our network. And the answer is no. The devices to get onto our network have to be certified. We will not allow any old device to get onto our 5G or 4G network. Verizon has to do testing, et cetera. And obviously the SIM is unique to us, but those devices have to use APIs that work with our systems. So as Paul pointed out, those are unique and on the flip side, on the automotive side, their APIs are unique to each one of the car companies. So the things that Ford has developed are different from the things that GM has developed. So we end up having to work with all of that, and of course the scale is huge, so there's less motivation to create standards in that part of the industry.

Thanks very much Beth and I love how this format gives us time to really explore the questions that we receive from our audience viewers, right? Talking to which next question coming up and the viewer asks, is there a danger that telcos create APIs for services that they want to offer rather than create APIs for actual problems that developers face and will such a telco first approach ultimately end in disappointment? Lots of questions we're getting focused on the telcos here. So Beth, can I come across to you for your thoughts? First,

Well, indeed, Beth, maybe there's a bit of frustration from our viewers there about perceived APIs that they're having to work with. I dunno, maybe we can get some more comments from our audience and we'll include them in the program. We're going to talk to Paul and Petarr a second for their views. So Paul, why don't we start with you first and then come to Petar next. So Paul,

Yeah, thanks guy and very interesting commentary there by Beth because I think that is always what we attempt to do in the telco industry and we look at what service providers are offering for API sets, there's always an intent to enable the application that the developers trying to build. I think though historically the service providers have had a difficult time understanding the software developer ecosystem and particular in the question asked, providing APIs that solve actual problems that developers face, that requires really understanding software development and the internals of building an application. I think the service providers tend to really understand a service that they're trying to launch that they believe they can monetize because as she said, every service provider is a business and the intent of offering these APIs is to enable monetization of services. And so that's always very clear and the prioritization is to what services to offer and which produces the greatest value is the subject of much research inside a service provider. There's a difference between that though in offering APIs that actually solve what a developer needs and I think there has been a gap there in the past and a difficulty in the service provider market of really understanding what software developers need for APIs to actually implement their application.

Thanks for those insights, Paul. Great. Petar come across to you for your views on this.

I'll just follow up on what Paul was saying. So yes, there was this type of attempts in the past and there were these type of gaps and the difference that we are hoping now is that by creating those developer friendly APIs, they are easier to consume than the previous versions of telco specialist APIs and simply have to start from somewhere and that somewhere is to expose network and IT assets that telecommunications companies have. I mean, what kind of other assets should they try to expose? I mean those are the ones and do this by doing pilots with enterprises and learning from those and contributing that in kamara different work groups and agreeing there to the best possible level of that that the teams are capable of agreeing, use that for further application enablement and get the feedback and interact fast on that and to try to ensure that feedback loop in that community. There is also developer customer representatives up to SC.

Great. Thanks. Thanks. Yeah, that's great insights. It obviously appears that we're trying to listen and bridge this gap between the telcos and developers. Beth, you wanted to come back in though and have some additional comments.

I will concede. Telcos are not software developers. That is not their role and we are very focused on delivering services, although I would argue that with cloud now many applications are services have come to be services, so the developers need to think about their applications or delivering a service. However, and I've said this before, there's a real gap in that the telcos are being asked to develop APIs that allows the applications to be more or rather the way to say it properly is we're being asked to provide application aware services, application aware APIs and we're doing it as much as possible. However, what's the real gap is that there's very little network aware APIs for developers and that I think is a serious gap that really would benefit developers to be able to have an API that connects to the network and figures out what's the optimum way that this application should work within a network framework because applications do run on networks and most developers know nothing about how networks work. And so providing that set of APIs would really benefit everybody in having the applications work. The application performance is something customers are always asking for from us and we only have one half of the equation. We have the network piece of it, we don't own the application piece of it.

Absolutely. Thanks very much Beth and to all our viewers, what do you think? Let us know. Send us an email, contact us on LinkedIn, use the q and a form on the website, however you want to get in touch, please do get in touch and share your views. Now talking about your views, it's time to check in on our audience poll for the telco as a platform summit. The question we are asking you this week is what are the main benefits to network operators of a telco as a platform strategy and the real time votes have just appeared to my right here, creating new service opportunities in the enterprise market is still leading the field but not by as much as it was yesterday. If you have yet to vote, then you are running out of time. We will keep the polls open until the end of today and then we'll analyze the results on telecom tv. Right. We still have time for more of your questions and here's our next one and the viewer asks, to what extent is the platform as a service strategy dependent upon developer access to telco SDKs that house network as a service APIs? Okay, very specific question there. Petar, perhaps you could help us out with some thoughts.

Fantastic, that sounds really interesting. I'm sure a lot of our viewers were MWC and we're lucky enough to see that, but there's obviously a lot of interesting developments happening as we speak. Paul, what are your thoughts on this?

Great, thanks Paul. Emphatic answers there. Beth, do you have views on this as well from the operator side?

I do. Both Paul and Petter are absolutely right. Unfortunately from the telco perspective, SDKs is kind of foreign language to us. So again, we're service providers, so we think along those lines when we're developing our APIs that they'll be in continuous use, they'll be integrated with our systems on the customer side as well. So thinking about how customers use these APIs to create new applications and making it easier using SDKs I think as a foreign language for us and I think that has held us back from making them more usable and gets back to my earlier comments about what we really need and that real gap of having very few tools that allow applications developers to incorporate network intelligence into their applications.

Yeah, thanks for those insights, Beth, especially the operator specific insights into the SDK question, right? Let's have a look at what else we've received from our audience. There's another one here. Well there are two very similar ones actually. One has come in a few moments ago. What are the thoughts of our panelists on the most effective go-to market strategies for telcos to sell their platform capabilities to the enterprise and also for developers to access these APIs direct sales via hyperscalers, via developer ecosystems. What is the optimal approach? Beth, can we maybe come back to you first to kick us off?

Thanks very much, Beth. Yes, communicating and getting the message out. Can you come in on this one as well? What's your views?

I'll focus on few keywords. So one is what another one is enterprises. So the way to get there is to start from what are those developers serving enterprises there are either in-house or there are some of their system integrators. It can be very fragmented per industry, country and so on. So obviously, I mean my favorite example is if somebody wants to sell to mining in Chile, knows to know how to spell this thing properly and have all the right context to get there and need to understand the environment, the use cases for this is of value, those that are currently being invested because there is chance to change something if this is static environment, how to disrupt it with all the ways on how it's correct to do that and then eventually has chance to have the discussion and to prove that those APIs and capabilities are of value and actually get adopted. And this is what makes it challenging. The fragmentation, the engagement of all the different enterprise vertical ecosystems is a very nontrivial thing to do and was explaining how this thing is currently being done and how to do more of it.

Great, thanks Petta, because as you rightly say, there are lots of varied enterprise ecosystems out there to deal with, right? Let's move on and see what else is coming from our audience and we've got another question here that's telco specific. So Beth, I'm hoping I can come to you with this one first and the viewer asks, there are multiple API standards, different industry bodies, there's vendor influence, there's open standards, telco has all these different aspects to deal with, but are these challenges a hindrance to telcos or are there opportunities that telcos can leverage?

I think they're both the number of people that participate in the many standards bodies. The great thing is that there's lots of them within the industry. Verizon as well as the other telcos are pretty limited and the people that participate tend to be, it's a longer term view, right? Developing standards, investing in developing open source code, developing open source reference models. I personally have been working on the ATE project for coming on six years now. And yes, it is a mature project but that's a lot of time and effort, but that's not my full-time job. My full-time job is developing products for Verizon and so I find that it's a struggle to get the company. It's not that Verizon is not in support of standards bodies, don't get me wrong. We absolutely are. I actually just read that our chief product officer, DECA is the president, chief chairman of the meth organization. So clearly we do sponsor open source and as well as standards bodies, but probably we have to weigh the cost and how long it takes for these standards to develop against very real pressure from the investment community in Wall Street to get successful products out the door. So it's a challenge and we do have to pick and choose what standards we support and what standards we don't support or rather we don't actively support, if you will.

Yes, absolutely. Thank you Beth. Lots for individual telcos to consider that to what their strategies should be. Petar, let's come across to you if you've got additional thoughts on this one.

Great. Thanks very much Petar. Thanks very much for those comments. Well, looking at the time, I think we might have time for just one more question. Let's squeeze in this late question from the audience and it's a question that really picks up on the earlier panel discussion and the questioner asks, what is the timeline for the industry to move beyond consumer use cases to address enterprise and IOT use cases? We've been doing this for years with APIs and middleware for example, one M, two M partnership. What has changed now? Why is it different today? Anybody would like to hazard a view on this one as to why today we find ourselves in a different situation than we maybe did 10 years ago and why developers should have more trust in us perhaps for our offerings. You mentioned this in the panel discussion didn't you, about how there's a sense of urgency now. Do you want to weigh in with an extra thought?

Yeah, a sense of urgency is great motivation. I mean we can read number of financial statements and come to conclusion on ACT now. There is a cultural evolution, evolution in terms of understanding developer requirements and make it developer friendly. This is a very strong design principle for defining this type of API categories. There is understanding on why this thing needs to be done through innovation in open source versus trying to agree in standards development organizations. So yeah, time is right for it now

That's good news. Petar, let's also hear from Beth and Paul starting with Beth. Beth, what do you think? Why is the situation different now?

So I'm going to talk about the pendulum swings of between consumer and enterprise and I have the gray hairs to say that I have seen that happen several times and right now the pendulum is swinging back toward the technologies leading enterprise development, technology development is coming out of enterprise. So somebody recently told me 5G at the end of the day is an enterprise play because the real benefactors are the enterprise. And I thought about that and I was like, yeah, that is true because the average user, if they're using a cell phone, doesn't matter whether it's 4G or 5G, they don't really see the benefit. However the enterprise can see real benefit for smart cities for for iot, we talked about the automotive industry really revolutionizing the capabilities for smarter cars, drone technology, all sorts of technologies. Oh, industrial, IOT, industrial manufacturing in general, supply chain, all of these are enterprise applications that really need APIs, applications, cloud, all of that to work together to be successful. And that's why I think enterprises is pushing the technology boundaries forward today. But 10 years ago it was a different situation. The consumers, the rise in smartphones and the drive toward developing smarter use of phones and how people interacted with their devices, mobility devices was very different. So enterprise winning today, maybe in 10 years it'll be different.

Great, thanks very much. Beth Paul. Times are different now. So is this why the prospects are better for the enterprise market, enterprise services?

Great. Thanks very much Paul. It does seem to be a lot more opportunities at the moment. Well, we are out of time. Thank you so much to you all for joining us for this live program and that's a wrap for this year's very first Telco as a platform summit. Thank you to all of you who submitted questions. We try to cover the most representative ones in the limited time we had available. If you missed any of our programs featuring all of these industry guests, then you can watch them on demand from the telecom TV website. Our DSP leaders coverage continues next month with digital support systems, another new summit for you. Until then, thank you for watching and goodbye.<br><br>Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

Hello, you are watching the Telco as a Platform Summit part of our year-Round DSP Leaders Coverage. I'm Guy Daniels. Now, this past year or so has seen a renewed interest in APIs application programming interfaces. The Open Gateway initiative from the GSMA was launched back in early 2023 to establish a framework of common network APIs designed to give developers universal access to operator networks. Well, I'm delighted to say that joining me now to discuss the initiative is Alex Sinclair, the Chief Technology Officer of the GSMA. Hello, Alex. It's very good to see you. So can you tell us what is the current status of the Open Gateway initiative and has it met your expectations in terms of operator engagement?

That's a great question, guy. The current status is that our members are fully engaged, as are their technology partners. Well, I would say we're making pretty solid progress. You mentioned it was launched last year in Barcelona. We've had around 47 operated groups that represents about 239 mobile networks. I think at the moment opcos, and it covers around 65% of global mobile connections from Brazil to China, Norway to New Zealand. We're working with a whole bunch of technology partners and cloud providers like AWS and Info B and Microsoft, goia, Ericsson, Vonage and the operators so far have made about 95 APIs commercially available. That's in about 2021 countries, I think at the moment. But that's just the beginning. Just to sort of illustrate the point, it was yesterday that we announced that the three Chinese operators, China Mobile, China Telecom, China Unicom, have launched the first commercial open Gateway APIs in China. So they've launched a one-time password, API, which we're all familiar with. So you can deliver that to a phone and user can provide proof of possession of the device. Typical use cases are the ones you'd expect onboarding the digital services, high value banking transactions, et cetera. In further news, we also announced that C Telecom, Huawei and ZT have joined the initiative. So yeah, I would say it succeeded our initial expectations, but there's a very, very long way to go.

Well, that's great news Alex, and it was also very good to see the initiative have so much prominence at MWC again this year and that it is continuing. Can I ask you how this fits with the Kamara project? Can you describe this relationship with the Linux Foundation and how, or even if the development of Kamara and Open Gateway are linked?

Yeah, another great question. So lemme start by saying from the very beginning we were adamant we weren't going to duplicate the efforts of others. Now that's not to be camera for the service APIs, but also the TM forum for their operate APIs. So we work very closely with both. We have a pretty strong relationship with Kamara. For example, we're on the Kamara technical steering committee and the outreach committee, and actually the APIs are actually defined, developed and published by Kamara, and it's an open source Linux Foundation project, which you're probably aware of, and it's got pretty broad participation. So by collaborating together, we can sort of realize our joint objective of exposing this new API NAS framework, and that will then make sure that partnerships and developers will have access to users across many, many operators. In fact, in 2023, we published a paper with Kamara Analytic and Forum documenting how we do this. It's called the Ecosystem for Open Gateway NAS API Development.

Okay, thanks for the update there Alex. It's all about developers really or getting developers involved to deliver these services. So what has been the response from the developer community? Because we do hear from developers that there's general gripes about API sprawl, so is there really an appetite for more APIs?

Well, it's still early days, but I think the response so far has been pretty positive and we have seen some interesting use cases coming through. I mean, as you kind of alluded to as an industry, we have to be clear that this isn't necessarily our strong suit dealing with developers and we have to listen more to what they want and what they need. Many operators have of course, early adopter programs, developer programs, but at the end of the day, we want to reach as many developers as possible. So as well as the sort of operated direct outreach, we're going to some of the bigger audiences as well. So we're going to sort of AWS reinvent, for example, to get through to as many developers as possible In return, we are sort of showcasing what some of the developers do in Barcelona. A couple of weeks ago, for example, in our talent arena at the mobile world capital stand, we had a 48 hour open gateway hackathon.

So they were basically using three of the APIs, SIM swap number, verify and voiceover wifi. Now, wifi quality on demand I think. So the developers could test their skills by literally developing in two days. The winners had to defend their actual solutions in a boxing ring, which was wide model, and they produce applications for sort of public administration, healthcare and streaming broadcast. So yeah, I think it's early days, as I said, but we're seeing some good momentum and we are trying to take it on the road, as it were to some of the bigger developer communities.

Well, you outlined there how the GSMA can help and some of the initiatives that the GSMA is doing to stimulate this and encourage engagement, which has been traditionally difficult for telcos. You also mentioned the hyperscaler approach is a reliance. Reliance might be a strong word, but is the use of hyperscalers here, one of the keys, because they're global telcos are traditionally more national. Is it easier for developers to get excited when they're dealing with global opportunities?

Well, it does vary of course, from API to API, some have very local utility, whereas others have maximum benefit globally. But we see three basic routes to market, and I think you've mentioned most of 'em, and we've actually seen all three of them emerge and we have the direct to customer end customer approach where operator will partner with enterprise directly. Obviously there's a ton of aggregators involved as you'd expect, and that's still growing, but we are seeing strong participation from the cloud players as well, the hyperscalers, and they have very, very valuable marketplaces of course, where we can hopefully get our APOs in front of as many developers as possible. We're expecting all three routes to grow over the coming year. And yeah, I think, as I said, early days long way to go, but we're seeing pretty positive responses to all three approaches.

Good to hear. Well, as you say, it is early days, but are we seeing any trends yet evolving with regards to API exposure? You talked about the different routes there of working alongside developers, whether it's engagement with hyperscalers or vendor based platforms or the direct route to enterprises is also an option whilst it's early days. I appreciate that. Are we seeing any trends?

I think it's probably too early to make a kind of definitive statement to that. As I said, all three channels to market are being deployed and they were all on showcase in Barcelona, but we tried this sort of thing before and we're not naive. Ultimately, the market will decide what the best channel is, and so we're trying to keep it as open as possible.

Now. Telcos are all hunting for new streams, where therefore is the economic value in contributing to a network API ecosystem?

Well, in terms of value, we've actually done some work with McKinsey and they've kind of estimated that if the operators do expose lots of these network assets and capabilities via APIs and they should be able to unlock around about 300 billion, I think it is by 2030. So that's a pretty bold and big number, but that's what our friends at McKinsey are forecasting.

Well, let's move on to the future. We've said it's early days, but we have a long road ahead of us, and perhaps we can conclude by looking at what the next steps are for the open gateway initiative. I mean, we've seen some APIs that maybe are, if we use the word low hanging fruit. I don't want to be drug to about this, but some of the APIs we've seen so far are maybe, as we might have expect to see in early days to get developers really excited and interested. We're obviously going to need to see more interesting and dynamic APIs, but what can telcos expect to see from you, the GSMA and the whole initiative perhaps for the rest of this year and looking into next year?

Well hold that thought. I think it's a really good one, but we've had a strong start on the supply side, as I would say, and we'll continue to recruit more operators so that they'll expose more of their assets. We will, of course, continue to develop more APIs as well in Kamara, and we should see more examples. In fact, we will see more examples of each of the three channels to market. I would say that we want to change our glance a little bit at the GSMA to more demand side, kind of an outside in perspective, as you kind of hinted at. We've already done that with the FinTech sector, and that's where we've got these kind of fraud mitigation APIs, and they're being deployed pretty globally from Brazil to Spain, Ethiopia to Sri Lanka. Now that's a model. It is low hanging fruit because there's such an obvious utility to reduce fraud for a major bank is a big deal.

They're perfectly willing to pay for it, and it's the kind of model we'd like to repeat with other sectors trying to understand what they need. We want to try and create more of a kind of customer pull through rather than just an operator push. This is what we have. So we've been experimenting already with a number of potential use cases. There's one showcased in Barcelona around safe drone flight, for example. There are others around extended reality immersive gaming. Ultimately, and as you alluded to in the question, we will see more value in future coming from the more advanced 5G network capabilities and edge. So network slicing, that sort of stuff. But we have to be honest and say that will take some time to mature and scale globally. The leaders will be doing that some already are, but to get to the global scale is going to take some time. I would say the future's exciting and we can't wait to see how this develops.

Thanks very much, Alex. Well, we look forward to seeing developments, as I'm sure the whole telco community does, seeing how things go, and hopefully getting involved as well. Alex, for now, good talking with you. Thanks so much for giving us an update on the Open Gateway initiative. If you're watching this on day two of our telco as a platform summit, then please don't go away as our live q and a show is coming up in just a few moments. For now though, thanks for watching and goodbye.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

How APIs and middleware can support vertical applications | TelecomTV

Hello, you are watching the Telco as a platform summit part of our year-Round DSP Leaders Coverage. I'm Guy Daniels and today's discussion looks at how APIs and middleware can support vertical applications. Telcos are rallying around a common set of network APIs that can hopefully unlock value from their networks and lead to new services. But given the API sprawl that developers already face, will a new set of interfaces be welcomed and adopted? And will API gateways or a new middleware layer provide the keys to help telcos realize this opportunity? Well, to answer these questions, I'm joined on the program today by Peter Arbitter, who is SVP of Mace Magenta, API Capability exposure at Deutsche Telekom. Beth Cohen, SDN Network product Strategy for Verizon Business Group. Paul Miller, chief Technology Officer at Wind River and Petar Torre principal engineer with Intel Corporation. Hello everyone. It's really good to see you all. Thanks so much for taking part in our discussion today. First of all, I'd like to ask, what is a telco network, API and can we support this definition with any current, well-known examples? Peter, I'm going to come across to you in the role you are playing at Deutsche Telekom. Can you first of all summarize for us what a network API is?

Yeah, happy to do so. So APIs, our application programming interfaces, so they allow us to talk to our network, to our network infrastructure. And actually, and I want to be honest, I do not like that term too much because it's pretty telco centric and it's pretty inside out. So I'd rather like to describe those APIs as business APIs, but no matter, so there are two kinds of categories of these APIs. So one category allows you to get some additional information out of the network. So we sit on tons of information and with the APIs we provide you access through these information. So that's one category. And the other category allows you to get some additional functionality because we allow you to at least to certain extent, configure parts of the network. So examples for the first one would be like device location information. You get information about the location of a device directly out of the network. An example of the second category would be the wellknown slicing or quality on demand API where you can get an additional or an uplifted performance out of minute.

Thanks very much Petar. Interesting shift of emphasis there from network APIs to business APIs. Beth, let's come across to you for your views on what constitutes APIs.

I agree that there are network APIs, but we're finding that we have contributed quite a few APIs that are focused on, as was said, business APIs, which is APIs that our customers use to pull data about their network that they can incorporate and integrate with their own ITSM systems. And those are actually business because it's ticket information, it's performance information, it's information that it makes the information that we're providing to them more meaningful to them. And then many of our customers are taking that information and integrating it or rather correlating it with their applications to really understand what's driving their application performance. So I've been saying this for years, we really need to have a better integration of applications with network and unfortunately I think the telcos are mostly driving it. The developer community I think has little understanding of networking and so therefore kind of ignores, it just sort of happens, which of course in reality it doesn't. So I think these APIs can allow us to get to that next level where the correlation between the network performance and its impact on the applications can really be understood and I know that some of our more sophisticated customers are in fact doing that.

Great. Thanks very much. Beth, you raise a good point there about developer engagement, which has always been quite difficult for the telecom operators. Paul, let's bring you in now and your comments about network APIs and APIs within the industry.

Yeah, it's an interesting conversation today guy. Thanks. We're one of the vendors that is underneath the hood, right? Providing infrastructure and network elements within the service provider environment. And the couple of things I'd add here is it's really important for those of us that are in that role. There's of course hundreds of vendors that contribute components into the carrier network to actually extend northbound APIs out of our systems, whether it be infrastructure or applications orchestration and automation functions, analytics elements. We're providing many of those things to service providers. But if you don't extend visibility northbound out of your systems with rich APIs, then the conversation about things like API brokers and API gateways and the way the service provider can aggregate those API functions into something that's consumable for a business purpose becomes very difficult. That's one thing. And the other thing I'd mentioned, and I think we've had this conversation already today, is that it is really centered on a business purpose, right?

If you can't monetize that service through some way and certainly an API broker and gateway is a way to measure that, right? And apply a monetization engine if you will underneath it. But fundamentally there needs to be core business values and the capabilities that the API is exposed. For example, if you look at connected systems, connected automobiles for example, the ability to provide access to high definition information about where vehicles are can help drive self-driving applications or advanced parking algorithms that look for empty spaces, then you've got a monetizable value, right? So at the high level you have to be able to realize an actual application that a consumer or business is interested in and then at the lower layers you have to expose all those services via APIs and continuously grow that API set as the new services are launched into the network.

Yeah, absolutely Paul. And then you mentioned the business case there, which brings us very nicely onto our next question, which is how can telcos use and monetize these APIs? And also equally, how can developers use them to enhance their applications and services? Petar, let's come across to you. What's your view here from what you are seeing with the developer community and the interest to them?

So there are two sides to it, two sides to it. One is exposing APIs so that those valuable network IT and other assets that we will figure out as we go. Now when the priority is set on that and hopefully culturally we'll be able to execute on it, that this will be the exposure part and we will look into how exactly this gets exposed. There are different mechanisms, we'll touch on it in this panel. Now on the developer side, it is these developers, we need to differentiate them as per end customers. And those can be normally in communication, service, product solutions, they come through print integrated solutions that they're going to smaller customers because amount of integration and customization is super limited. So something that is prepackaged for consumer, small office, home office, small and medium businesses is one type of developer ecosystems and use cases completely different.

One is various custom integration for huge enterprise verticals and government and they have their own ecosystems. Now what does not make it easier is that all of that is very fragmented in those major categories. But then per use case, when we from Intl site develop software frameworks and those that top optimize and run best on different harder options underneath selected during the runtime, we have a lot of adoption for that where we create value for those developers. Now you already mentioned at the beginning in the intro that they do have a lot of different API categories as option, and then Beth was mentioning that they don't comprehend the way how the telcos vertical in general we were trying to get across to them. Now there are good initiatives with the right design principles that have focused on delivering developer friendly. So something that is easy to adopt ideally provides the value so that it's even being discussed.

But the hurdle to adoption is not like in the past when from comms vertical, we would go and try to develop the APIs, but what was coming across with desired stated goal of interoperability, I mean in reality this was not even within telco specialist developers interoperable and definitely not with some webscale developers. So we'll need to as we go down that path beyond exposing APIs towards consuming them, this includes ecosystem enablement of those very fragmented ecosystems. So whoever has good programs towards that. And from Intel side, I would claim we have decent ones because we do it over decades plus they will be mapping between a lot of operators that we have. And ideally when we enable a lot of developers, we need to figure out how this mapping works. It can be to every connection. So there will be some sort of aggregation in between. And even when all of that is done still we to go to market program so that eventually something that is enabled, stitched together from APIs still enabled use case that brings value still somebody needs to do the go to market at the end of it.

Thanks very much Petar for that perspective. You all want to come into this question. So let me start with Paul and Paul, let's come back to this whole point of monetization and what's in it for the telcos and the developers.

Thanks guy. I'll try to be quick. Three basic points. One is that to be attractive to developers, one major component of that is the tool chain that a developer consumes a portion of our business obviously feeds as I mentioned a moment ago, equipment and capabilities into the service provider, but we also directly sell to developers at a variety of different customers and we created a completely cloud native DevSecOps tool chain. And this helps a software developer manage everything from requirements definition to coding in an IDE to building the final software, product testing digital twin capabilities. This is the modern software development environment that a developer lives in and you need the modularity and the libraries to be able to bring in the APIs that are published by the service provider into this environment so that a software developer can easily consume it if it's not easily consumable.

It creates a natural friction for a developer or company to build applications that leverage the service provider's APIs. The second quote I talked to is API revision management, right? As you go from V one of an API to V two, if you're really good at maintaining backwards capabilities and those APIs as they evolve, you're very attractive to a developer. If however you break that as you move forward, that becomes very painful and costly for a company and a developer to deal with. And then the third piece, which is probably pretty obvious, but if we look at things like Linux Foundation's Cera project, it's actually really important to have commonality across service providers for similar network services and similar APIs. And the reason for that is obviously if you're a developer and you build an application for one network and say Verizon or Deutsche Telecom, and then you try to move it to the other carrier and you can't, then you have to rebuild the entire application and API services. So having commonality across the service providers through things like the Cera project are great ways to solve that problem.

Thanks Paul. Great points there to be aware of. Peter, let me come across to you then I go to Beth, but Peter, your thoughts on this?

Yeah, let me share with you that, I mean this is not new to the telco industry. I mean APIs have been there around for almost 15, 15, 20 years looking at what happened with CPOs. And from a telco perspective, we just weren't capable to really bring these capabilities to the market because at the end of the day we did not understand the developer play, let's be honest to ourselves. And that's mainly because we as telcos are typically regional or national players while this developer market is a global one. And so I believe that now a few things have changed that we have better understood and what we need to do. And Paul is absolutely right. We have to ensure that is absolutely easy and interop needs to be given that this is not a Deutsche Telecom specific API or Verizon specific API, it has to follow a somehow global standard. And these things have changed, but we have a legacy which unfortunately wasn't that successful,

Very honest Peter, but so true of what we've seen over the past decade or so. Beth, let's get your perspective as well.

So I'll kind of build on what the others have said, which is we don't understand the developer community. We've never been able to understand that, but we've also not been able to convey to them the importance of the network for their applications to work, particularly as applications have moved out into the cloud and then back out to the edge, the network is more important than ever and it behooves us to step up our work with the developer community. I know Paul mentioned camera, but there's also Nefi and there's other projects within LFN that are focused on more collaboration with the developer community, with infrastructure, the CSPs as well. nefi is sponsored by CSP, so I think we're going in the right direction, but nothing is easy and nothing is going to be fast, but I think that we're going to see more use of APIs.

I mean we're seeing it with our enterprise customers, more use of APIs on the operations side of things because I think there's more bang for the buck or rather quicker bang for the buck, which is when you can coordinate those, correlate those tickets that you're getting from the service provider with the tickets that you're getting from your user community complaining about the poor performance of the application. Well hey, that's a super useful use case that you can act on right away. So it's worth spending the time to do the work to integrate those and correlate those two systems together.

Thanks very much Beth. Well let's develop this thread about how we can help with the engagement effort. Now we're speaking with the GSMA later today in the summit about the open gateway initiative, but perhaps we can touch on that now. And also some of the other initiatives we've already heard mentioned a few of them there that are in place to help telcos with APIs. Let's find out what progress they're making. Peter, perhaps we could start by hearing from you.

Yeah, there's a lot of going on. I mean you just mentioned GSMA open gateway. I mean that was really a great initiative which really also helped us to drive that governance forward and to somehow sort out the go-to market travels and we are seeing quite some momentum at NA WC with the local champion activities all around GSMA open gateway. So that was really successful, but for me even more important had been kamara because that for me also showed a different mindset because this now is an open source foundation project and with that it's not about that everyone thinks about what could be done and should be done. This is really hands-on this is whenever someone has an idea, there's no need to wait, just get the act together and go with the API. And this is why we see more than 50 APIs, which have been described in a lot of momentum and we see more than 300 companies being really active within these first two years that kamara on this existing and also then the forum where the operate API would happen. So a lot of momentum and I believe that this one helps us really driving that topic forward.

Yeah, thanks very much Peter. And there has been a lot of momentum recently from various industry bodies. peta, let's come across to you because I know you are closely involved with Kamara as well.

So indeed I'm Intel representative into it from before it got started. And also just to share perspective, I was also representative to some of the previous incarnations of industry attempts to go after that problem statement. The huge difference now is that first there is urgency on this and this is really properly resourced, like number of mentioned companies, a number of experts over there. We have not had something like that in the past and this is obviously a huge difference, the understanding and design principles to get this to be developer friendly and easy to consume. We didn't have this type of things in other previous attempts either. And what is really great to see is how complimentary different communities can find themselves in their efforts in terms of who is doing the API category definitions towards developers. What EM forum is doing what GSMA open gateway initiative with the gateway specs and the certification for that is doing this all somehow meaningful. It fits together to get towards the exposure part. What we will need to all work to figure out is how to get the adoption of that also.

Yeah, a lot of hard work has been done, but as you say, there's still a lot more to do. Paul, let's bring you into the conversation at this point and your thoughts about the industry groups and how they're contributing.

I certainly want to echo the positive comments about Linux Foundation's Chimera project. The description is accurate, right? There's a GI repo, there's actual code being developed and that will drive further adoption of the technologies versus just creating standards or speculation as to what should be done. So that's real action, right? From a software company perspective. The other thing I'd say is that it's really important to recognize how these things will be used. If we look at, for example, in February the automotive edge computing consortium came out and announced a partnership with Project Cera, and that's really about connected vehicle services. So here's an example of a use case and you really need that open source consortia Camaro working to expose the APIs so that you can realize connected vehicle services. And that's interesting to us because a portion of our businesses in the automotive sector, our parent company is there as well, and we provide some of the infrastructure used for next generation software-defined vehicles and connected vehicles are a key part of the future of the automotive sector, whether you're looking at over the air update, compute, offload into the carrier network, cellular V two X applications like many service providers are pursuing.

This is the first time that we've seen service providers coming together with the automotive industry to generate new use cases and revenue. All of that is enabled by API access to the services of information and controls that are within the carrier network. So seeing project Amira happen and seeing some of these use cases come about through electrified modern self-driving vehicles, I think we're finally at the cusp of seeing API adoption really happen.

Good to hear, Paul. Thanks for sharing that. Beth, let's come across to you for your additional thoughts.

I just wanted a couple thoughts. One is to follow up with Paul, the automotive industry and the connected auto is clearly a huge use case, which the APIs need to be fully integrated with those applications and there's a real business opportunity there. Increasingly, cars are, some of the car companies are treating a car like a subscription, so it's a subscription model instead of you buy a car and you keep it for 15 years. So that's going to require a whole different way of thinking about those applications that are sitting in the car and the network connectivity, which is of course a paramount interest. And so the fine grain, for example, to make car auto drive self-driving car, you need very precise geo coordinates. What's currently out there is not good enough. It has to be if going to have a car park itself, it needs to be very precise.

And so I see there's a lot of opportunity to have the code interact more. I'm thinking there are other GSMA tends to be more standards oriented, but NEFI is code, kymera is code MEF is producing APIs that are code as is of course TM forum. So ironically the standards bodies and the open source community, which I've been an advocate that they really need to work together for APIs to really take off and be adopted by the industry. The coordination and working together needs to happen even more than it already is. And the good news is that the standards bodies and the open source communities do understand that they're really two sides of the same coin and really do need to work together to further the technology to build on these use cases and these business cases that are getting developed.

Thanks very much for sharing that. Beth. I had like to move on to an approach where seeing a little bit more of this year, and that's how a separate middleware layer can encourage and simplify the deployment of vertical applications and systems at scale. Now, does such an approach work alongside API gateways or is it a replacement for gateways? How does this all fit together? Peter, perhaps we could come across to you for tapping into your expertise here.

Yeah, so this is absolutely spot on and it needs to sit on top of the existing gateways because there are some additional challenges we need to solve. And let's pick one of those where it becomes really obvious. This is the consent management. So there are APIs where you need to get the consent of the user and unfortunately this is not standardized across the globe. So based on the regulation within the country, you might run into explicit consent or legitimate interest or any kind of solution which you need to ensure that you have. And this has to be handled by that additional layer, by that middle layer you talk about. Because at the end of the day, since there will set an application on top of whatever we talk about, this needs to roll through to the application and we need to ensure that this can be revoked and then it needs to walk back its entire way. And we also need to consider what if that device is roaming in a different country and the consent regulation in the own country is different to that foreign country. So there's a lot of complexity and that describes the need of such a middle layer, and that was just one function, not talking about all the others like the advanced billing, like the identity, the additional security things you need to ensure. So there's absolutely a need of that additional.

Great, thanks, Peter. Very interesting one for us to follow in more detail on telecom TV as the year progresses. I think I have a final question I'd like to put to all of you because we've been spending a lot of time looking at collaboration and gateways and amalgamating various APIs and approaches. Why can't a telco simply create and expose a set of APIs and offer direct access to developers? Why do we need to bridge some kind of bridge to network functionality through gateways? And Paul, perhaps I could put that one to you. Why can't individual telcos just do it themselves and go direct?

Well, certainly they can, but then you have some complexities that arise from that. Really the function of the gateway and broker that it sit in line with the APIs is multifold. Many of the things that Peter described are accurate and those are stateful interactions and managements of the underlying APIs. In many ways, the underlying APIs in the network are quite unintelligent, right? If you ask for some data, it will provide it. If you look to engage a control to configure, say a network slice, it will take action on that. The question is, does that user have permission to do that? Is there a restriction in the network that would prevent that from happening right now? Should it be visible? Is it private data that somebody's getting access to or you look at the country and roaming boundary problems? What that means is that you really have in this broker and middleware and gateway kind of functionality, if you group that upper layer of functionality together, you have management of the APIs, you have throttling, you have access control, you have aggregation.

In fact, the API that a network provider, a service provider may want to extend externally to a developer that API may trigger multiple APIs being exercised inside the network and the management and successful stateful closure of those API events needs to be completed before success is returned to that developer from that single aggregated API call. Otherwise, you have the exposure of thousands of internal APIs from the service provider network directly to a developer. And of course from a security and feasibility standpoint, that's a non-starter. So the functionality we're talking about, the gateway, the broker management, permissions control, all of these things are very, very important to offer an API service that's truly consumable by external companies.

Great, thanks Paul. I can start to see why this might not be a desirable approach to take. Now I know you all want to come in on this final question. So let me start with Beth and ask you about the need for this collaborative kind of approach.

We in fact do have a portal where we share APIs and as others have said, we're not software companies. Yes, we can write these APIs and we do, but we don't fundamentally understand how our users are using the APIs. And so if you look at our portal, it has a bunch of APIs that are really focused on operations. So again, pulling information about the customer's network performance. And then we have a set related to some of our business related to automotive and telematics, but we really don't expose our internal APIs and pulse spot on to manage the network. We don't allow our customers to manage our network and we don't allow them to have access to any of that. That's all private. All those management layers are private. And so we're never going to expose them to our customers. So we have to be very careful about what gets exposed and what doesn't.

And that middle layer is essential to do that because we haven't talked much about it, but security is a huge component and as network integration with security is progressing a pace, I will say our messaging to our customers is, Hey, don't just buy pipes. You have to think about the security of the pipes you're buying and how those are secured. And there's APIs related to security as well. So the complexity grows pretty exponentially. So yeah, the middle layer has to be used to simplify that. I mean the whole purpose of APIs is to simplify things and somehow we haven't made it any easier for anybody to use them. So yeah, middle layer is essential.

Yeah, that's telecoms for you Beth, isn't it? We don't like to do things simply. Thanks very much Beth Petar, let's come down to you for your thoughts on this. So

To compliment this, but also from a view on how it gets even further complicated is there are operators running in 20 plus countries that each of those networks is a special design, like a snowflake on its own and it is very non-practical if we ask developers to go and have anything to do with that directly. Okay? So all of that gets obstructed. Common APIs get exposed and they will go in two broad categories like Peter was saying. One is pretty much getting the call, querying the information and sending the information back that is easier to implement than something which is session-based, create get notification, tear down that across different network domains and generations and country implementations. It's already serious integration thing to do and as its own, it needs to be normally separate platform that has all the required logic in that it comes either from the existing vendor of all the other elements in the network or from a third party that is specialist and can still pull it through and has all the integration partners to get it done.

So that's how we get it simpler, exposed out. And then still once it's exposed, we have so many countries and then operators per country. And if you make it technically super easy, you still have all the commercial and legal terms to sort out going to developers, which is why even when all of that gets done, there will be aggregation channels and marketplaces as a way how this big number of operators is going to connect with big number of application vendors or enterprises implementing all those use cases. So there will be additional level of integration that all still needs to be implemented.

Great. Thanks for explanation, peta. We really start to see the complexity that's involved here. Now Peter, let's come across to you for your input on this question.

Yeah, I'm still Polish as you can read on my shirt. I believe that they'll overcome the technical challenges. I know that these are complex, but I see these ways out. I like to build on what Patron has said. I mean the technical thing is the one side, the commercial thing is the other side. And this is why there are some important and larger telcos sitting together and thinking about how to do that application. Because at the end of the day, we also want to ensure that it's from a commercial perspective, easy to consume these APIs and the developer could just look at a country like Germany, you have three, but you also need to consider the virtual network operators where you have to have at least look at four or five additional ones to get the full coverage of the country. So that means that you have to come up with 7, 8, 9 contracts. You have to then have in place for a developer to get access to the APIs across that one single country. But I believe that we have understood what we need to do and we are working on this one, and this is why I'm really positive that the middleware layer is needed, but we are working on this

Great Peter, and that's where you're hashtag bullish and I think we all should be hashtag bullish on this subject. A lot of work to do, but the rewards are rather great. Paul, I'm going to come across to you for some additional thoughts to round out this show.

Yeah, I think everybody's done a great job of exposing some of the issues. There's certainly complexities when we talk about these API middleware layers and the functionality they need to have. Imagine in your mind these APIs being exposed and a customer calling them a thousand times a second. How do you deal with that? How do you manage the rate of use, right? What if you have 20 customers and they aggregate to a thousand times a second? Does that cause a problem in the network? And how do you have a policy to throttle down the use of that across those different customers with the different commercial contracts that Peter just mentioned? How are you managing monetization of those API calls and how are you doing that in a way that produces profit for the business but doesn't create undue complexity with respect to the subscriber to the API service? So you can see when all this is going on that it is unfortunately a pretty complex problem both from a business and technology perspective, but I also agree with Peter, I think we have enough experience now that we understand actually how to do this and with some of the companies involved, we directly interact with the developer community and that helps close some of the gap. So I am also quite bullish that we're heading in the right direction and we'll solve the problems here.

Good to hear. Thanks very much, Paul. Well, we must leave it there and I'm sure we will continue to debate this topic during the rest of the summit. For now, thank you all for taking part in our discussion. If you're watching this on day two of our telco as a platform summit, then please do send us your questions and we'll answer as many of them as we can in our live q and a show, which is coming up later. The full schedule of programs and speakers can be found on the telecom TV website, and that's where you will also find the q and a form and our poll question. Please do complete the poll if you can, but now though, thank you for watching and goodbye.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

Radisys:<br>Good afternoon everyone. I know this is post-lunch session, but we'll keep it interactive, so keep everyone awake. Yeah. Okay. Welcome everyone here. I'm joined by three speakers. We have Jim Estes, CEO, Dense Air. He has 35 plus years of experience in multiple roles in telecommunication industries industry, right from building products to deploying product now and changing the word from how the infrastructure is deployed. Today we have Vinay Ravuri, founder and CEO of EdgeQ Inc. Again, Vinay has played critical roles in companies like Qualcomm and is now changing the way SOC is looked at it and also joined by Arun Bhikshesvaran, CEO of Radisys and he's responsible for executing Radisys strategy in terms of transforming the telecom industry. Again, Arun has played multiple roles previously with Ericsson to welcome everyone. We'll go over a few important questions, which I think everybody has their mind and then we'll open up the floor for questions for everybody. Alright, so starting with, I'm sure this is everybody's thinking where 5G is expected to play critical role from evolutionary and revolutionary capabilities in wireless networks. So we look at how this panel symbolizes with the revolutionary nature of 5G networks. Starting with this, I would say Jim, maybe if you want to start with how does your approach to bridging the infrastructure with cloud networks changes the traditional network deployments?<br><br>Jim Estes, Dense Air:<br>Thank you. Well, the great thing about this architecture with open Ran is that we're able to lever a lot of really talented partners and bring it all together in a pretty amazing 5G solution. We really have looked at this as a way I view it as, I call it Tower 2.0. You think of the tower model in the early days was very, no one wanted to do it and now it's commonplace and we're now at the next inflection point, which is really to share the active infrastructure and this is what the architecture enables. We can actually have multiple operators operating on the same radios and sharing that to get the best efficiency and economies of scale like in the tower model, except we're doing it with the base stations<br><br>Munish Chhabra, Radisys:<br>Thank you Jim. And Arun, maybe if you want to share your views, especially with your experience with Ericsson, how is 5G changing the way how the networks deployed today versus traditional networks?<br><br>Arun Bhikshesvaran, Radisys:<br>Yeah, I think that's a good question. Munish, like we were talking about a little bit earlier this morning, every generation of wireless has been deployed basically for the same use case, which is people talking or watching YouTube videos maybe, right? And I think what we want see in what the industry wants to see in 5G is a very different way of monetization, but also very different way of serving multiple use cases. At the end of the day, not everybody is driving a German car and all cities are not consisting only of highways. There are speed and B lanes. And so you've got to have diversity in the way you do things, and that is the beauty of the partnership that we have on stage. You've got a new silicon vendor, a new way of deploying networks that makes it accessible to multiple people and the role of software coming in and everything working together underpinned by the cloud and that is very, very different from what any other generation has achieved in the past. I think that's the beauty of the, whether you want to add something.<br><br>Vinay Ravuri, EdgeQ Inc:<br>You said it really well. 5G is very different from 4G, I call the evolutionary part of 5G is like 4.9 G, more bandwidth and all that. But the revolutionary part is to enable new use cases beyond the phone. Phone is one modality. You have cars as Aaron just mentioned, and there are more to come and this is also a step towards six G that's also there. So I do think that even though the revolutionary part of 5G is not seen today, but it is an evolution of these things, it takes time, but it's just going to be the non phone that enables these use cases.<br><br>Munish Chhabra, Radisys:<br>Thank you gentlemen. I think this was very insightful. Let's go over to the next topic, which is about the scalability of the solution that we are talking about here, especially with respect to using cloud native environment and in this particular case they're using GCP. So maybe Arun, if you want to start with how Radisys is enabling cloud infrastructure through 5G ran application.<br><br>Arun Bhikshesvaran, Radisys:<br>So absolutely. I see the basic premise of being able to run ran software in the cloud is something that we are giving true meaning to. Other people talk about doing it, but they're mostly doing it in private clouds inside telco environments, what we are bringing together is a true public cloud deployment and that is massive. And you talked about GCP, there is also a component of GDC on the distributed cloud, right? So when you start to put the DU closer to in the GDC to close up deployment and having the CU run in the central cloud more from a GCP perspective, that simple capability sounds simple, but you got to open up the interface and make sure everything works in a very structured manner. And that is only the first step because then after that you can separate the CU into a control on a user plane and start to build cardinality in a very different manner.<br><br>And that is how you start supporting multiple cells and then you get auto scaling and everything. Now if you are a traditional OEM, you have to think about feature parody and how you take your current code base and you start to modernize it. But because we start from a different level, all this comes to us natively, we think about it and start to go implement it without any baggage behind us. I think that is a huge plus and I think it's great that Jim and Dense Air is going to take it out into the market and create a showcase that other people will actually learn from.<br><br>Munish Chhabra, Radisys:<br>Exactly. So my next question, Jim, is for you that how are using GCP helps both in terms of scaling but still ensuring the security and reliability in the shared network infrastructure?<br><br>Jim Estes, Dense Air:<br>Thank you. Just to build on what Arun said, the great thing about working with GCP is I as operator of this network don't need to be in the server business. I don't want to own a bunch of bare metal servers and have to maintain them and all the transport and associated costs. So GCP has a global reach, we're levering that we can take advantage of their scale and all the security features that they've implemented in the cloud. But then now I just have to basically attach the radio to the cloud and so the DU and the CU are running the cloud and ability to deploy rapidly is massively extended beyond having to deploy bare metal server. So it's a very exciting opportunity.<br><br>Munish Chhabra, Radisys:<br>And maybe Vinay if you can also talk about how does the cloud environment or cloud native applications throw challenges on the SOC?<br><br>Vinay Ravuri, EdgeQ Inc:<br>Yeah, there are many. Well first thing is just to reiterate what Arun and Jim just said. The benefits are that economies of scale that you and the know-how that comes from other applications can be adopted. So hence it's a more efficient network. A lot of the software could be reused. So there's a lot of value in not reinventing the wheel all over again, which cellular industry has done too many times. So this is a good way to go. Now everything eventually has to run on hardware and chips. So when you run something in the cloud, you try to make it as general purpose as possible because you want to run different applications, not just one thing but many things. So that creates an interesting challenge for a silicon vendor like ours because on one end you want to be very cost efficient, very power efficient.<br><br>On the other end you want to be general purpose. These are vectors that pull against each other. So that's the challenge and that's why I exist as a company because that's also the opportunity and traditionally this is not how things have been done. So this is the way HQ was started is that how do we run cloud native applications or take things like containerization Linux, which is a very common thing. How do you run it efficiently in a modem or in a RU or a du? And that's the model that we built. If you look at the traditional approaches, that's not how they've done and that's also the challenge for us, but there's many more coming because cloud continues to evolve, which means chips that go in it have to evolve as well.<br><br>Munish Chhabra, Radisys:<br>So continuing to actually on that topic, especially the advancement which is happening in the 5G area. From SOC point of view, how is your approach of base station on a chip changes the evolution for the current solution and especially help dense air in the solution which is being discussed here?<br><br>Vinay Ravuri, EdgeQ Inc:<br>Dense Air should say what they like, but we are thankful for the partnership with Sair and Redis. So the thing that our customers see in HQ is that we kind of did a clean slate approach. We didn't do this based on our previous generation because we didn't have a previous generation first thing. Second thing is we looked at the industry and said, okay, what is the best of breed that I can adopt rather than reinvent? Okay, so further the modem or the communication part, we took risk five. Instead of reinventing that world ourselves, which a lot of modem companies do, we decided not to do that. So there's some goodness that comes with it, but at the same time, there's software that's out there that has to run on top of our silicon, which needs ecosystem to be there and things like risk five doesn't really have a great ecosystem, so we put arm on top of that modem, which is inside the ship.<br><br>So these are decisions we had to make. Now in 2018, this looked really strange to everyone like mixing two different technologies and this looks more like a computer than it looks like a modem today, five years later people say, oh, well that was such a good idea. It's like you are far ahead. Honestly, it was an obvious idea. The industry just needs to adopt what's there.<br><br>Munish Chhabra, Radisys:<br>So Jim, to you, how in terms of using HQ as a SOC of choice helps you in terms of developing the solution faster and especially as part of your small cell?<br><br>Jim Estes, Dense Air:<br>Yeah, thank you. Just to build on what Vinay said, one of the big things is a significant reduction in cost. So I can build all of this on one chip rather than have as many as four or five more chips to do the same thing. The second thing is is that I have a radio that I can do multiple bands and functions all on the same one. So I can do CBRS, I can do C-band and I can do band 41 all on the same chip set. So now I can provide a R ru both indoor and outdoor. This supports both licensed and unlicensed spectrum all in one radio. It's a pretty dramatic savings because we can share the fronthaul on that as well.<br><br>Munish Chhabra, Radisys:<br>Thank you. Arun, back to you. How does it impact the RAN implementation or architecture given that you have more capacity available right on the SOC?<br><br>Arun Bhikshesvaran, Radisys:<br>Yeah, I was just going to talk about that, Jim. We went and met with Vinay's engineering team at Bangalore over a weekend and on a Saturday morning they opened up the office for us and suddenly, I don't think they were expecting this big crew coming from Radisys and when we told people that we were going to go meet with EdgeQ, there were more people who wanted to join us. So we all went into this conference room and we started asking all these questions as to how does this really work, blah, blah blah. And then your head of engineering Hari says, look, hang on for a second, and he brings out a tray that has just come from the factory with all the chip sets and he says, look, this is what it is.<br><br>This is real. It is dramatic. When you think about what a base station on a chip actually looks like and what you said vinne about having the arm cores and the disc five architecture running our software with all the experience that we have, compressing it, running in four cores, et cetera, you put everything on one deck. The cost reduction that you get in terms of having a highly efficient design, this is revolutionary for us because we know how to run it on 20 cores and 32 cores, but when you start to say, Hey, everything that you have designed is here in one chip, I think that is groundbreaking. It's a new frontier for us.<br><br>Munish Chhabra, Radisys:<br>Absolutely. I think this not only impacts in general the densair solution but also the industry overall in terms of bringing the cause down, especially for small cell. So coming back to Vinay in terms of the current solution that we are discussing, I'm sure and this audience would have questions about split six versus split 7.2. So why split six is more effective here compared to 7.2, which is more popular?<br><br>Vinay Ravuri, EdgeQ Inc:<br>In open ran? For those that don't know, there are different splits that you can split a base station 7.2 implements the physical layer in the RU and then the upper PI is done in a DU as it's called, and in split six with the entire PI is implemented in one place and then you aggregate a bunch of these things into a single deal. So architecturally and dense air does that, and our silicon is flexible. It could be cut in any way, but it does have a lot of advantages when you do the split six this way because the fronthaul bandwidth gets greatly reduced when you process the whole file. What people don't understand is when you are, let's say downloading something, let's say you're downloading like 100 megabits per second, hypothetically the bits that go in the air is not a hundred megabits per second.<br><br>It's almost like base 700 megabits to a gigabit per second if it include the number of antennas and include all these things. But so when you have fronthaul where you have to transport these bits, it becomes expensive. So that's like almost a tax that you have to pay. So doing more of the radio processing if you will, or the base band as it's called upfront, it essentially reduces the cost of deployment but also architecturally opens up new application.<br><br>Munish Chhabra, Radisys:<br>Yeah, Jim, so how has this helped see from a solution point of view and what were the choices that you had to make between the two?<br><br>Jim Estes, DenseAir:<br>Thank you. Split six is a big opportunity as an operator of a network. So we denair build, owns, operates these networks as a neutral host and we then provide capacity as they need it to different operators both on the enterprise side and on the carrier side with split six, I don't need to use dark fiber out to all of it, so that saves a lot of money. Also, the latency of tolerance is much more flexible, so that allows me to actually run longer runs without having to optimize a network around latency in indoor. The interesting thing about that is you can many times use existing IT cabling and be able to do the front haul. Then split six allows you to do that. If you were doing 7.2 you would have to haul fiber everywhere or so it's a big cost savings really drives down our unit cost. That's great,<br><br>Munish Chhabra, Radisys:<br>Thank you. Jim. Arun, back to you as Radisys is, you have seen both 7.2 evolution work with so many different radios on fronthaul and now split six options with small sales. Which do you think suits better from Radius's architecture or even for this particular use case around cloud?<br><br>Arun Bhikshesvaran, Radisys

Yeah, so I think the beauty of split six and what we do with EdgeQ is that you have a specialist in the file layer that you completely rely on to take advantage of. So you let Vinay and his team excel in that domain and we excel in software and we run the software along with his core complex and that brings together an ecosystem of people who are specialists in their domain. That is the beauty of split six and what we do. But you mentioned something earlier Munish about this being a great option for small cells and I have discussed that this could also be a very good option for 7.2 because what you then start to do is to have a single card implementation on which you're running your DU and CU and you can have a very efficient, power efficient, cost efficient infrastructure that runs at the bottom of the tower and then comes our flexibility that we have interrupted with a number of 7.2 radios and this can start to bring a very different perspective on where HQ technology along with our technology can be deployed.<br><br>This is not only for small and deployment, right? As we scale and we go to other kinds of shared infrastructure, macro network deployment, it starts to become a very efficient use case and if I can do a small pitch for vinne, the ability to support both 4G and 5G, and this is Jim, we have talked about this as well on a single SOC also starts to become very, very important as we talk about the evolution of networks. Even here in Europe for example, people are looking to have at least 4G as a fallback to go in and say that you can support both technologies, same infrastructure, this is what we talked about yesterday. You can start with a 4G if you want. You can upgrade to a 5G and over a period of time you can tune down the 4G for example. Tremendous flexibility that you get and for rapid replay kind scenarios, this becomes a very, very efficient way to look at it. So there is a lot of flexibility that we get with these solutions and then getting Jim and his team giving this flexibility to get started in the US I think is such a great opportunity. Good.<br><br>Vinay Ravuri, EdgeQ Inc:<br>I don't need any more sales guys. He is done for me just to extend what Arun just said, but thank you for those kind words by the way. We were asking about cloud and how this can be used, reused, adopted, if you look at Google or any of these guys, they don't have different hardware for Gmail versus YouTube versus it's the same hardware and not even, it's not, it's just the same hardware. They also the stack, the software elements, the foundation elements are actually the same regardless of the application. So architecturally setting up a platform silicon as well as some layers of the software to be common across different implementation of the 5G RAN is key because if you look at historically there are not that many base station companies because it takes forever to build one of those things and it's like you need a certain type of mindset, you need the expertise, forget all that. If you build this in the right way, then you reuse this platform and that was the goal of the company as Arun articulated and that's what we want to see more and more.<br><br>Munish Chhabra, Radisys:<br>Actually leading on to that, I would say maybe Jim if you want to share that the ecosystem that is created with Dense Air radisys edgeq, how is it helping reducing the cost and increase the flexibility for deployments across enterprise and network as well?<br><br>Jim Estes, Dense Air:<br>We see dramatic cost reductions and look at the open ran architecture because we can use software that's been developed in other places without having to develop multiple times big cost savings. The other area that we see a lot of cost savings, you talked about IT world and the enterprise world, we're bridging the gap between the enterprise world and the mobile network world. I mean mobile networks were always this thing that was completely unique and then everybody, oh, I don't want to work with the carrier or whatever. We go down this path and we can actually make this look much more like an IT implementation for indoors for example, especially if you're running split six inside, I don't need to have a bunch of you think about a das system and you're pulling coax all over fiber. We don't have to do that. One of the things we found is that it scales down much better than DAFs does.<br><br>So if you think about a smaller facility, let's say 250, 300 50,000 square foot office building das is very expensive to do. So that's problem number one. We don't have that scale down issue using this architecture. The second thing is is that I don't need to bring a signal source to the site everyone. So everyone knows this is a challenge. You need to get the m and o to bring a signal source. They may not think it's important, they don't want to do it, so they're not on your network Here we integrate the neutral host to each of the operator's core networks and now I don't have to do that every time I do it once and I can reuse it everywhere. So that's pretty significant savings.<br><br>Munish Chhabra, Radisys:<br>Thank you. Jim. Maybe Arun, don't know if you want to build on top of it. How does this ecosystem helps in terms of faster deployments and even again emphasizing upon reduction of cost per deployments of networks?<br><br>Arun Bhikshesvaran, Radisys:<br>See one of the biggest thing is when Jim goes and deploys in special venues, they don't want to have multiple deployments from every single operator in the country. They want to deploy it once. They want to have it flexible and they want that to be good. So it has to cover every single part of the environment. We've talked about some use cases where it's not just about indoor but it's about also covering the parameter right outside the loading dock for example. So you want coverage everywhere and you want it to be as seamless as possible. So for every operator to go in and deploy that infrastructure, it's just a waste of money.<br><br>You don't need it. And having the new tool host concept come in there, make it available and then taking advantage of the underlying cloud environment like we have discussed, it really gets the distribution there with great penetration. So the calculation on cost savings is obvious just from pure sharing, but I think the calculation from cost savings in terms of modern technology just accelerates that calculation.<br><br>Munish Chhabra, Radisys:<br>Vinay coming to you now, apart from giving run for money to the big companies and reducing the cost through your innovative submission, what flexibility do you provide as part of this ecosystem or what flexibility does the ecosystem provides for faster, quicker deployments?<br><br>Vinay Ravuri, EdgeQ Inc:<br>Yeah, that's a good question. So other than the fact that we integrate a lot of things and gives you low power and all the flexibility of the chip that it has, what we have done or recognized was that it's not enough to just build a chip and say you write your software, so we build a layer one FI that is hardened ready to go. So you don't have to work on that yourself.<br><br>One of the bigger companies does do that, most others don't. Then on top of it, we recognize that to kind of accelerate these things, so we're a chip company, we don't actually have to do layer two, layer three that could come somewhere else, but we licensed your stack early on Redis stack and we worked on showing that it can be integrated and you can get very high performance because otherwise people see a slide and you can is something that's like, okay, maybe I can, maybe I can't. So getting that demoed and show that this can be done and show proof makes and I don't want to go build a layer two, layer three stack, that's too much work. We're a chip company I want to say as a chip company. So ecosystem there is necessary. So those are good things, but it's also there's a lot of other things that have to come together over time. It's not as simple. If you take wifi, I like to use that example like a company like Netgear, they can take a chip, put it into production in six months to nine months, you can get a wifi router at home. It takes you 10 minutes to configure that afterwards and you're done. You probably have to add a few zeros next to that for 5G. Okay, so the simplification is that the ecosystem has come together well for wifi.<br><br>5G can also do that. It's just to take time and we have to have enough players, more players like you, more players like you that bring this to some simplicity.<br><br>Munish Chhabra, Radisys:<br>Absolutely, and I think as you simplify things, this also throws other challenges. When you create open and flexible architecture implementations, this will throw many other challenges. So maybe we go over the panel in terms of what challenges do you guys face while creating such networks?<br><br>Jim Estes, Dense Air:<br>So this architecture and this approach allows us to do things we never could do otherwise. So if I could buy what I just described, I would buy it, but it doesn't exist. In fact with the 4G and 5G, we had one major mobile network operator in the US called the unicorn and we're going to build it and we can only do that because of this ecosystem. But then because we have all these different elements, things like how do we make sure we have interoperability and achieve the right kind of quality of service for example. So there's a lot of really interesting things in the cloud with GCP that they do on demand scaling instead of doing traditional QLS where you tag the payload and give it though this is more important than that. What they do is actually scale the capacity up and down in the cloud as you need it. Pretty revolutionary. They do it in an IT world every day you don't even think about it. It's not been really done on this part of the world. So that's really good from a security standpoint. That's the other area we have to spend a lot of time looking at. We need to go through every element in here, make sure that it meets all the security requirements. We don't want to, it creates issues with that, right? And that's a key element of this whole architecture is making sure that we have adequate security.<br><br>Munish Chhabra, Radisys:<br>Maybe Vinay, if you want to share your thoughts around especially the challenges by creating these networks because it's not easy either and especially the industry to accept it because it's very different the way it is done now.<br><br>Vinay Ravuri, EdgeQ Inc:<br>Yeah, one of the biggest things is why has an OAN really taken off in a big way is the ecosystem challenges exist. It's one thing to say we disaggregate and you got this piece, but then in integrating them and making them work in a seamless manner because that's what people buy. They don't buy components, they don't buy segments of things, they buy a solution. When I am on my phone, I don't want to think about how this thing is connecting, I just want to make use of it. So the challenges, there are many, like I said, the challenges for wifi existed a long time ago, but they've worked through it and it's seamless.<br><br>That still exists with 5G. It starts from how do you even benchmark a O RAN system is a question like we take system one versus system two as system three. How do I compare these things? What are the metrics like machine learning there there's something called ML per, there's no equivalent to that here. And who is the systems integrator who integrates them? What's the one 800 number to call? So there are many of these challenges that have to be addressed. Cloud native is a good way to do it because then it just goes in the cloud. Nobody knows what happens but it works. So therefore that's it. It's a good way to address that because then you're not reinventing that wheel, but it's going to take time for orran to be the market that a non orran market is today for it to be fully covered.<br><br>It'll take time because the ecosystem has to get formed around it.<br><br>Munish Chhabra, Radisys:<br>Thank you Vinay.<br><br>Arun Bhikshesvaran, Radisys:<br>See, one of the important things, Vinay and I can create technology. At the end of the day, you need a buyer and you need a buyer who is willing to take it, accept it for what it is, work with it to mature it and deploy it. And I think that's the beauty that we have in this. The biggest challenge, the biggest help we have received is from Dset and also the company that backs you driven by a philosophy that comes from SIP in terms of look, you got to get wireless coverage out there for the people who really need it. And there is a big movement behind that and modern use cases connecting to cav new, et cetera, that driving force is needed. Very often what you see is that the traditional operator community, even though they talk about monetization, the ability to go in and do these things, take action, put money behind the cost that is lacking because they're too wound up in their classical way of thinking. I think that is probably the biggest challenge in commercialization of any technology and I think Jim and the backing of sip, that's a huge thing that we have in the ecosystem.<br><br>Jim Estes, Dense Air:<br>And there's one other ecosystem partner beyond the one you talked about is we have a world-class ODM partner in WNC and Vinay introduced us to 'em mouth them was sparring with their CEO. They are first class and we would not be able to get the time of market that we're doing here. We don't have to go build a factory and they're going to build us in Taiwan for us. But the whole thing is coming together to deliver what we need.<br><br>Munish Chhabra, Radisys:<br>Thank you Jim. I think that was super helpful, but Arun, back to you. You avoided my technology giving me all my, yeah, so would still want to all otherwise I still practically on all this goes would still like to hear from you the technology challenge of being first in the industry to create open and flexible networks. So we should also talk about some challenges with respect to what kind of challenges does it impose in software? Because software in general people think about is easy, right? You can do anything in software, but the reality when you have to create such open networks, what are the challenges that you face?<br><br>Arun Bhikshesvaran, Radisys:<br>See, one of the biggest challenges I think we have faced, which is also the advantage here is when you go talk to a traditional mobile operator for them to consider you as a software vendor, the first thing that they talk about is feature parody. And it's not featured parody for today's technology. It's featured parody for three generations of technologies and common sense the calculation simply doesn't work. Why would I go create software for two G technology? But if you put that as an entry barrier, it creates tremendous complications because now I have to figure out not only how to create modern software with DU and microservices and make it cloud native and everything, but I have to deal with the non-standardized, non-open version of monolith for the earlier generations and I got to make these software coexist. That is a very, very big complication for us. I think in this particular case, the big advantage that we have, if we focus in on something that is very sharp new, that allows us to start with a clean slate approach similar to what then I did without a lot of the baggage and then we focus on, hey, how do we make this cloud native?<br><br>So the challenges that have been posed on us in the case of D, not so much because we don't have that big threshold to cross that allows us to come in with a clean implementation of 5G SA and start from there. And for that we come in with software that has been designed and tested for that environment, interrupt tested with top tier OEMs, et cetera. That product grade that you get from the the door, that is a big advantage, right? So I think for any new technology provider, definitely for us from a 5G software perspective, the challenge to address legacy technologies that was kind of removed in this case and now we might do something on 4G, but that is still much better than having to go all the way back to two G.<br><br>Munish Chhabra, Radisys:<br>Perfect. I think these parts were very helpful and insightful. So I'll open up the floor for audience for any questions. Let's ask some difficult questions guys.<br><br>Audience:<br>If you would describe the perfect customer for you because you need to enter with this idea also to the big operators that are traditional thinking and this is so new. Would you mind to describe what is your first priority?<br><br>Jim Estes, Dense Air:<br>So there's actually two ways to look at that. We talked about enterprise and the traditional m and o environment. Initially we're seeing very large demand on the enterprise side. So many of the enterprises go to the MNOs and they say, your coverage is horrible in my building, can you help me? And they're like, well no, we don't have the money or we're busy or whatever. So there's a venue pays model that's developing out there. It's similar to what happened in the UK with Jots originally where they are basically saying, we will allow you to rebroadcast our PLMN and integrate your neutral host into our core. But then you go to the venue and the venue pays for the deployment. So that's one model they're very enthusiastic about that they don't have the money to spend on that. Beyond that, it really is now for let's say outdoor small cells for capacity and for coverage infill.<br><br>Now we're trying to help them solve a problem that they may or may not have the capital to do that we bring a couple things. We do build, own, operate and maintain. So we actually will pay for the CapEx, build it, and then we have our own knock and we operate it and that integrates into their network and it looks like any BAU kind of base station from day one. So they can hand in hand off all the parameters that you would normally do as if it was a base station that you purchased from someone is there, but it's a virtual base station effectively and you're only paying for the part you use. I was quite skeptical that people would be interested in that when I first met the investors because I mean I thought are ever going to get these guys to ever even consider it.<br><br>And it's interesting at a relatively high level in the organizations, they're very interested in this, but it's then how do you triple that down into the organization within the existing ran groups and things and make it part of their new business as usual. We're actually seeing pretty good traction on that, but it really is starting more indoor enterprise. And you mentioned the, we call it near outdoor. So if you think about do the indoor, I'm going to cover the parking lot, it's a hotel. Let's say I'll cover the pool for the beach area and all that. So the venues are very willing to pay for that because it's a big part of their customer satisfaction and it really doesn't cost anything to the MNOs. They go put us through validation like they would anything to make sure that it meets all of their requirements that isn't going to cause problems with their macro network and then we can broadcast their PL nines and that solves everybody's problem. So little lengthy there, but it it's kind a two phase or two-prong approach.<br><br>Munish Chhabra, Radisys:<br>Thank you Jim. And do you see Jim, just continuing on that, do you see the industry or the tier one operators accepting the fact, especially across shared infrastructure? I'm sure the audience also has this in their mind.<br><br>Jim Estes, Dense Air:<br>As I said, I never thought that they would, but a lot of it comes down to just economics and what they have the bandwidth to do. So the fact that we can come in and help them, there are things we could do now that they may not be able to do for a couple of years. And you look at 5G, they're rolling a lot of this out on the macro network, but they may not get to a lot of the small cells for a long time. So if they wanted to accelerate part of that, they're actually pretty open-minded. Again, as long as it meets all the requirements that it integrates into their network as any other base station would, it's not causing problems of their macro network integrates to their o and m as well so that when there's an alarm, it shows up in their knock and ours as well. They see it and they know it's there, they can hand any hand off. So it's evolving. There's definitely interest there.<br><br>Munish Chhabra, Radisys:<br>Thank you, Jim. Any other questions? Anybody?<br><br>Audience:<br>Yeah, thank you everyone for the insightful thoughts Vinay I have one question for you. How is AI going to change the layer one posted on SOC? Your thoughts on that? Thanks.<br><br>Vinay Ravuri, EdgeQ Inc:<br>Yeah. So who is my perfect customer? The one that pays full price and doesn't ask any questions? We look for scale, but coming to ai, my investors said if I say AI once a day, our valuation will go up. So thank you for that question. So in my previous job I was at Qualcomm and I worked a bit on the AI part of it. Machine learning has lots of potential to change the RAN and software aspects of it. So I look at AI as there are two areas in the ran. One is how to make 5G or 4G better using ai, meaning implementing the physical layer or layer two, layer three, but use machine learning algorithm instead of the traditional approach like a scheduler that schedules users learn a pattern and optimize that at the physical layer.<br><br>Understand the spectrum when you're in low SNR regions, like where signal is not good if employing traditional algorithms give you very predictable results, but in those areas you want to find something different, a much more higher performance results, meaning a single bar on your phone, but you still want to get a very high throughput or medium throughput in that. So machine learning actually does a better job there compared to traditional. So we implement things like that. Now the second bucket, which hasn't yet taken off is moving machine learning models to the edge. A large portion is still in the cloud, whether it runs on let's say the end device or the closest to the end device being a CU DU the RAN in general. There are a lot of discussions and work being done here, but it hasn't come through yet. Take as an example, you have a bunch of cameras that there's live feed, you don't want to store things that are not important, but yet you also don't want to send all this to the cloud to figure out what's important, which means ML is a good way to summarize these things.<br><br>But you also don't want that in every camera because you want to amortize that or aggregate that rather into a central place, a semi central place that's a base station, that's an area for example. So there are many applications like that today. The problem statement is not can machine learning help? Actually it can. That's not even a problem. The problem statement is how do you implement them in a cost-effective manner and is there an ecosystem to make use of that so that not everybody has to do it themselves in the cloud. There is AWS has one, Google has one, right? The RAN doesn't yet.<br><br>Munish Chhabra, Radisys:<br>I think this was very interesting. Anyone else, any in questions?<br><br>Audience:<br>A couple of quick questions. Question number one, Jim is how does this solution sort of standard compare if you were to take the current path with advanced distributed antenna systems? It's ubiquitous, right? Do you see any challenges trying to break that strangle hold?<br><br>Jim Estes, Dense Air:<br>So you're talking about das for indoor venues, right? Yes. So we have seen tremendous demand at what I'll call at a small to medium size enterprises. So if you had a building that's, like I said before, I think let's call it two hundred fifty, three hundred 50,000 square feet down to let's say 50,000 square feet. das does not scale well at that level. And even if you installed it, the odds of them ringing a signal source from each of the MNOs is probably not very good even if you paid for the signal source. So because we use the neutral host integrated into each of the MNOs core networks, they don't need to bring the signal source to the venue. So that's a big thing, but not only in terms of cost, but in terms of accelerating the deployment of it. And then in terms of the, because we're again standard IT cabling and things versus coax and fiber like you see in a DA system that's less expensive as well. And you don't have to amortize the cost of a base station hotel across that particular venue. So pretty dramatic savings. I mean we're seeing in some cases 60 to 70% cost reduction over das at the smaller end. That doesn't mean you can't do a million square foot venue, but that's in that kind of lower end is very, very high demand and at a very significant cost savings over das.<br><br>Munish Chhabra, Radisys:<br>Okay, thank you. Thanks Jim. Anybody else? If not, then I think we can wrap up the session today. Thank you for the panel for sharing insightful thoughts around how 5G can change the world and virtually the networks the way they're deployed today. And I believe next year we'll see the network deployments right? So around this and learn about the challenges that we have faced while deploying these. And thank you for the audience for asking interesting questions. Thank you everyone.<br><br>Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

Qualcomm: AI is creating a new generation of devices | TelecomTV

Hello and welcome to Barcelona for MWC 2024 where I am delighted to be joined by Enrico Salvatori. Enrico is Senior Vice President and President at Qualcomm Europe. Thank you so much for joining us.

So Qualcomm has obviously attended MWC for many, many years. So what's new in 2024? And I'm curious to have your take on the big conversation this year. It's about this race for AI supremacy. What's your view on it?

Yeah, definitely this year the team is ai. I think all the industry is declining the AI in different way. And for Qualcomm in particular, AI is the edge. AI, meaning the platform that is powering the device to have AI performance device gets me the smartphone, pc industry automation devices and cars. So all of that benefiting of these edge AI platforms that will work in combination with the cloud. So we are very proud to contribute and to power this new era of devices.

The technology is evolving very quickly. So when we stand here next year, how far do you think we will have pushed the boundaries?

Well, definitely it's running very fast because we move from the edge computing, meaning giving power in terms of CPU, processor capacity in the device to the edge ai. So giving the power of AI to the device. Moving forward, we will continue developing the platform in order to support more and more AI functions that today is first of all focused on gene ai and will come more and more models to be supported by the devices and connectivity because the connectivity is a pillar of these AI era because the devices have to be connected to the cloud and the cloud has to be connected with the device. So this is two pillars, AI and edge computing together with the connectivity.

And how do you feel the global telecom industries dealing currently with the onset of AI and its early deployment?

Well, very well, I would say because telecom industry is leveraging on the AI features to improve, evolve, more service application, user experience performance. So if you take a look to what we are doing in Qualcomm on the connectivity with the new products, we have an AI feature supporting model, ai, feature supporting wifi. So connectivity of course ai, the neural processor unit supporting the performance into the device, into the car, into the pc.

So you have made several announcements today including some related to ai. Can you tell us more?

The announcement on AI today is focused on the AI app. That for us is an important element, a glue to combine this AI environment, cloud devices, edge ai, meaning that is a tool for application developers going to these AI app portal. They can select which model they want to use for AI and which platform hardware, Qualcomms Snap dragon for smartphone, for a PC for a car they want to select. Then they can integrate with the fuel line of software, code, the application into the AI environment, hardware and software and deliver to the market because that will be tested on a real physical device by the AI app portal. So it is a tool for the application developers to make sure that not only technology will continue marching fast in terms of AI edge and connectivity and cloud, but also the application developers can get easily access to this environment and make it available in the devices. So

AI is definitely super important because it's creating a new generation of devices that again is across the board is horizontal and that implies a new platform for all those devices. But at the same time, I want to stress the importance of connectivity because connectivity is a pillar to this AI era. Without the connectivity with low latency like the 5G, without the wifi seven evolution coming, wifi eight and the 5G moving to six G, there will be no opportunity to continue connecting objects but intelligent objects with the cloud. And so making sure that the coordination and performance and at the end of the day user experience is optimized and improved.

Indeed the connectivity conversation is moving very quickly. Do you feel that somehow AI has trumped the industry's priorities when it comes to the development of 5G and looking forward that of six G, do you think that you need to remind the industry of how important connectivity is to the deployment of ai?

Well, I don't think connectivity is not receiving the same level of attention. Investment r and d that AI is receiving of AI is the new element, new technology. So is attracting attention and I would say curiosity by the market, but connectivity is there. Connectivity, we welcome in particular here are presenting and announcing two products that are in connectivity, the 5G model, seventh generation X 80 is the part number name that is introducing more feature set by leveraging on AI for power efficiency, spectrum efficiency six antenna in the smartphone. So it is a more and more improving the performance also because of ai, but also the 7,900 that is the wifi platform we are announcing here. So Qualcomm is coming with announcement on connectivity in say parity with announcement on ai.

Welcome back to the Telco as a platform summit, part of our DSP Leaders coverage and time. Now for our live q and a show, I'm Guy Daniels and this is the first of two q and a shows. We have another one tomorrow. At the same time, it's your chance to ask questions on this highly topical subject. I mean the news today of China's commitment to the open gateway initiative, which you can read all about on telecom TV shows how interest in this area is accelerating rapidly. Now we opened our summit with a panel discussion that made the case for a platform-based approach to services. It's only just finished, but we are already receiving questions from you. If you haven't yet sent in one, then please do so now using the q and a form on the website. Let's now meet our guests who are eager to help with all of your questions and joining us live on the program today are Mark Gilmour, chief Technology Officer for Connectivity Europe. Terje Jensen SVP Business Security Officer and network and Cloud technology Strategy for Telenor and Francis Haysom principal analyst with Appledore Research. Hello everyone. Thanks for returning to answer our viewer questions and let's get straight to our first one. Let me read this out for you. Regarding the collaborative cross-industry approach, what are the key points of alignment needed between telcos for platform-based deployments? And Terje, perhaps we could start by getting your thoughts on that.

Great. Terje, thanks so much indeed. Obviously a lot of areas of alignment for Tokos to consider, but as you were saying, there's already a lot of work being done. There are groups out there who are putting together frameworks and what have you to support that. Let's see if our other guests want to jump in on add any extra insights into this. Mark, did you want to add anything to this initial question about the points of alignment that we need to consider?

Well, very interesting. Mark, thanks very much for those additional points. Francis, any thoughts on this initial question on collaboration and points of alignment?

Yes, perhaps I can put in a little bit of a controversial view here. I hear in the question a little bit of what I would term is a little bit of the telco standards process is that we all need to collaborate, we all need to agree on what we're going to do in advance in order that the telco solution can work. And sure there are aspects of regulation that will affect the whole of the telco industry, but I think there's a different form of collaboration which starts with actually people really saying, look, here's a commercial proposition that I want to make maybe in my area or maybe globally that I think I'm going to take the lead on. And there could be, I've just come back from A-C-N-C-F conference Q con in Paris and a very different mentality in terms of collaboration, start with the problem that needs to be solved, then collaborate to make that problem go away. And I think Telco almost needs to relearn some of its history here. Things like pay as you go as an example, were not something that started as a collaborative initiative. They were started by individuals telcos saying, I want pay as you go as a way of differentiating myself in the market and we perhaps need to get some more of that energy into this process.

Great. Thanks so much Francis. Terje, you wanted to come back in and to respond to I believe what you might've just heard Terje.

Yeah, no, no, I was just supporting actually Francis, I think it's not in my mind at least controversial at all I think. So it's not like you have to collaborate and agree in all dimensions before you can start going. You better start going with some focused value to say a number of customers for example. So build on that and then start on a platform in that way, but of course start in the way that it can be escaped. I think that's very important, but it's also good to start with something which is providing value as delivering a quick proof point on that approach is valuable. And I also fully agree with what Mark is saying, that in the wholesale retail setup there will be a number of roles and a number of different offerings and for example, say Telenor for example, we are in all these roles. That means that we are going to expose a number of capabilities and in some cases we are also going of course to compete with someone we are collaborating with. So this is kind of the dynamic landscape we have to maneuver in and it's not given that everything will be very clear when we start, but it's also what I think Francis is saying that we need to get started then we solve the problems as they are appearing.

Excellent advice. Thanks very much everyone. Three sets of great advice there for our first question. So let's move on to another viewer question we have received in the past hour or so, telco as a platform should be adopted as holistic and agnostic to the type of network and yet the wider industry tends to associate them as 5G or mobile. How therefore do we broaden the message to include fixed and wifi and attract developers and customers to those networks? I think we're guilty of focusing on mobile an awful lot. Mark, what thoughts do you have to make sure that this is holistic and agnostic?

Great. Thanks so much Mark. The opportunity is there for us if we want to grasp it. And you mentioned what Francis was saying earlier, let's go over to Francis now. Francis, what are your thoughts on this?

Yeah, I think Mark makes a really, really strong point, which is that there are APIs and opportunities all over telco. It's not simply in 5G or in mobility more widely. I think again, I come back to some earlier point, we've got to start with what is the problem we're trying to solve for developers. There's a danger in this question again, which is we are looking for the universal API to all telco and I don't think that's the way developers see it and many different networks are providing very, very different capabilities. So definitely look for alignment in APIs for example, access on demand on a mobile network or on a fixed network is certainly something that is ideally standardized in order that the developer can use it whatever the technology in an area location-based services limited, probably limited opportunity there. So I think the important thing I think for all of these APIs is start with what is the problem I'm trying to solve for the developer and what is the likely commercial model that they'll provide for me delivering that one. And in some ways I think we almost need to look at it in a slightly different way, which is actually APIs targeted the at specific developer communities rather than the APIs targeted at what the telco thinks they can sell to the developers' communities may well be the opportunity for telco as a platform.

That's food for thought there Francis. Yeah. Well I wonder if any of our viewers online might want to send in some follow-up questions to that. That's very interesting either today or for tomorrow's show where we focus more on APIs. Terje, let's come across to you on this question of being more holistic in the approach

Thanks. Yeah, and thanks for telling us off Telenor's approach as well and what you are doing at the moment. Let's move on to another viewer question here. I'm just reading as we speak Francis, let me put this one across to you. Are the majority of telcos ready to offer platform services to enterprise customers or is this at the moment just a capability for a handful of either very large or very niche telcos? What do you think?

I honestly think everybody can play in this area. I don't think, this is not about how big you are, it's about how targeted that you are and your focus on a commercial opportunity. Any telco that can address what is it my applications need, what is it the enterprises that I'm engaging my, what I'm exposing my platform to. It can clearly say what that capability is and why somebody would want to buy it has the opportunity to succeed here and I've used the comment many, many times a good platform and a good API is one that is used. It's not about how well formed it is or anything else like that. The opportunity for the smaller providers I think is quite huge and we're already seeing that in some aspects of some of these solutions that the operators in the global south are providing in terms of delivering to their local development communities in their specific areas. Another area specifically to do with the enterprise is using other enterprise platforms or we've recently done a profile of service now is service bridge capability, which is something which a telco can buy as part as an enterprise and provide that to enterprise customers providing a seamless experience from the enterprises network into the telcos network. So there's a whole load of opportunities which are there, some of which are ready and off the shelf capabilities that can be provided by telcos of any size.

Thanks Francis. So it's open to all, let's hear the views from Mark and Terje as well and Mark, let's start with you.

Great. Thanks very much Mark. So there's ways to offer platform services irrespective of where you are on your individual transformation journey. Excellent. Terje, let's get some thoughts from you as well, please.

Thanks Terje. Yeah, absolutely. There's technical guidelines, there's technical reasons, but there's also the business reasons and individual telcos need to decide that that's their strategy they want to pursue. Thanks very much indeed everyone. We're going to pause for a few seconds because we do want to check in on our audience poll for the telco as a platform summit. The question we are asking you this week is what are the main benefits to network operators of a telco as a platform strategy? And you can see the real time votes appearing right here to my right. Look at that one. Create new service opportunities in the enterprise market. No surprise, I guess that, well I don't think there's a surprise that is proving to be a very popular answer choice now. If you've yet to vote, please do so. I'm already seeing the votes go up every few seconds, so we're getting a lot of response into this poll. We will take a final look at the voting during tomorrow's live q and a show. Well, we still have time today for more questions, so let's get through as many of them as we can and we'll start with this one. How do our panelists see telcos working with aggregators and hyperscalers given their proximity with developers and enterprises globally and the fact that hyperscalers have much better relations with developers? Terje, let's come to you first on this one. This is a question we see quite a few times actually. What are your thoughts?

Thanks Terje. That's what we want because obviously yeah, as you say, the hyperscalers do have, well their global reach is very attractive to developers and hence their extensive ecosystem. Francis, multiple ways to engage with aggregators and hyperscalers. What are your thoughts?

I think the most important thing is not to see hyperscalers and aggregators as either total impossible competition or they are part of the ecosystem which any telco platform has to engage with. I think it's also important to say with both the hyperscalers and the aggregators, they got to where they were by solving a real developer problem and if we can again just make sure that we as telco are focused at exactly the same thing. If we are solving a developer problem, if we're solving it with an aggregator or in competition to an aggregator or in collaboration with a hyperscaler or in competition with a hyperscaler, if we are clear what the commercial model and why a developer wants to use us, we can succeed. I think the other important thing is last week I was actually at A-C-N-C-F conference in Paris called CubeCon, which is all about, it's a huge developer community doing stuff with open source, particularly whilst hyperscale was important in the conversation, aggregators were part of this conversation on, for example Twilio. Twilio was there. It's also important to say it was lots of small operations doing clever things, collaborating, creating new ecosystems, creating new opportunities in there and I think again, if Telco can visit, see these types of events and see the possibility in different form, then possibly they'll see hyperscale and aggregators as less of an impossible mountain to compete against.

Thanks very much Francis, and I think one of my takeaways from day one of this summit is what's the problem we're looking to solve for developers and keeping that front and center right. Next question, here we goes. When we look at the big internet platforms, they are controlled by single companies. We appear to be talking more about a federated approach with numerous interconnected network platforms and given that the big tech companies still haven't worked out how to do this successfully, what chance does telco have? Francis, perhaps I can come back to you with this one. Any thoughts from you as to are we talking about a federated approach and what's our chances of success?

Great, thanks very much Francis, and let's go across to Mark as well.

Indeed it is. Yeah. Thanks very much Mark for those comments. And Terje a let's go across to you for your comments on this question about a federated approach.

No, quite right. Thanks Terje. We've got to engage whatever happens in the longer term. Right? Thanks very much. Let's try and squeeze in a couple more questions. I think we can do two more questions before we run out of time. So let's look at our next one. How will the platform integrate with existing telco infrastructure and legacy systems? Terje, perhaps I could come back to you for this one about integration with existing infrastructure and legacy systems.

Yeah, I would try to be quick, I think as we are probably running out of time, but of course legacy systems, that's a bit of a negative melo or tone to it. So of course if it's going to be legacy the term in the terms that is a problem, you can look upon that we are introduced platforms as a one way to isolate or even expose that legacy to partners. For example, if the legacy system is not able to support mostly tendency, for example, or security isolation, it might be an opportunity to build something on top called a platform, for example, to interface a customer still towards the legacy system. So it's a way to potentially to isolate the legacy from the demands from external demand. Typically, you can also look upon, and that's something we also doing. We are looking upon a platform purely for internal use to make this legacy and to isolate and to have different life cycles on the legacy systems. So allow us to decouple them and to start facing out some of them and also freeze others of the system. So it's a way to bring the business flexibility in quality it into the system architecture and platform might be one of the components in order to achieve that.

Yeah, it could be interesting. Thanks Terje. Mark, would you like to add some thoughts to this question of integrating with current infrastructure?

Yeah, it goes back to a little bit to the point I was making earlier on one of the other questions about meeting partners or meeting systems where they're ready. Toter has made a great point about abstraction, putting in a platform, some sort of orchestration or automation or abstraction layer into that technology or legacy service to be able to then expose actually the key parts that are necessary for service delivery or to resolve the problem. And I think that's a very good way of being able to manage that. We've had some very in-depth discussions and moving forward with a number of niche players actually that helps solve a distinct problem or a distinct use case that actually then allows legacy system to be able to still get full use out of that. But in an automated platform, as a network, as a service sort of environment, you can still leverage some of those skills. So I think it's really important to be able to meet the, or design your systems, design your platform in such a way that you can meet partners, you can meet technologies or other systems at where they are ready to. So it lowers the barrier to entry for consuming service or consuming through the platform that you've orchestrated or designed. And I think that's really, really important because ultimately that's going to build to the success. If it's incredibly difficult to onboard into your platform, then the success is going to be limited.

Great. Yeah, thank you very much Mark and Francis, over to you for thoughts on this question of integration with existing infrastructure.

I think first and foremost, it can turn a static product into something that is dynamic and extensible. That's what we have noted. What we have devised with our products and services is that you can start to do, you can be much more flexible with how that product is consumed, be it commercial models, be it technical pieces. We found that actually architecting our network and our service offering and our automation platform allows us to be able to do things with the technology that has been there for a long time but really just couldn't be accessed when I think, for example, on cross continental transport links, for example, data transport links, the ability to select and really identify routing, which becomes really important on very long distance network routes, for example, for resiliency, for geopolitical reasons, all those sort of things that become steerable. I mean it's been there in the technology for a long time. You've just been really difficult to access it at a service level that can be exposed. Those are the sort of things that can happen. There's many more that we could go to, but I'll give others the time to jump in there. But yeah, I think it does open up windows to be more flexible and extensible with the products and services.

Great. Thanks very much, mark. Well let's hear from Francis and Terje to round out the program. Francis, we'll come to you first. Does the platform approach change the product that CSPs are offering?

Actually, that's a very simple answer. Yes, but I come back to, it only changes it if we're very clear. What is it we're trying to do, who wants to buy it, and what is the opportunity from that one? If we start from that basis and we start to expand that out across a number of use cases, that gives us a huge opportunity for new products, new ways of earning revenue as a service, on demand services, et cetera. That platform enables you to do that. But start with the commercial model and the commercial focus, who you're going to work with, who your customers are and the rest follows.

Great. Thanks so much Francis and Terje, let's come to you for our final word.

Yeah, so my answer is also yes. I think one thing it does is actually lowering the threshold for offering more products. So that's one of the things. So actually, and if you want to read about this, you can probably look into our technology strategy. So there are two aspects there, which I would just highlight very briefly. I think one is that we are actually what we call layering, which is collapsing an integrated stack. So it's have the opportunity to offer a lot more new product types. That means also new customer types, and we also want to deliver this as a service, which is another way to provide and also consume the services. So these are characteristics we'd like to achieve with following this approach.

Great. Thanks Terje. Well, we are out of time now. The hour is up. Thank you so much to all of our guests who joined us today and do remember to send in your questions for tomorrow's live q and a show as soon as you can. Don't leave it too late and please take part in the poll. There is still time for you to have your say. Here's the agenda for tomorrow. Day two of the summit. We have a panel discussion for you on how APIs and middleware can support vertical applications. Plus I interview G-S-M-A-C-T-O, Alex Sinclair about the open gateway initiative. Until then, thank you for watching and goodbye.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

Hello, you're watching the Telco as a Platform summit, part of our year-round DSP Leaders Coverage. I'm Guy Daniels and today's discussion looks at the case for a platform-based approach to services. Now in the pursuit of profitability and an improved return on investment, there's growing interest around facilitating new digital services. How would offering up the Telco's infrastructure as a platform help address these issues? What would a telco as a platform strategy look like and more importantly, would it work well to find out, I am joined on the program today by Rahul Atri, President, OSS Business Unit, at Rakuten Symphony, Terje Jensen, SVP Business Security Officer and Network & Cloud Technology Strategy, for Telenor, Mark Gilmour, Chief Technology Officer, ConnectiviTree Europe, and Robert Curran, Consulting Analyst, Appledore Research.

Hello everyone. It's good to see you all, lots to talk about today on this first panel of our new summit. First of all though, can we actually define a platform? What do technology platforms have in common? How do they appeal to developers and service creators? And also what makes for a successful platform? Terje, perhaps we could start by asking you as to what exactly do we mean when we talk about a platform?

Yeah, thanks Guy. Of course, it's one of the questions we are battling with these days, but we see platform as one place to go in order to deliver number of different services and also supporting a range of customer needs and partner needs. So platform actually in that sense enables both the support and delivery of a number of components which then can be used, the components can be used individually or together in order then of course to deliver a value to our customer. So in addition to, of course, these components is necessary to define what we call the rules of engagement. So both the rules for being present on the platform and also rules for consuming the components on the platform. So what we achieve with this is of course first thing we achieve reuse all different modules. So which of course is good for scale and efficiency, but we also speeding up the innovation as we are lowering the for implementing new offerings and also for working more flexible together with new purchase and also co-creating with customers.

So the platform also allows a bit of separation of concerns between what we call the northbound interface and the southbound interface for example. So it's also introduce a modularity, which we think is a good thing from the architecture point of view. Then we see that of course portal the platform. We need to define the APIs and what as I said, the rules of engagement or to consume those APIs. And to some extent we can see in my mind at least the platform as a technical perspective and the commercial perspective is more like the marketplace, which then can have access to a number of components. So it's a platform and marketplace what we need to put together. So it's not only the technical part of it, but it's also the business and the incentives for different parties to contribute to this. And that's also important I think.

So of course the platform is not only a technical system, but is also need to describe, as I said, the rules for working what we call an operating model and also the money flow incentives on the who get what part of the money and how we split the pie in that sense. So it's more important to capture all these components in the platform. Then of course the benefits or why we should do that, which is also part of the question is we think, as I said, lowering the threshold both for the developers to promote, put new components on the platform for system integrated to be able to select components from the platforms from the customer to simply consume it, for example. But we also see the platform coming as an internal component within an operator for example, or telco. So one way to harmonize the products for example, and making it possible to sell this stuff in different components through the different market channels. So there are a number of perspectives on this platform, but of course it's also a journey to get there. We should probably come back to later in the session.

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you Terje. And we certainly will, we'll develop some of these aspects you raised as we move along. So let me get other views in from our guests as to what constitutes a platform. And I'm going to start first of all with Mark. So Mark, what's your take on what a platform is?

Well, Terje's answer was very comprehensive actually. So I'm just going to comment on a couple of things or add from a kind of user or a experience point of view. One of the defining characteristics for me as of a platform is that a platform is just that. It is something that is extensible that can be built upon. And so one of the characteristics there that I want to see in a platform, whether it be a technology platform, whether we're talking in telco or in any other environment, is that it's got that capability to, as Terje mentioned, define all the rules of engagements and the operating or the environment in which it's, it's going to exist, but not necessarily limit the capabilities of where it can go to. It is a foundation piece, but in saying that there are some things that also we need to bear in mind.

It's got to have ease of use and reach. I think a thing that makes a platform successful is that it's got a large reach, whether that's to a customer base, whether that's to number of users, eyeballs, those sort of things on it. Normally a successful platform is defined by the scale that it reaches. So I think these are kind of important factors that delve into what does a platform look like and therefore when we consider it in the realm of telco, we've got to be considering these sort of things and how is that platform going to be consumed and what will that platform also enable and making sure that we don't restrict upon that.

Yeah, good points. Thanks Mark, for those additional factors, I'm going to come to Robert next and then Rahul, but Robert, let's get your comments from what you've heard so far and additional thoughts.

Yeah, very comprehensive answers already. I think there's two aspects I want to just bring up here. I think by definition a platform is not only something that contributes value to some other business process, but I think it's inherent in it that it also takes away some problem or complexity. Why would you go to a platform rather than any other mechanism for solving that issue? It needs to provide a way of inherently providing aggregation or what mark's alluding to that sense of reach. How do you take a problem working with one telco or working with 50 telcos and remove that problem? And I think that's an integral part of what a platform proposition is. In addition to all the other things that were mentioned, there's some other aspects to that which is that obviously in this context you want something that's going to scale gracefully and that works both for the provider of the platform as well as for the user of that platform. I want to be assured that there's a completely seamless mechanism no matter where I'm using it for two customers or 2 million customers, it's the same software, it's the same experience as far as I'm concerned, access to the APIs. So that scalability is an ly integral thing, but those are two things I think are quite important. What does the platform, what complexity or difficulty or challenge does the platform take away? As well as what value does it add? And then secondly, making sure that the scalability is a key part of the promise.

Yeah, great. Thanks Robert. Two really important areas there to remember when we're talking about platforms. Rahul, I promise to come to you and let's come across to you now for any additional thoughts you have on what makes a platform and anything you've heard so far.

I think all my colleagues cover up all the great points. I think the simplified version of that would be something which brings the user and the producer together to bring the innovation on the floor. If I'm talking about the users, how do a platform hide the complexity, stack the complexities of the programmable telecom networks and expose them as APIs or maybe the use cases. And if I think from the platform or the telecom perspective, how do they reach out to more end users enterprises to have the scale and monetization which they look forward to? If you are able to solve these two things from outside in from user perspective and then inside out from telecom operator perspective, whatever comes out of that is a platform. APIs are one way of exposing the others are use cases. The third one could be any of the vertical stacks like enterprise edges and other things, but coming all together, it's all about making time to market much more dynamic and runtime today. That's one of the problems which Telco operators faces. The technology is not a problem. We have technologies like edges, we have technologies like Slice, we have other capabilities as well which are needed by the enterprises, but the time we take to launch those services is what is not working in our favor. And if the wrapper of a platform can solve that can make it much more simplified, hide away the complexities, I think that's the way to go forward.

Great. Thanks so much Rahul. And as you say, it's more than just APIs. It's important to remember the distinction here and how everything fits together. Well, we've had four great answers there. In a way, we've created our own platform for this discussion. So let's go into some more detail now. And Robert, I'd like to come back to you next because why should telco's consider platforms? How would offering up a telco's network and infrastructure in such a model as a platform, how would it make any significant difference to their digital services capabilities?

Yeah, it's a good question. Of course we've touched on some of the answers to that already. Firstly, introduction, it is about growth, it is about revenue, it is about monetizing networks. Obviously a lot of this conversation goes up in the context of 5G, but not only mobile networks, it's in a fixed context as well. It's another channel to monetizing the network in different ways. The other word Terje had mentioned at the start as well, which is innovation, more offerings, greater, a variety of offerings, more ways to do anything, things with customers. So as an additional channel to revenue and maybe one that works a little differently, it works at a faster pace, more chance for experimentation and more chance to grow. I think those are really some of the key reasons why telcos ought to consider platforms. It's not that telcos have to provide platforms at any, sorry, at a single layer. I think there are lots of different platform expressions for a telco. Again, as Terje referenced a minute ago, component services could be end-to-end services could be infrastructure in a more or less raw form, integrating, presenting a business interface to tower companies and so on. There's a lot of opportunity to define what sort of platform you want to provide as a business proposition. So I think it gives telcos more room to do something innovative, do something different, and ultimately to try and extract more revenue from the infrastructure that they've built at different layers, different levels.

Great. Thanks very much. Robert. Rahul wants to come in as well, but Mark, let come across to you first

And thanks Guy. To answer this question, maybe I can just share a brief experience that we had at connectivity in kind of the foundation of the company and the idea. I mean we started off life with the vision of building a pan-European wholesale network that helps to resolve some of the challenges of long distance backhaul, sorry, backbone transport. But as we took that to the market, took that to industry, it was fascinating to me that what really stood out for our partners, for our potential customers and in the industry was the combination of the network with a global alliance that is part of that proposition, but then with the software automation to be able to consume and deliver that. So I wouldn't say we stumbled across a platform, but actually it was the combination of the three, the network plus the reach, the global reach, and that ability to consume those services on a global scale easily and swiftly that actually made the difference.

That's what excited them then people as we spoke to them and really gave us the encouragement to move forward with our project to move forward with forming the company and stepping into the market. So as RA mentioned earlier, that bringing together or bringing closer of the producer with the end user, we saw an immediate need for that and an immediate market. So this for me has been a huge driver as why the platform approach basically enabling our network to be consumed readily and simply and swiftly. So in that kind of as a service sort of model became very attractive very quickly. So that's been our driver. I can only speak from our point of view, but that's been our driver there.

Thanks Mark. Very powerful story there. Rahul, why should telcos consider platforms?

The answer is very simple. There's no killer use case right now, and when we talk about the use cases of the future, especially with B2B, B two X, the enterprises included, every use case would be different and there will be days. An initial part of the journey would be creating customized use cases. And if you have to create those use cases, the ROI would never sustain. If you don't do that in a platform way, create repeatable assets like Terje and Robert was mentioning earlier, if you want to deploy edge, please make sure that the edge is deployed as a platform, as a self-service on top of it. If you want to deploy a host of application, enterprise application, please do that to create a vertical stack. So if you're not thinking about the platform approach, we will never achieve the monetization aspect or the ROI in this case, and that's why there's no other way to do it manually or semi manually or the legacy way of doing things. So platform is the only approach to go forward till the time we replicate and start understanding that these are the monetization use cases of the future. Platform for me is not only technology but also part of the culture and the culture is to solve certain things in an agile manner and also create repeatable assets which later on become your self service portal or the marketplace, which Terje was talking about.

Very clear message. Thanks Rahul, for that. And Terje, let's come across to you now following up from your opening comments during this discussion, why should telcos consider as a platform as a business model?

Yeah, no, I fully agree with all the previous comments on the comment, but maybe offer another kind of supplementary perspective. We believe it's going to be very, very important at least for telcos to move away from this additional integrated operating model. That means that we have a lot of assets and capabilities that we would like to expose. And the reason for that we believe that these assets and capabilities are not fully utilized as long as we are only using it internally and how do we expose these capabilities or assets? Yeah, we are exposing it on that platform. So that's one way to think about the platform in our context. One simple, maybe tri example is that we are exposing for example what we call infrastructure capabilities, meaning fiber base stations, data centers, IP connectivity and so forth on a platform, but that we actually make it much easier to consume I think these kind of capabilities or assets if you want for partners, for customers and also for internal telco market units, which then put together these components into one offering for example into a B2B offering.

So we think about platform in the sense of both exposing capabilities from ourselves but also of course getting capabilities from partners which can be part of this platform. So platform is helping them of course to drive scale. It's also helping to lower the threshold for any customer and any customer means external customer and it also means partners and internal consumers of these assets. So it's a bit of a different maybe way of thinking a platform in the way we are approaching it for the moment. And of course it's a lot about the scale and the reach I think what was commented from Mark for example earlier. So that's kind of driving the business motivation for doing this in addition to cost to innovation.

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks very much Terje. Before we move on to our next question, Rahul, let me quickly come back to you Rahul, for some additional thoughts.

I think I agree with Terje on the point that we should not stick around with only network as a service and APIs of exposing the network capabilities. When we talk about platform, it's a host of services and capabilities being exposed. Some of the use cases which we are also working on is exposing the data analytics to partners or probably the business lines, demographic data, traffic patterns, use these patterns and services experiences at different areas and I think telecom operators and service providers have a lot of data to understand and create value out of not only for them to improve the customer experiences services, but also to help businesses grow and take the right decisions. For example, if somebody wants to open a new restaurant, what is the right place? What is the demographics? How many people are going out and doing transaction and have the footfall in certain areas? All those information sets and analytics and insights can be exposed. Telcos could actually start offering Google API layers to say, if you buy this, this is the enterprise layer which your business can use when you are doing certain analytics or probably planning where to start your business on. So once you have the platform layer, the technology part is sorted, there are possibilities which can help telcos even monetize their assets, data or value and the customer experience metric.

Okay, thank you Rahul. Now we've looked at what a platform is. We've spoken about why telcos should adopt this strategy, but what would the strategy actually look like? Mark, let me come across to you. What would this strategy be like? What would be involved? Can you implement it with minimum disruption? Do you have to spend more money doing it? What does the strategy look like basically to Atoka who's thinking about going down this route?

Well, Rahul's answer just then was really intriguing because he was speaking there of where once you have a platform in place where it can take you, and so I think the very first port of call really in establishing this strategy when it comes to going down the platform route is what are you trying to solve in the first instance? And because those other things can come in due course, but really understanding what is that main driver and where are you focused Now we've got the huge benefit of being a greenfield operation and a greenfield build, which is fabulous for us. However, we are working in an established industry with established partners with their own processes so that brownfield piece starts to come into it. So a key part of, for example, our strategy and we are focused as the network layer, as network as a platform that can be consumed easily.

That's where our focus point is and we're in the fixed long haul market rather than in the cellular access piece, but understanding what the demand is and how do we simplify those process, all those things that we spoke about earlier, how we enable those, but then having a very clear strategy of how to integrate and extend into our partners and through our partner. So that's through APIs and understanding where they are in their API on automation journey. So a key part of our strategy is to be able to meet our partners at where they are ready, where they are ready and where they are capable and build the automation journey, the automation story, the platform consumption story at a pace that they can meet as well. So for us that's been a key part of building the platform and building the platform success and then understanding I think some of the other things that have to come in this are culturally we've kind of touched on that, an understanding of being able to work in this environment think slightly differently.

And a thing that I always think is important is you kind of need to let the corporate ego get out, get out the way because we can't all be the end customer facing when we're talking about a platform, a telco platform for example, a network platform that exists across a multitude of networks, it becomes almost network agnostic to the end customer. And so I think it's important to understand that sometimes the ego needs to step aside in order to create the greatest value for the customer. So that would mean for example, that us as a wholesale provider sitting behind from a customer portal point of view or the consumption into that platform sitting behind that and it's our APIs that are talking into the front end that is being used by one of our platform partners and customers to their end customer. So it's understanding the market that you want to play in and understanding then how the platform can solve some of those challenges and then adopting the culture that will allow to allow it to grow and then I think you start to reap some of those benefits. That role then mentioned about where the platform then extends the capabilities and the options and the monetization possibilities too.

Thanks Mark. And I'm going to come on to the market and customers very, very soon, but I just want to go back now to Rahul. Do you want to build on your previous answer because Mark was referencing your comments there. How do you see a strategy in this area developing?

So for me, there are three main layers for this platform which we talk about. The first is intent layer. The intent layer is where the end users or the enterprises come and say, this is what I'm expecting or this is what I want as simple as expose me your infrastructure capabilities and tell me what are the infrastructure towers where I can install one or more ENT antennas. The second layer is where the intent gets converted into a policy in case we want a guaranteed quality of service for ar vr game as an intent, the policy kind of reads that intent and convert that into actions and configurations that could be activating a slice, could be configurations of new UPF for example at dh could be deployment of new application scale out scaling. And then the third layer is the programmable network itself, whether we run them on top of cloud at software defined applications or we figure out a way to scale them out or define different configurations on the schedulers.

These three layers together along with the data, each of the layer collect and build on top of it intent layer, build more use cases as catalog the policy layer, build autonomous network as the AI policies to run the lifecycle of the network and the programmable network itself understand better take decisions to say when I need to create a new slice or when I need to do scale out, scale it, all these things working together is the platform and the capabilities which we want to expose and create in the future. Now, when the intent is the use cases catalog, if it is an exposure of API, great, we open up a Kimara based open API and the API gets exposed. If the intent has to be a configuration of new a PN for that exact users, we do that. We probably do an EIM profile on the fly.

If the intent requires to instantiate a slice, we do that. But these three layers coming together is the platform and that's what I feel is the platform where the ecosystem can collaborate. The users community, the producer community, even the end customer community can come together probably act as sandbox and say let's play together, create this playground and start realizing some of the use cases and intends to drive the network. The most important aspect is the network which is programmable in this case, not open, not talking about cloud, but making sure that the network itself is infinite, it's scalable, it's always available and that's for me, the platform is, and that's how the strategy is. You start building probably the programmable network first. You start the second orchestration or policy management as the universal action orchestration, and then you probably come on the layer where now it's easier to convert the intent into actions not have static product catalog, but the use cases catalogs as marketplace or a PS or intent management routers on top of the platform and exposures.

Great. Thanks Rahul, this is absolutely fascinating. Terje, I'll come to you in a moment, but I want to go to Robert first. Robert, lots of ideas here. What are your thoughts for the right strategy for telcos?

We've got great expertise on this panel today, it's fantastic. I think something I'd like to add in two things I'd like to add in. The first is telcos a platform isn't a technical strategy. There's lots of technology in it, but it has to be a business strategy, has to be a reason to do it. Mark's touched on his experiences in engaging customers in conversation and finding market need, platform strategy only work if there's some element of scale, a market scale there. So our industry has been through various iterations of making network APIs available. They haven't really been successful today because we haven't tapped into that problem of where is there a large scale global issue to be addressed. And telco as a platform is as much a business strategy as it is as a technical strategy. So in terms of this question was phrased, what does the platform look like?

And that's one element that has to be understood. Where do we get scale from this business? Where are there thousands of customers running millions of transactions to be solved? If you can't answer that, then maybe you don't need this as a strategy, you need something different with some of the technology, but as I say, I think it's a business strategy. The second part goes in hand with that, which is, and again we've talked about it several times already, and this is more than network APIs. If you're going to put something in a developer context and expect developers to use it, you need all the supporting machinery and incentive for that to be effective. So it is the routine things. It is code snippets, sample code tutorials, training, easy onboarding, all of that ease of use and all of the commercials. If again you want developer to use it and gain value from this and be part of a value share, developer's got to know from day one what's it going to cost me and what am I going to get in return? We've talked to a number of operators involved in various projects around this area where the commercials are not yet known and that's going to be an obstacle that's going to limit the scale question in due course. So Telco as a platform for a strategy has to have all these other things around it as well. They're not hard, but the strategy is incomplete because they're only looking at just the technology part.

Great points, thanks very much Robert. We'll come back to Rahul in a minute, but Terje, let's come across to you for your thoughts on the best strategy approach and what a strategy may look like.

Yeah, so the best strategy approach I think we can probably argue, but at least I very much very strongly agree on what we just said. The platform strategy is not only a technical strategy, definitely needs to cover the business part of it and also the different roles and opportunities there from not only from the business and technology point of view, but also from the tools to be supported and all the kind of things which needs to be addressed in order to complete the picture of the ecosystem and all the things and all the companies we need to collaborate in order to make it happen. So that's the more they complete I think the platform strategy and all the aspects. Then of course, I think Mark was mentioning this in the very beginning that it might be different steps of course in order to achieve this strategy depending on are you a more a greenfield, you don't have a lot of legacy or are you at the other end of the scale?

You have a lot of legacy and overall you moving that what someone also referred to us as Broadfield. And of course the steps might be different depending on what kind of systems you have. Again, back to clearly it depends on what kind of business ambitions you have in the market. It might also depend of course what market you are in and how you want to serve the customers, for example there. Then I think we also are of course there are a number of concrete initiatives in the industry on putting components into this platform story together. For example, on the open gateway initiative by GSMA, there's also TM Forum Network as a service and connectivity as a service and so on. And if you have any of these components of course already implemented, you need to figure out are these components to be reus and then going to be replaced and so forth. So it's a kind of holistic approach which needs to be captured. But then I think it's also important, which was I mentioned before, you probably cannot aim for the ideal estimate end of the journey in one step. You need to break it down into number of steps. And in order to do that, I think it's important to work together with partners, work together with the customers to document and validate that these steps are in the demand and you bring value to all the partners and the customers.

Thanks very much Terje. And that leads very nicely to our next question. There's been a lot of talk about collaborating with and understanding customers and focusing on the business case. So what would be the attraction to enterprises to vertical industry customers and digital content providers? Basically, is there a market for telco as a platform? Robert, let's start with you.

Yeah, I think mediating the journey to the customer, to the customer are our systems integrators and there's a huge amount of interest in this integrators. People who build application software for enterprises large and small have a lot of interest. When you look at the membership of the open gateway initiative for example, and how that's grown in a single year, there are something like 200 companies involved in the application development firms and something like 50 different operator operator groups. And again, GSMA will tell you it's 200 plus mobile network represented. There's huge interest in doing this in solving interesting sets of problems, often in vertical contexts. It doesn't have to be every vertical, but part of what we're seeing at the moment is these early use cases come to light. A lot of interest currently in finance, for example, around fraud detection prevention. That's really interesting because it's not that that's converting directly into monetizable revenue, but there's an indirect benefit as purely financial.

So as part of a way determining whether a transaction is safe to proceed with or not, it's information that can be extracted from networks to help banking institutions, financial institutions make a judgment call. That's really interesting. So I think there are lots of applications, lots of potential contexts like that that are really attracting attention here because as Raul says, there's lots of information available and there's capability available in networks not only mobile but fixed as well. That with just that little bit of extra could make a real difference in a customer experience in the business process or in some other kind of context. So I think there's a huge amount of interest in doing this, and as I start removing a lot of the complexity of dealing with networks, I mean the last thing that anybody wants is for developers to have to become network experts. That's totally not going to work as a strategy, but it doesn't mean that they can gain some awareness of what's accessible there. So again, another way to add another dimension into an experience into a business process is part of why there's such a frenzy of activity around this area and the technologies are coming together now in a way that they weren't there even five years ago to make this much more realistic, much more feasible, much more achievable. So I think that's part of what contributes to making this a really interesting upside market opportunity.

Great. Thanks very much Robert. And we'll come to Mark in a moment, but Rahul, let me just go straight back to you and ask you elaborate on why you think there is a market for telco as a platform.

The short answer is I think Telco is one of the most trusted organization along with the lines of banking systems and others. People trust telecom networks. We all trust, we live with the network day in day out. Our telephones or smartphones today are our banks are our digital wallets. All the information about me is residing on my smartphone and that gets connected to the network. Every transaction is done via network. Every content I watch is via, every search I do is by my telco provider, although the O TT applications are provided by somebody else, but we trust it and then we live by it. It's lifeline and I'm very sure if more services are being offered by the telco network providers, we will be the first one to adapt. And I really hoped we would have done that. All the O OTT apps could have been one of the use cases from telcos, but the world doesn't end there.

Like Robert just said, integrating the transaction management system or the banking system with telecom today should be by default. Whenever I do transaction internationally, I get a call from my bank. I don't want to get a call, I just want my bank to verify where my location is with from my network and say, yeah, this seems to be the legit location of Raul. He happens to be traveling and that's why the international transaction was done. And there are lot more use cases as that, which can be integral part of the services plan itself. And I as a customer would love to pay for them, some of them. And there can be monetization, there could be experience, there could be lifecycle value of the customer coming in through there are capabilities which network today has, which can be even exposed to the external customer like we discussed. So there's no one short solution, but I think just the fact that telcos are one of the most trusted organization, we live by them all our data travels to them, and I'm as good as my digital footprint today. Everything I do, even when I'm speaking on this forum today is being digitally working via the network. So I don't see any other reason or no other reason for not doing that. If not Telco, then who?

Yeah, good question. Good point. Thanks Rahul. Mark, you spoke about meeting customers where they're at at the moment. Is this one of the keys to ensuring that telcos do have a market for as a platform strategy?

Yeah, yeah, definitely in my space, I'm in that wholesale environment. My customers are other carriers and partners in that environment, but also then the end customers, their customers, and we've been speaking to both and the real challenge that we have faced, so I've got quite a narrow use case here that I'm working with a narrow view here about, and it was mentioned earlier that telco, we have a reputation for being slow to deliver, particularly when we start talking about global reach and global networks and global connectivity. It can take a long time for those services to be not just turned up but to be found and interconnected and then turned up. And so we wish we realized, and it was very quickly in our conversations with our customers, with our potential customers and with their customers that being able to turn up these services swiftly and effectively and securely and provide that service in a way that really they're experiencing in many other industries.

We are now used to a consumerization of enterprise services and so that is happening on a much wider scale. The consumer market, well actually it's the same people in enterprise. They're just why do we tolerate a less than consumer-like experience on the enterprise or the business side? Why does it take months to turn up a service? And so those are the sort of things that can be enabled when you adopt a platform strategy with the automation layers, with the ability to do self-service, the portal side of it, those sort of things that come in. But it's not just about that. It's reaching in and so therefore there really is a demand that we have seen for these sort of capabilities and consumption models. And then the interesting thing is it opens up the opportunity to do new things to enable new services. A very simple example, in the world of wholesale connectivity, you have to interconnect, you physically have to do some interconnect work.

And now that can take time when you're trying to connect a whole raft of operators together to create a global service. Now if you've, seems very straightforward, but if you've got those physical connections in place ahead of time, then you can really move to the world of turning up service immediately. But being able to understand where to have those interconnects in place and not at what point to do them so that you don't have resources just sat there tied up doing nothing, those are the sort of things that can be enabled through a platform approach, which is giving back real time analytics on real enough time. The things don't have to be split second when you're looking in that sort of range, but those are the sort of things that start to become available when you take this sort of approach. And it's all driven by, there is this customer problem, how do I solve this customer problem?

And it becomes, I think it was Robert that said, it's not just a technology piece, it is really a business process and commercial. And then you can start to offer the sort of commercial models that the end customer really wants. And we all become winners then in that scenario because ultimately we're in the business of selling capacity on networks. That's what we do. We build these networks for them to be used. That's how we make money. And so different ways to consume those services. And if we are consuming them effectively and efficiently, then we're also fulfilling some of those sustainability challenges that we look at. It's a whole different approach that we can take. Yeah, we've seen that there is a market and we've seen that there are benefits that can come to the customer.

Thank you Mark. Great possibilities here. Now we are approaching the end of our program, but I do want to get in one final question because I want to ask, given all we've spoken about and all the possibilities here, can we actually do this? Do we have the capability to create the necessary extensive and innovative ecosystems that are going to be required to make this a success? And Terje, I'm going to come across to you to start us off. Thank you.

Yeah, thanks. So my short answer is yes, we can do this. And just to add onto to that, let's not wait and sit and wait and figure out those amount kind of things we need to get started. And we also can build on what we already have in place, what I referred to earlier as a about brownfield setup because it's a matter of fact that we are offering a number of capabilities today through what you can call maybe platform components, even legacy systems like voice and messaging for example, is indication and how they're attracting new use cases and being consumed in different settings and by different customers and different partners is for me an indication that this is something we can do. Of course, we need to put them together into a broader perspective, what we might call the platform strategy, but I believe we already have demonstrated that we are relevant as a telco, for example, to provide and offer different assets.

And I think it's important that what we also addressed earlier that we need to open up and expose new capabilities. And I think also I will point to that when we do this, you're actually not your journey, which actually allows us to pursue new roles, work with partners and customers in completely different ways. And I think Mark coin it and in that way we'll all become winners. So that could be maybe a guiding star on the collaboration, which are needed in order to do this. And I think it's also needed to get going to demonstrate the value through concrete activities, work together with customers, and also work together with partners.

Great. Very positive. Thank you, Terje. Well, let's come back to Mark. If we do this right, we could all become winners. Mark, do we think we have the capability to achieve this?

Yes, we definitely have the capability. Question is do we have the desire across the industry? I think we are seeing that there's been a number of initiatives that have been driven over the last few years. I'll come from the area where I'm in these days now and things such as the work that's been done in the TM forum, TMF, and then also INF with some of the lifecycle service orchestration APIs that start to create a little bit of a standardization platform having spent many, many years in the cellular market. I understand the value of global standardization because here we're talking about scale, so there's value in that, but we also can't get caught in the hangup of standardization in that it takes a decade to get there. So this comes back to, I think Raul mentioned about the fail fast, fail quick and move on approach that I think is really important. So yeah, we have the capability. I also think that the desire is there in the industry as such, and I think there need to be a few key drivers that are pushing this forward and really creating that ecosystem and marketplace, that environment to thrive because ultimately we will all benefit from that.

Great, thank you very much. Mark. And Robert, you mentioned earlier, we've been working on this for a number of years now is the time, right? Do you have faith that the industry can achieve this and will make it

A success? Yeah, look, I think we've got all the pieces in place. I think collaboration and corporation is great, but I wouldn't want to overstate it. I mean, again, what we've seen is to some extent this dug as a platform is highlighting some of those differences between the internet world and the telco world. Simmering differences between how those two industries work and the internet world works by trying stuff out and iterating it and moving forward, proving what's successful and moving forward. That's not to say there isn't a role for standardization. There absolutely is a role, but this won't progress by the world as a whole, agreeing that it's a good thing to do, it will progress by getting enough standardization to allow some companies to collaborate and put something in market and see if it works and build some success on it. The likes of WhatsApp, even a s and so on, those didn't start out as standardization efforts.

They started out as companies trying to solve problem, even someone like Twilio. So I think we're yet to see a few companies emerge who are like that, willing to take what's there, but also willing to overhang a little bit and lead the industry. But that'll be exciting because those companies will start generating money and that will attract a lot more interest from other companies in how to do it, a replicate or how to partner with it. And that's I think what we're going to see. It's not everybody has to move as one together. We'll never get there. We do that. We have all the pieces mark's, right? We need the attitude, the ambition. We also need a little degree of Juba if you like, or entrepreneurial spirit that will say, you know what? We're going to lead the industry. We're going to stretch beyond what we know already and maybe be a pioneer in doing this. So that's exciting about it, but we absolutely have all the pieces.

Fantastic. Thanks very much Robert, and let's end our discussion with some final comments from Rahul.

I think, like everyone said, find the right partners partner in this instance. For example, if we are a telco, who is our potential future customer? For example,

Banking systems could be the partner of the future. Why don't we partner with them and say, we're going to expose an API to you, which can be queried at I VD transaction. Reach out to the smart connected vehicles, Teslas Yds of the future today. Why don't you have our eim and we offer you five different configurations and profiles when you want to go for a software release upgrade, this is what we can do for you whenever you go via told, this is what we can do for you, and these are the services, which as network platform we can provide to you. I think if we start doing some of these key partnerships, make one or two successful use cases, show that this really work and obviously some of these are value and also the scale banking is transactions, millions of transactions per day. Cars on the road, we already know.

And there are multiple such partnerships which I can think about today where networks exposure and network monetization and network APIs and exposing network capabilities will play a role. I think it's all about getting started, not just getting blocked into strategy standards and thinking about what the future vision of the telco as platform look like. It'll take time, it'll need a push and some successful case studies to make that thing happened. 1, 2, 3, successful use cases. I'm very sure the world will follow because that's the only way to monetize network. Further, we have reached to the data limits. We have reached to what SMS or voice call could reach to. We can load more things as use cases. There's no killer use case for 5G to eat away more data and consume more bandwidth or even to activate Slice. I think we have to start looking into more venues and the partnership model to say a telco partnered with banking, partnered with smart car, partnered with insurance, partnered with somebody else, is the entity or probably the use case of IT, customer require in their day-today life.

Great. Thanks Rahul. Well, we've started this journey. Let's see where it goes. But for now we must leave it there and I'm sure we will continue to debate this topic during our live q and a show later. For now though, thank you all for taking part in our discussion now. If you are watching this on day one of our telco as a platform summit, then please do send us your questions and we'll try and answer as many of them as we can in our live q and A show. And that's coming up very soon indeed. Now the full schedule of programs and speakers can be found on the telecom TV website, which is where you'll also find the q and a form and also our poll question. Please go ahead and fill that out for now though. Thanks for watching and goodbye.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

HPE GreenLake Flex Solutions provides digital twin for the industrial metaverse | TelecomTV

Hey, good afternoon guys. I hope you are all having a good show. I'd also like to introduce Jose Arias, my colleague, and we're here to talk about digital twin. So just so we know, for those who don't know what a digital twin actually is, a digital twin is a digital representation of a physical object or a theoretical object. So this could be anything. We look at this as pretty pictures, but imagine if these objects are all defined as individual objects. The lemon, the bread, all has texture, all has the ability to rot like a real, real vegetable, real bit of fruit. You can actually get it to move. You can do things that are quite interesting with these devices and these objects across the board. You can do it at massive scale with fire. You can actually use physics to look at how objects act in the water.

You can do this at massive scale. You can do it at water tanks and you can do this in warehouses. Data centers, we can look at this in terms of how millions of objects actually react with each other, how they impact each other, how they fall over looking at safety, looking at obviously things that go wrong. How can we avoid those things going wrong? How we can simulate orbits at massive scale to make sure that actually when we go through the idea of prototyping these things, we can do this multiple times. They have real physics in it, but also the fact that we look at these things can actually be used as showcases for the products before they're built. But you can make them at such fidelity that there are actually beautiful things to look at. You can also integrate things where you're looking at weather patterns.

Digital twins are based on data sets that you can take and data sources that you pull in together and effectively you can make that into a platform that does everything from the building blocks all the way up through robotics, how robotics work at massive scale, how all these platforms work together. Robotics, how will this dog actually jump? You can look at digital twins for sporting events, sporting prowess. What's the best thing you can do? What about looking at traffic analysis? How does the traffic flow? All of these things you can do before you ever build everything before you put a spade in the ground. Looking at telecoms, looking at factory capability. And of course the other beauty of this is looking at it, it's beautiful. You can look at this with VR headsets, you can interact with it with natural language. You can do a whole host of fantastic things.

So the problem is, as I mentioned, you start with a digital twin. So the virtual representation of your device or your object, the problem is you've got data sources all over the place. You need to establish which of these data sources are going to give you the right data. The old adage of garbage in garbage out is really true here. So effectively if you get the data wrong, the digital twin will be wrong and HP can help you on this journey. Going through building the data repository, moving this into actually the creation, the digital twin, and then more importantly how you actually interact with that. Be it on a 2D screen, how you act with it in terms of virtual reality, how you interact with it in terms of multiple people. It can change the user experience, it can change how you bring products to life.

It can change how you do return of investment based on lifecycle management of a product. And there's lots and lots of use cases. Anything from networking where you can use this. There's a great demo on, I'll stand here around Ericsson who use this to look at how signals propagate. They built a digital twin of the local office environments and external environments to see how data paths and network paths propagated around buildings. So signal so they could use that to assess what was the right location to put transmitters and receivers. So all that was modeled long before they actually did the implementation of run, et cetera, so they could see how this was going to interact with the real world and optimize where they located things. Same with assembly line. We have people like Mercedes-Benz, who have spent a lot of time building the digital twin of the production line so that when they actually put a spade in the ground, they know that production line is optimized.

They know it works. They know where things like predictive maintenance and needs to take place because they've actually used it in a real world. Those objects have got real world properties. So when the two objects touched each other, they understand how they were. So they know the life cycle of certain parts may be two years. So at 20 months they replace that part. So there's no one scheduled downtime. There's a huge number. And of course we saw something around warehousing. Amazon used the similar product stack to develop an entire warehouse before they actually built it to make sure it all worked. We do this at the moment with products like that. Jose's going to introduce you in a second around Nvidia Omniverse, VMware Horizon, and a product stack from HPE, which solves a lot of the problems I'm going to talk about, which is this all sounds really good.

This all sounds like a great thing we can use to build multiple products. The look and see what works to simulate how things will act in the real world without spending all that letter. But the problem is at the moment, VMware platforms are usually scattered around the world with various different applications trying to do either virtual reality or digital twins. The teams are disconnected, lack of trust, many vendors, there's probably 60 to a hundred different tools you can use to create a digital twin. And actually getting them all to operate together is really, so compatibility and data management is really important. We all know an example where a large airplane manufacturer had one design function in one country, half of it in another country using two different bits of software. When they came to physically build the aircraft, the bits didn't fit because they'd used incompatible software, siloed data. So getting all this right is really important and the incompati drives inefficiencies. So what I'm going to do is we've solved this problem and at this point I'm going to hand over to Jose to go through what we've done.

When you're building a digital twin, obviously you need hardware, software services, and as HP, we want to keep all the complexity regarding the platform here with us. So you can focus in the digital twin, twin Green Digital Twins basically is a complete solution with hardware. As you can see here, we have the compute and we have the storage needed to run digital twins over this storage. We have three layers of software. We have Bmware Horizon and we have Omniverse over this. So with this complete hardware and software solution, we are wrapping everything under Grid Lake. So we are going to provide this as a service for you. What is the meaning of that? That you are going to have a cloud experience. If you are using more hardware and more services, you are going to pay as per use, you are going to pay as your growth. So in this view, we are going to be focused as HPE in providing you the platform, software services and the hardware. And you are going to have the focus building the detailed twins for your own business

And it's worth out, this is entirely certified stack from Nvidia. So it comes out of the box ready to run. All the licenses are included, the platform's included, storage is included. It's run with Nvidia, A 40 GPUs, I think it is in the current flies, but we actually pay, this can scale. It's flexible. So if you decide you want less users, we can scale it back down. You reduce your costs. If you want more users, we can expand the system and expand the platform so you can cope with all those additional users. And I think at this stage, what I'd like to do is say thank you very much. If you have any questions, please let us know guys.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

Enabling the CPaaS 4.0 era with AI and programmable networks | TelecomTV

Hello everyone. Thanks for joining us today at the Radisys booth for a very exciting conversation on the evolution of programmable communications and the new era of connected experiences enabled by AI and programmable 5G networks. My name is Ashish Jain and I'm joined by four very esteemed industry influencers and experts in the communication industry. Al Balasco, SVP of Media Applications at Radisys; Adnan Saleem, CTO of Software and Cloud Solutions at Radisys; Raul from S&P Global, and Kevin Nethercott from CPaas Acceleration Alliance. Thanks for joining me today. So let's kick things off. The communication industry has evolved quite a bit in the last 10 years, and it seems we are at the cusp of pivotal breakthrough into new experiences enabled by maturing technologies like ai, programmable networks and others. The question really is, are we at the pivotal breakthrough and how are telecom operators adjusting to this evolution to leapfrog in this new era? Al, to start from you.

I think. Absolutely. I'll go to Raul quickly. You've been tracking this industry for many years, for 15 plus years, and on this one and Al talked about the mindset, the shift in the mindset. Can you elaborate on that a bit more in terms of what is that mindset shift that you have seen over the years and why do we think that the operators have the opportunity and the mindset to actually leapfrog in this evolution?

Yeah, I actually think I like very much the way you articulated, there's a significant opportunity for operators. I have been following the CS and digitization of communications for about a decade, and when this started, the main topics were based on how cloud communications vendors were enabling access to the mobile network operators to deliver services. And in that sense, that's an opportunity that telcos were not fully capitalizing on. The talk has been since the industry was turning digital, so for about 15 years, mainly at the application level. What I find very interesting now, and I do think it's a significant milestone that we're about to see, is we're now talking about services that are delivered based on not just the application level but also the network level. So if you look at it from that perspective, first of all they're complimentary, so we should be able to see enhancements, significant enhancements to the user experience. More importantly, since we're talking about the network level, frankly that's the territory for the telcos. So they should be excited, they should be looking at it, and I do think it's definitely an opportunity for them to leapfrog and go past all their direct competition.

So, programmability of communication, especially voice video messaging has been there for past what decade or so, even more than that, and the operator community hasn't really embraced to the level we all expected. What is different this time and where are the barriers and how the industry and technology providers like yourself changing that? You want to start with that?

Sure. So I think one of the biggest differences is that we're at a point now where we have an ecosystem. If you think about the players, particularly the larger CFAs players, they've built everything from the network up. They contracted with the network providers to get their SMS or voice services, but then they created the platform on top of that and then taken that all the way to the enterprise. I think what's now is we have access, as Raul was saying now with telco APIs so that you can have a carrier that can expose at that level. You then have aggregators that can take those services and then you have other Cpaas players or I think even more vertical oriented applications that can take advantage of those platforms and take it to market. So that's why we're excited at the Cpaas Acceleration Alliance is because we have this growing community, this growing ecosystem where the opportunity is so large that and it's happening so quickly that you really have to partner to get to market in a meaningful way. And so I think that's what's really changed, I'd say over the last even 18 to 24 months. That's a game changer for the industry.

Yeah, there's been quite a bit of excitement regarding the open gateway initiative and initiatives like kamara, APIs, Adnan, you want to talk about that? You're chairing the work group around this and what excites you about this and how do you think the communication aspect of the programmability and the network access to the programmability, the convergence of that, what new possibilities do you see and where do you see the operators that are already excited and adopting and launching services around that?

Can you share some examples of how Radisys is bringing that to market and kind of applications you're enabling with that? Yeah,

Sure. I think the three areas that I just mentioned, so I generated AI in terms of conversational intelligence based on generative AI technology and built into the platform. So a designer who's writing an application does not need to be a data scientist. We don't necessarily need people to be data scientists or computer vision experts or architects and engineers at know telecom networks. You have to abstract all that complexity from them. Expose applications in a simplified STK and API matter in some cases, literally no code where you would drag and drop things. So the creativity, the imagination of the application to the developer should not be restricted or impaired by the complexity of the technology that they try to use. So that's what we are bringing in together in a nutshell, if I could put it that way. So computer vision, machine vision, conversational ai, generative ai, and the ability to be able to go and have access to programmable network so you could control the devices and the underlying network below you. Then the application developer can go and create very seemingly very complex application literally in a matter of days. And we have a bunch of them over here we've been demonstrating during MWC this week.

Great generative ai, you can't go wrong with that, right? I mean it's ai, it is on every booth and every conversation and it's maturing and it has been disruptive to a level that it has seen in an option of 500 million plus users using it within 30 days, which is unheard of unseen in any industry. How do you see generative AI playing a role in the telecom network beyond the operational efficiency that it brings in terms of managing the network, but in terms of enabling new experiences and communications? How do you see that playing a role? Al you want to start with that? Sure.

Maybe I'll give a couple of real world examples. We have a customer now who's deployed an application in Japan where the service provider is serving theme parks, and when guests enter the theme park, they're greeted with a video assistant essentially, and they interact with that video assistant via natural language interaction. But the additional layer, there's an additional layer which uses ai, which is a video persona. So in their case, they have characters from the park who can respond to questions, and those videos don't have to be prerecorded. They're generated based on AI and using the responses that are triggered by that conversation by the guest. As an example, another application, we have several customers who are rolling out some of this technology we're talking about as Adnan and the other speakers have talked about is it's been available for some time, even generative AI in past couple of years has been evolving and has been accessible to companies with big pockets. What we are providing is the opportunity for telcos to offer their business customer small businesses and mid-size businesses, even sole proprietorships access to this technology that was prohibitively expensive and also very complex for them to use. So today, what we can say a service provider serving that type of customer with our solution can and say as you're using us for connectivity, we can provide you a tool that you can

Your own content, scrape information from your website documents where your customers can call, get information that's very specific to you. This can even reside in the service provider's network, so it's private and it's higher performance. So these are a couple of very practical and interesting applications. One that last one from something that can scale in the market and is repeatable and that first one, one that's very tailored but provides kind of an immersive experience that creates stickiness for the business' customers. So

So Raul and Kevin would love to hear your perspective on that as well, and not just from a technology perspective because technology find its way somehow in the network, but monetization and business models also becomes a block for many technology to come to market. How are you seeing operators rethinking their business models not aligning with the typical way of them serving the voice and data services? So how do you see the business model changing in bringing these new set of services and AI enabled applications to the market?

Kevin, you talk to a lot of operators and one of the charters of Cpaas Acceleration Alliance is to really help them take the next step and guide them through this journey. Where do you see they're struggling in that shift and coming up with business models and what kind of business models align with what they're trying to do?

No, I think whether you're spot on that, and I'm seeing that and it's quite refreshing to see both Telefonica and Vodafone talk about that very topic, right? It is about collaboration, it's not about going alone in this and they are opening doors to the technology providers to partner with them and create these solutions. So what does that mean for Radisys? I mean, does that open doors for radisys to play a bigger, more strategic role with operators versus just a technology provider and enabling and creating those applications with them?

Absolutely. I think that's absolutely critical for any technology to adopt. And this is even more because this is a new domain for many talking about new domain value. You mentioned about data channels, and I'll come to you Annan for this one, there is a long desired from operators to converge the voice and data. Voice is still their application towards brought both voice and data into the network, but the real experience of converting voice and data hasn't really been seen and that's where the over the top providers have been really benefiting from using that data channels. And there is an emerging technology which brings that together web IMS data channel. Can you elaborate on that and what does that mean for the industry on an impact that operators will have in bringing these, so-called internet 3.0 services to the market, and what kind of applications are you bringing to market and what are the possibilities?

Yeah, it's actually a good question. I think it's over the last few days when we actually started demonstrating some end-to-end use cases that are built on the concepts of IMS data channel and even prior to the IMS data channel being available in the IMS core network, how that can be delivered today. The interesting thing was a lot of people made the same comment. They said, well, that's IMS what, 15 years ago? What does IMS stand for? IP multimedia system, not an audio only system, multimedia system. So it took this long for the industry to get to the point that it truly becomes multimedia. If you've always had audio, of course on occasion it may be a video call, but there was never that third leg of communication. I think probably the most important one in addition to audio, to have that full interactive immersive experience while you're in any kind of a conversational, whether it's point to point or multi-party calls. So that really does I think finally fulfill the promise of IMS, which was really the idea of I-M-S-I-M-S core networks. So it is pretty interesting and exciting and I think that really, I think as you said, that finally brings the web world into the traditional telecom world because just relying on audio only is not only kind of run this course.

Yeah, I think that's actually a great example of bringing those capabilities at the API level and the network level to deliver these innovative services, and that's the opportunity for monetization. I actually think that the combination can be very powerful because if you look at all the digitization that took place over the last 15 years, most of it has been applications over the top. And that's a way to kind of go around. The operators still benefiting from their infrastructure and their services, but if you follow the money, it's not going to the operators. So delivering these services I think is a game changer and it could really enable operators to reposition within the value chain. Actually, if you think about the contrast between an over the top service compared to a service that is leveraged in both the network capabilities and the programmability, it's more powerful, it's more reliable, there's opportunities for security control. So there are many advantages to that. So if you take a step back and just look at the whole contrast in both options, one might ask, well, why would you do over the top instead of using the network capabilities?

This has been tried before. I mean arguably RCS was an attempt to do that and it hasn't been as widely said, what's different this time?

So I'm going to process this. Did you just say that the telecom industry is moving faster than the analyst can predict?

Well, as you can expect, we have to rely on a lot of data and we tend to be conservative. But yeah, it took us by surprise and that's a good thing.

It is surprising a lot of us, I mean I was very pleasantly surprised to hear the kind of applications, the mindset, the integration and the collaboration the operators are talking about. I mean honestly, I was hoping I was probably expecting a lot more six G and Spectrum conversations and it has been all about vertical applications, which is so refreshing for this industry to see how the connectivity and the applications are coming together. Talking about that, let's shift a gear a little bit. Inclusivity and accessibility is big on the agenda for many operators. What are you seeing how operators are handing that and kind of applications they're coming out and what data is doing in?

I think you're very right on that. The way I look at it is voice is still the king. We still talk call and there are 4.3 trillion calls that happen every day. And what this brings to table is making voice the new omnichannel platform to enable new digital services and engage clarity for hearing loss is a great example. I mean there is an unserved community out there that have been ignored and through I expected that they will utilize the hearing aids and other things which they don't. And this solution is really interesting. I would love to take a perspective from Raul and Kevin in a minute on Adam, looking up from outside in here, what do you think of this and how are you seeing the operator feedback throughout in the AT MWC

On that? Two things. One, to an operator, there's interest in this application and it fits into whether it's accessibility initiatives or empowering society initiatives. The other interesting thing, anecdote that for me is when people come through here, they say, not only is this interesting for me as a business, but I'd pay for this for my parents, for my grandparents. So it really can be a life-changing application.

Well, I think this ties back to what we were talking about a little bit earlier where technology has improved to a point where it's enabling so many options. And with the APIs that we've been talking about, the developers that are out there, there's so many new things that we can do. And taking that technology now and being able to deliver it in an impactful way to a certain sector, the population that can really use it, it just makes sense. And I think we're going to see more and more of this. Right now we're looking at a lot of horizontal type use cases that are here, but as we look at the next three years, we're going to see this technology really hit the verticals. And so as healthcare adapts this more, you're going to see lots of really interesting use cases that will have similar impact on people's lives and how families can interact and all of those good things. So we applaud you on the progress here in this type of initiative, but I think it's just the beginning of what we'll see from a lot of organizations as we leverage technology in an impactful way for the human race.

It's great. I think we are coming towards an end here, and I'm going to ask this to everybody. If you can add your perspective to this, if you're sitting next year talking about a similar topic, what would be your killer application for next year? Good question. I think moving from these

Solutions that at least I emphasized in terms of the scale of the opportunity and repeatability to these industry verticals, that industry 4.0 applications that leverage these technologies and the benefits of the network from service availability to security and fraud prevention that are tailored to specific industries that we can take a similar approach cookie cutter, but maybe 80% of the way there. And then provide the tools that allow those businesses or the application developers who are serving certain industries to bring new solutions to market that are tailored for those markets or for specific customers, like Adnan was saying, instead of having these solutions take months or even years, takes weeks or even days. So now move into those tailored application

Yeah, thanks. So I think just along those lines, I don't think it's a one killer app or killer app. I don't think it that way. We are expecting that there would be many of them, dozens and dozens. And as time goes forward, there'll be many of them. You're not going to be able to go say, well, there's that one killer app. The thing is to have many killer apps, each one of them that is more usable and more easily deployable, that will create this plethora of applications that will have serve different segments of the industry or serve different verticals in the industry. And they'll be the killer apps within the domain that they're intended to be deployed in. So I think we should think of it not as individual killer apps, but bag a bag full of killer apps. It can be deployed, but the whole key point again is that user technology in a way leverage the thing in a way that you can deploy it quickly. You don't want to go and spend two years on an app and then find out, well, it was Muslim, really all that popular, we want to create it, deploy it in a month, get the user experience within that thing, and then go and transition and then deploy another one, get feedback from that one. So I think there'll be lots of them coming out. And the time to market is I think is a key thing there.

I think I'm thinking in terms of a category, if you will, and what I expect to hear much more from a year from now is trusted communications. So if we talk about the rise of digital channels and digital engagement, I think now we see the need for those interactions to be secure and that's going to be something that falls on the lap of companies, consumers, mobile network operators, regulators. So I do expect to see much more of that in a year. Kevin,

Let's just get rid of the term killer app. There's no such thing, there's no silver bullet. I mean, I look at my own life, I've been trying to get rich my whole life. There's no get rich quick scheme that's going to work. It takes hard work. And so when we keep looking for that killer app, that means we're not starting anything. The killer app is human nature inside of us. It's how hard we work, it's how we grind. That's the killer app. That's what drives success. Clearly we're going to have technology, we're going to have a lot of different use cases, but it's going to be the individuals, it's going to be the organizations, the way we work together as teams. What's going to create the success, the technology levels, the playing field. It's what we do with it now. That's going to be the actual result that we're looking for.

No, I totally agree. I'm glad you said that. The reason I asked for K app is I was hoping somebody will say that, but can we agree on that, the mindset shift, the open programmability and collaboration, the combination of that is going to enable all sort of new possibilities that have been seen next to yet.

Absolutely. So I think with this rollout of telco APIs particularly, we're resetting the game. So we've been playing one game for the last decade. I think there's an opportunity now for a lot of different players all along the stack to reorganize themselves. And so it comes back to how organized are you? What's your business plan? Who are your partners that's going to make the difference here on the success? So that's exciting for me about this show. It's not any single technology, but I think we've hit a point where there's new opportunity for so many new players and that's really what is most exciting.

We are very excited too. Thank you gentlemen for your time. This has been a great, great conversation and I wish you have a great rest of the show.<br><br>Thank you.<br><br>Alright.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

Enabling safer innovation: A security-first, AI-powered approach | TelecomTV

In today's rapidly evolving digital landscape, ensuring the safety and reliability of the network is paramount. Joining me to talk about this topic and more is Scott Calzia, vice President of Marketing at HPE Aruba Networking. Scott, thank you for being with us today.

So what are some of the biggest secure connectivity challenges facing telcos and their partners today?

So how does having a security first AI powered network help telcos really serve their customers

Well, so there's four things that they really have to consider. One is visibility of that. They're getting security information from a lot of different sources. So part of what h HP Aruba Networking does is we collect telemetry information, security telemetry information from not only the networking devices, but also the devices or the end user devices that are connected to the wired infrastructure, the wireless infrastructure, the wide area infrastructure, the users that are using them. And so we have a single source of truth coming from all of those different users and all those different devices. Now, with that, we can define a single global security policy, and from there we can enforce that security policy across what we call the edge to cloud. So it doesn't matter whether that security policy has to be enforced for users that are connecting to the wireless infrastructure or if they're connecting into the wired, or if it's data that is flowing through the data center network. That's all part of the same policy. Now, with that, in order to be very efficient and to reduce the amount of time, you have to have some type of automation that goes with that. So that's where kind of, again, coming full circle AI comes back into play. With that, those advanced techniques, we can actually recognize various types of security breaches or be proactive about those and protect the network and the infrastructure as well as the users and devices from those in advance.

So what are some of the innovations that Aruba is showcasing here at MWC?

How should a telco go about using a Zero trust architecture to help keep their customers secure?

So we didn't talk much about Zero Trust, but zero trust is really a paradigm. That is kind of the goal that all security teams are striving for, ensuring that any users or devices will allow them to connect, but we're not going to trust them initially. They actually have to log in with the right credentials. IOT devices. That's what the client insights becomes important. Again, because they may not have the credentials to log in, you've got to understand the type of device that it is. Is it following the right parameters? Zero trust is a paradigm. It's not a product, and it has to be continually looked at, updated and modeled. So what telcos and customers should do, they have to make sure that they are implementing, that they're implemented across all parts of their infrastructure, whether it be the campus, whether it be the branch, whether it be the data center environment, and they have to make sure that they're working with or they have to make sure that the networking and the security people are working closely together to ensure that they're coupling that so that we're maintaining connectivity for the best user experience. But we're following that paradigm of zero trust and ensuring that we're not trusting until verify.

Scott, it's great information. Thank you for being with me today.

Thank you, Clarence. I've enjoyed it. Take care.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

The future of telecommunications with ZTE and Red Hat | TelecomTV

Okay. Good morning everybody. Thanks very much for joining us. We're here at the ZTE booth at MWC 24 in Barcelona. Of course. My name is Ray Le Maistre. I am the editorial director of TelecomTV. I'm the moderator here for this panel this morning, and we've got a great panel of speakers. So welcome everybody. And to help everybody know who is speaking here today, I'm going to ask our speakers to introduce themselves. So Ben, let's start with you.

Thank you, Ray. Good morning. My name is Ben Panic. I'm the Vice president of the Telco Center of Excellence for Red Hat.

Okay, good morning. My name is Wang Quan. I'm vice president of ZTE, and I'm in charge of the global marketing for the core network.

Hello. Good morning everybody. My name is Eduardo Gutierrez. I'm the wireless operations director for izzi.

Hello, good morning and thank you for being here. My name is Israel Madiedo. I'm an innovation technology for izzi. For those of you actually not knowing who izzi is, we're the largest MSO in Mexico.

Okay. Thanks everybody. So I mean, pretty much the topic we're talking about here today is the importance of 5G Cloud Native core innovation, which of course is really important to every operator in the world right now. So Ben and Wang, if I can start with you, Red Hat and ZTE to you have been in a collaboration on this topic. How did that collaboration come about?

Well, ZTE is one of our key partners globally. We've been working very closely with them for many years now and listening to the clients, listening to what the industry is looking for, the leveraging of open source technologies is something that we hear from our clients. Working with ZTE, especially around 5G and the wireless side of the network is something that we have been focusing on from an engineering through to a product management perspective. We see that the criticality of 5G continues to grow for our operators and they were looking for a strong partnership and that's where Red Hat and ZTE have come together to work on this.

Okay. I think about the collaboration between ZTE and the Red Hat. It is based on some fundamental understanding that many operators, they actually want three level decoupling architecture in their networks because it's open and it's flexible. They can choose applications, platforms, and hardware from different vendors. So there will be less vendor locking. And actually I also think it is one of the main reasons why we introduce virtualization and cloudification technology into the core network.

So of course it's great to have partnerships in the industry, but the partners want customers and here we have a customer with izzi. So if we can come to the customers here, Eduardo, why did izzi choose this partnership between Red Hat and ZTE, and can you share some insights about what this solution has meant to you, how you're able to operate, what it means for your customers?

Definitely. Well, let me start first by saying that at izzi we truly believe that there is a need, an urgent need to sell something beyond simple connectivity. We really are keen on delivering experiences and experiences that help us to take that sense of our subscribers of being at home while they're in the go. And that is not easy. That is definitely not easy. And to do that you really need an flexible open platform and it's very difficult to envision for the future all the services and all the flows and the customer journeys that you will need. So that's why the platform has to be convergent. It has to be future proof and it also has to be standard based. So we found in this joint collaboration solution those attributes that can help us to do something completely different from what we traditionally see in the market.

And Israel, this kind of the solution that's been delivered by Red Hat and ZTE, what does that mean for how a company like yourselves is able to deploy this really important next generation core platform and how does that impact the customers, what you're able to deliver to customers?

That's a very important question, Ray, because we have been working with ZTE and Red Hat for some time now. We have deployed several projects in Mexico very successfully. And now it's a time to move into the mobile arena. We are in MNO, so we are trying to bring the best solutions as Eduardo mentioned to our customers as a quad play operator. So it only makes sense to actually extend what we have been already working on the fixed side to the mobile side and have a real convergent environment. We have been cloud native in certain platforms for some years now, four or five years. And it came the moment to taking a decision, what's the next step and how do we make the best out of what we already have? But also thinking about the new deployment, the new core, and how to interlace everything. So for us it was quite a visionary kind of approach working with both ZTE and Red Hat and looking forward to achieve that. Everyone has been talking about convergence forever. I remember being in this show 10 years ago when everyone was like Convergence, well, we do believe that it's coming in and we need it to be ready. So it's quite a journey. Definitely.

Has it met your expectations? Have things gone as you expected? Has it delivered what you needed

So far? So far so good now. Yeah, we are having a great support from both companies and Eduardo who's in charge of this deployment. All of us in the rest of the engineering departments and technology, we're supporting him. But definitely we sense that commitment from both ZTE and Red Hat to make this successful.

Okay, excellent. So let's dive a little bit deeper into exactly what this collaboration is bringing to the market. What would you say, Ben, are the key highlights, the key strengths of this joint solution that you have with ZTE?

Well, I think firstly, we are going through a paradigm shift in the market. We've seen that over the past years as we've moved through the virtualization era and now into the cloudification of the applications. And one of the things that I'll pick up on is we're not done with this. And I think that's the exciting part for izzi and for the industry, is that through the open source technologies that Red Hat delivers with ZTE, we are building these platforms that are going to enable izzi and other clients globally to deliver new applications, to drive new revenue streams. As Eduardo said, not to just be providing carriage to be able to differentiate services in the market. For me, I think that's really exciting, having been in the industry for many years, for us to be able to generate new revenue services to increase the wallet share that we have from consumers and businesses is one of the highlights. I'm also seeing that clients are looking to partners like ZT and Red Hat to be able to help them de-risk the deployment of the solution. And I think that's where the work that we've done at an engineering level with our partner ecosystem team to be able to come together with ZTE and provide that resilient solution that izzi can build their business off is really important.

Okay. And Wang, what kind of capabilities is this joint solution delivering to operators like izzi? What is it giving them that they haven't had before?

Okay. I think one of the most important highlights in this joint solution is that in this solution, ZTE comprise not only the software for the core network, we can also provide the end to end integration for the entire project. We can do this because first we have a very deep understanding about Red Hat product futures. Second, we actually have a dedicated laboratory to validate and to test every new version released by redhead and from ZTE through all the project we have already successfully deployed in the worldwide and the Red Hat platform. Actually we have already built experts and experienced the team. And of course with support from Red Hat, this team can get everything done smoothly and efficiently.

Okay, thank you. So it's a new kind of platform. It's a new era for service providers looking to advance their portfolios, give more to customers, but of course at the same time, greater efficiency and greater agility is needed in what the operators are doing. So Eduardo, if I can come to you first and ask about how the implementation of this joint solution happened, how it compared to previous generations, how different is it and what kind of efficiency improvements have you seen?

Well, Ray, let me first start by saying that I'm very personally sensitive in certain way because I live with a legacy product. And this legacy product places us in a very rigid and unreliable paradigm I would say. And as you can imagine, for us the most important thing are customers and the service that we're providing. So living with an unreliability, it's just very painful. There are a lot of first of opportunity and the way we currently manage this legacy solution, not only on the way we manage the resources, but also the way we operate and troubleshoot and the way we create new services. So far, with the deployment that we're doing with ZTE and Red Hat, it's been just amazing. It is really difficult to see something going as flawless as is. And I believe it's also, again, back to the fact of flexibility, openness, standardization. It's amazing to see how fast, impressively fast the deployment is going. And I'm also completely relying that as we move forward and go beyond the deployment and the integration into the creation of these new customer journeys, things are going to still help us to really come up with new services really fast, really simple. And again, with reliability and fixing all these gaps that we have today in the current environment.

And Israel, it's obviously relatively early in the journey, but you're obviously looking some way ahead and thinking what you can do in the future, how you can better serve your customers. How do you expect this deployment and this relationship to help transform the way you work and what kind of benefits do you expect in the future?

Okay, excellent. Well, we've been hearing for years about cloud native deployments, the evolution of 5G and the impact the 5G core will have. But what's really good is to see this actually happening in action. Here's a customer using solution that's been developed in partnership and partnerships have been talked up so much in recent years, how important collaboration it is. So it's great to see this actually happening in action and to hear from the customers as well. So I hope that everybody here has enjoyed the insights from Red Hat, ZTE and izzi, and let's give all of our speakers a big round of applause. Great conversation. Thank you.<br><br>Thank you, Ray.<br><br>Thank you.<br><br>Thank you.<br>Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

Hello, you are watching telecom TV and welcome to the DSP Leaders Council Industry Vision Report Debate. I'm Ray Le Maistre, editorial director at telecom tv, and I'm here to host today's program, which examines some of the findings published in our recent DSP Leaders Council Industry Vision Report. The DSP Leaders Council was formed late last year and is a visionary forum that brings together industry thought leaders, innovators and disruptors from the network operator, vendor enterprise and industry analyst community who've generously committed to sharing their insights and expertise by participating in our surveys and research and having formed the Council, which is about 80 strong currently and growing, we decided to conduct a survey to find out the councilor's views on some of the industry's hottest topics, and that resulted in the publication last month of the DSP Leaders Council Industry Vision Report, which is available for anyone to download from the telecom TV website.

And I'm delighted to say that I have several of our counselors joining me today to discuss some of the survey's. Results and on the program are Beth Cohen, SDN Network product strategy at Verizon Business Group. Diego Lopez, senior technology expert at Telefonica, and an Etsy fellow, Verna Schafer Vice President Sales and Marketing Group, general manager for network and communications sales group at Intel and Francis Hasum, principal analyst Apple Door Research. So welcome everybody. Good to see you all. We have some great topics and survey results to discuss today. So let's get stuck in now. Our first topic is service development strategies and we asked our counselors, should traditional infrastructure based digital or communication service providers, DSPs and CSPs, focus on connectivity services or seek to develop a broad range of digital services. Now here you can see the results are about two thirds of our counselors believe the development of a broad range of digital services is key. Francis, there appears to be a growing school of thought that telcos maybe should focus on connectivity services and leave digital services to others, but it seems our counselors don't agree with that view.

Well, honestly, I think the split here is actually a fairly representative of the conundrum for telco is that there's a desire to want to be A DSP. There's also I think a growing recognition that a lot of what makes a telco special is tied up in the sort of base capability to deliver connectivity activity. I think actually in a way, the 33% here is indicative of actually a growing realization that a lot of telcos will be focusing on. What I think five years ago would've been called the dumb pipe area of the solution. So I think five years ago everybody would want to be that sort of full service capability. Today, I think there's more of a recognition that many will take the way of delivering basically the connectivity and let's be honest, hopefully being good at that one. I think in terms of the 65% that want to be the DSP, it needs to be more than just, this is some sort of increment on top of the telco. I think telcos need, if they really want to be DSPs, they need to be making the investment decisions to become DSPs. They need to be making the partnerships with particularly an enterprise to become DSPs. And that's what I think finally decide what will ultimately in the industry where both will be potential futures for the company.

Yes, thanks Francis. Yeah, great points there. It's a real conundrum for a lot of the service providers. I think Verna, I mean, how do you see this developing? And the results are pretty clear from our counselors. They think the service providers should be going quite heavily into digital services, but there's clearly some that believe that they shouldn't.

Yeah, I think it's not an either or, right? There's probably an and in the middle there, but you do have to provide the state-of-the-art best possible connectivity. If we've seen the recent outages that we had in Australia and in the US here, that puts you back to basis, right? Without that connectivity, nothing's going to work and it's going to upset your customers. So if you want to play in these higher value more services, the connectivity absolutely has to be there and it has to be best in class and to adding to Francis's point right now, I think we're away from the dumb pipe to the intelligence pipe.

Okay, Verna, excellent. Yes, the intelligent pipe. Maybe that's a phrase we should be using more. Okay, so we dug a bit deeper in on this topic and asked our counselors should DSPs and CSPs focus new service development efforts on the enterprise services sector? And we asked this question because there's been a great deal of focus on how DSPs and CSPs need to improve their enterprise service offerings to get a better return on their investments, particularly in 5G. And it's clear the council believes the enterprise sector should indeed be the focus of the service providers r and d efforts, but does this make sense? Is this the way to go? I mean, the big chunk of customer bases and sales for the CSPs comes from the consumer segment, so enterprise, is that where the focus should be? Beth, let's come to you first.

Oh man, this is a tough question because it's always, there's trade-offs, right? The enterprise has traditionally been where the innovations come out of. So in that sense, r and D makes sense to put it into the enterprise and then swing it over to the consumer. That's the traditional path, but in recent years it has swung kind of the other way. I think it's swinging back toward the enterprise side is driving a lot of the innovation, particularly I know we're going to be talking about later, AI and intelligent networking that's being driven by the enterprise, much more so than the consumer SD wan, virtualized networking, the security pieces, security and networking integrated, that's all being driven out of the enterprise. So I think the enterprise definitely has the play, even though yes, that's not where we get the majority of our revenues, but a lot of the work that's happening in the enterprise and the r and d that's needed to support it will in fact go out to the consumers eventually.

Okay, yeah, great insights there Beth. Thanks very much, Francis. Do these results make sense to you? I mean, is the enterprise where the key focus, the key innovation should be happening in terms of service development?

I think it really reflects a certain part, which is if you think about the new technology 5G particularly, really the things like ultra reliable, low latency and the I OT aspects, they are fundamentally about enterprise. So actually in a sense, 75% recognizing that this important is a great result here, I put a caveat here that the question actually says R and D spending, and I think it's actually far more about the business model here than just simply r and d. It's going to be much more about exploring business models. The telco industry is very used to consumer, which is where it's selling actually in reality, some very, a small number of products to a lot of people, the enterprise area and is a completely different business model. It's selling capabilities into lots of use cases, lots of very different use cases and telco's, success or failure here will be about its ability to adapt to the business models of enterprise, not simply one of just technology.

Yeah, absolutely. And it's adapting to those use cases. That's proved a pretty tough task in the past few decades. Now, here's a big bone of contention and one of our more surprising results. We ask the counselors, do DSPs and CSPs need a broader ecosystem of vendors to meet their needs? Well, as you can see from the results graphic, the answer was an overwhelming yes. Verna, let's come to you first. What does this response from our counselors suggest to you?

Well, as you know, Intel is big and ecosystem, building ecosystem for many, many years. I think one of our key tenants actually that we bring to this industry and to other industries, the broad ecosystem that we can surround on industries, I think it is not necessarily maybe a question about it being bigger per se, but maybe utilizing it more, giving more access to the ecosystem, to, we will talk about procurement in a moment, but also about innovation and technology access into the operators and into that, let's say the core of what the operators want to accomplish. And with the need now of bringing in a broader set of players as everything gets more complex and it's not the one box, one shoulder to pad when things go right or wrong, that's now where you need more active players within what you want to accomplish as an operator. And I think that's probably where the real key is that you need to bring a group of like-minded companies together that helps you solve your problem.

Okay, yeah, interesting. I can see where you are coming from in terms of some of these collaborations we're seeing with smaller, more IT focused companies in particular. But Beth, I understand you were a little bit surprised by this result. Is that right?

I was, and I have been kind of on the forefront of this, and I'll use as an example, the sd-wan product evolution, if you will. So sd-wan came out of, there was probably 10 or 15 early startups that were involved with sd-wan. I think there's one independent left that's versa. Everybody else has either gone out of business or been bought up by somebody. So that is the natural progression. However, that puts us in a bind. So we got into early, we were one of the first service providers to provide an SD-WAN solution. We got into it probably a little early, and so we were working with startups, telcos, traditionally, telcos do not do well with startups because as the saying goes, we eat them for lunch and startups have a hard time working with the giant companies, and I know we're going to be talking about procurement process and introducing technology and our needs to be highly available.

100% dial tone has to work all the time with the startup mentality of, Hey, we'll ship it and cross our fingers. So that's a struggle, but there's no doubt in my mind that we need a broader ecosystem. We need to encourage these startups, and I don't know what the current status is, but a couple years ago, the investment was leery of investing in startups that we're going with telcos. So right now I think they're mostly investing in AI technology startups and not so much with networking and the telco space. And that's a shame because there's a lot of opportunity here, and I think we as telcos do need to get better at working with these smaller companies.

Yeah, it's a real conundrum, isn't it, wanting to deal with more innovators, but then hard for them to work with the companies they want to work with. Diego, do you think that this is perhaps a little bit of a wishful thinking on the part of our council? Yes, it'd be greater to have a bigger menu to choose from, but at the end of the day, you might always go for your favorites and not look at the additional options.

Well, I believe that this is for sure that there is a little bit of thinking. Having a wider menu, even if you always choose the same dishes, is something that is always appealing, but the belief that there is some issues that are important when it comes, we keep talking about the broader ecosystem and probably we should be thinking as well about the deeper ecosystem. Bernard mentioned this idea of the intelligent pipes. Francis mentioned this idea that in the enterprise environment you need to address the business needs of the enterprises, et cetera. I believe that playing with other players, not necessarily the ones that are providing, let's say the usual tools or the useful technologies, but trying to play the game of integrating, making more collaborative. We're not talking only about vendors, we're talking about how we can collaborate to create new services and create new revenues, et cetera. Probably going in that direction would be interesting, not only considering just what you simply put in the pipe to happen, but precisely this smartness that you need in the pipe to make it smart.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, why not think of an application developer as an extension, a new application developer as an extension of the vendor ecosystem. Francis, this debate has been raging for years. I mean, it cropped up at the beginning of network functions, virtualization as well. When there seem to be a lot of new prospects, and now we're seeing it again with cloud native and AI and network APIs and of course disaggregation. Do you think that we will see a broader mix of companies playing a role in telecom?

I think this is quite highly related to the previous question about what do telcos want to be. Actually, I think a lot of this is about if you want to be mature connectivity businesses. If you look at what other mature businesses like I'll take aircraft and jet engines for example. They don't have huge ecosystems of suppliers. They actually have one or two in many cases, three potentially in jet engines. So I think if it's a mature business, it's not a highly innovative business or it's an innovative business in aggregate rather than specifically between say airlines, et cetera, then I think actually the model we're increasingly going to, which is large, strong suppliers, is the right one. If you want to be getting into the enterprise business, you want to be differentiating what you are doing. You want to be working more closely with say, automotive applications or choose your favorite industry here.

That's where the key need for a broader ecosystem is. And also the key need in which we're going to talk about disaggregation or the survey talks about disaggregation. That's where the disaggregation helps because disaggregation is your means to insert things into the business, which might not just simply buy the base connectivity solution. So I think it is talking to the ambition of telcos, if you want to be a DSP, you want to be engaging with enterprises, you're going to need a bigger ecosystem and you're going to need to nurture that ecosystem. To use a slightly different thing from Beth, my comment is telco is where startups go to die. It's the comment that is quite frequently made, and that's something that Telco needs to address if it wants to be this DSP of the future.

Okay, thanks Francis. And Beth, I think you wanted to come back in with some additional comment there.

I did indeed. The problem with telcos is we are engineering companies fundamentally at the end of the day, and we have to have to be on the leading edge of engineering, and we cannot, cannot rely, unlike the airline industry, which you don't want airplanes falling out of the sky, hello Boeing. We have to work with the big vendors, the traditional telco vendors. At the same time, we have to work with the startups. I know Verizon has a whole group that does nothing but look at startups and invest in startups. And so we try to walk that fine line where we're using tried and true technology, but also inserting new technology at the same time. And I wouldn't say that it's easy, but I think it's important and it's critical for our success in the future.

Okay. And Verna, did you want to come in with an additional comment as well?

Yeah, just a thought there to share on that. Startups is probably its own breed to think about, but there's existing companies out there, especially when you talk about how it and telecommunication has merged over the years. Now they're well established companies, big companies, and they still don't really play a role that they could play in the industry because we are somewhat narrow in whom we're working with. So I think there is a good chance to even make more use of the hundreds of companies that are already in the ecosystem. We've got about, I think 600 in the network builders ecosystem at Intel, and I'm sure there's not any operator out there that's going to make full use of what we already have, not to mention the innovative startups.

Yeah, no, all great points. I mean, it's a real fine line for the telcos to tread and to find the right model and the right way to engage. Now of course, the council believes that a broader range of suppliers would be beneficial, but what about the way in which network operators acquire their suppliers goods and services? Can new or emerging potential suppliers even get a foot in the door of their prospective telecom customers? It's a thorny topic. So we asked the council are DSP and CSP procurement practices suppressing telecom sector innovation and making it more difficult for potential new suppliers to win business with the DSPs and CSPs now in the view of the council current procurement processes aren't helping. Is that fair, do you think, Beth?

I think that's a fair statement. Part of my job is working with vendors and I'll have to say Verizon's gotten better at it. I mean, it used to be literally we do the initial negotiation and then we hand it over to this bureaucracy I'll say that handled the actual contract negotiation, which was very awkward. We have streamlined it so that we do do it faster, but particularly getting back to the earlier conversation about startups, when I talk to startups a lot and we will bring up, Hey, we need you to sign an NDA before we're going to have any additional conversations. And sometimes they'll blk and I'm like, you know what? We're Verizon. Just sign it. And sometimes they'll be concerned, oh, well you're going to steal our technology. I'm like, dude, if we wanted to steal your technology, we wouldn't even be talking to you. Just sign and move on. We're not a software company. We buy that stuff and we're a services company, so just get over it.

Okay, thanks. Beth. Verna, I mean, is this something you hear about a lot, about the way in which companies maybe struggle to engage with Telco customers?

Yeah, I think it's a real challenge for both sides because we're traditionally in the procurement process. You had probably a handful of vendors that you were talking about, particularly when we talk about the network itself in the ran. Now, if you think about O Ran, V ran conversations, all of a sudden there's a much broader set of companies that you want to deal with, and that is new for the procurement organizations as well, and that's what doesn't necessarily fit in their normal mold. And similarly, it's also not necessarily what these newer players are used to in dealing kind of like what Beth just described with large organizations like the operators are. So there's probably got to be a little bit more understanding on each side for each other in there. And on the other hand, also maybe a real realization on the operator side, what do they want to accomplish there?

When you think about some of the RFPs that we're seeing right now that are out there for open networks, including the new cloud native works that can brought in there, how do you really want to accomplish the future view when you only look at the existing TCO? What do I get now out of what the vendor's giving to me? How do I actually quantify things like future energy savings, future flexibilities, right? The good stuff that comes out of the innovation that the customers bring and how do you have that immersed into your procurement process? So I think we're all learning and learning with each other, and that's probably an area where the communication conversation, sharing information will be helpful for both sides.

Yeah, it really is a case of learning for all parties. Francis, you have worked on the supply side and you speak to a lot of companies large and small that go through this process. What's your view on the procurement process? Is it something that needs to be fixed and can it be fixed?

I think it's actually a little bit easy to blame procurement. In essence, the survey says we do blame procurement for the problem kind of, well, we would've selected you, but that they wouldn't. In my background as a supplier, very earlier in creative system, there was a market development book called Crossing the Chasm, which talked about a chasm that needs to be left across for market development. And I think we have a similar issue in terms of what I would term is proof of concept ideas, ideation in the company where open ran is a classic case where we've done of companies have done large scale projects with lots of the innovators, and then there's a kind of chasm between that and the major part of the business. And I think the procurement problem is, I think a secondary, I think it's our ability to describe, and Vener hinted at it, it's our ability to describe the benefits of this new stuff in a way that a hard bitten procurement guy is going to understand is going to put into the KPIs.

And I think if we're to overcome this problem, the industry needs to raise its game in terms of being able to describe not just technological benefits, but the business benefits that will come to the business. I'll leave you with a sort of vignette from my time as a supplier. One procurement guy once said to us, he said, but literally all projects fail in my company. My business is about making 'em fail for the cheapest price. And I think if we can understand what is it we're just trying to describe to procurement that actually makes a difference to the business and making that very clear upfront that's going to solve a lot of these problems not simply blaming procurement.

Well, it's no wonder you got out of the supply side then if you were getting messages like that. But Diego, I know this is a topic that you've been looking at and thinking about for quite some time. Is there a way to make this easier and better for all parties?

I believe that this is something that we're suffering in many other aspects when we're talking about the telco sectors about that. We love standards, we love, and I believe that in many cases we love what they would call over standardization. My impression is that we have a procurement processes that have a deep logic and they're very much sustained by experience and the requirements for a critical infrastructure that has to be available 24 7, et cetera. But we tend to apply them these heavy procurement and processes to everything that we do and every kind of technology that we are thinking to acquire and deploy, deploy. And probably what we need would be some kind of diversity in the processes and well probably well to return to a little bit of distributed approach when we're talking about how decisions are taking with or with products that are not so critical and not part of the core business, but are equally important because they're addressing a particular market niche or they're going to provide relevant service to a particular business sector. And I believe that being more agile there, letting the people in charge of the definition and explanation of the services to take both steps if they're required, something that would be important. Again, it's more about allowing a certain degree of diversity or additional degrees of freedom for depending on the kind of acquisition or procurement we're doing.

Okay. Yeah, no, that's great points there to have maybe a more diverse approach to this than currently exists. Well, we couldn't have an industry survey these days without tackling green network issues. So as part of our survey with the council, we asked how important is sustainability including energy efficiency to your customers? So this is clearly important, but as our results show, the majority believe it is quite important. While 44% believe it is of the utmost importance, sustainability really matters. So I do wonder if we'd ask this question of the industry five years ago, what kind of results we might've got, but clearly this is very high on agendas these days, Verna, how do you regard these results? Are you surprised? I mean we did have a few people respond to say that it wasn't important to their customers at all. Was that a surprise that anybody would give that answer?

It is a surprise to me because every conversation we have with operators is having that as one of the first topics they address right now. And I believe, if I recall correctly, the survey, it is actually the top rating concern that came out of the survey in general to say, we need to address this. And we're doing a lot of work there right now around power management and it's probably, it is surface faced obviously so strongly over the last couple of years just simply with the increase of the energy costs, right? It hit the operators with unforeseen unprecedented spikes in what they have to come up with now to operate their network. So there is a clear business desire to lower consumption and it's not just for green, obviously we all want to do that. You all have our ESG goals, but it does impact the bottom line and we have to work on that.

And it's not just about innovation, about new stuff. We can't just come to the customers and say, Hey, our new products will be more energy efficient. No, we have to look at what's the installed base, and that's where we actually really focus on, we can help operators lower their energy costs 20, 30% in existing brownfield installments. And that's where we are focusing on, and that's what we're hearing is the number one piece for the operators when it comes to operating their networks right now. But it goes beyond that because green is not just in the way you operate, it's also in the way you procure. So it's not enough to say, Hey, the box I'm buying is green and it's done nicely. No companies go down to the component level. They want to know if the processors that we manufacture are there manufactured in an environment that actually is not causing harm to the earth, to the environment. And that's very important when you think about your supply chain in general. We hear that equally from the customers and from our partners.

Yeah, no, absolutely. It goes very deep these days and France is, how do you see this playing out in the industry? Do you feel that as time goes on, that this focus on energy efficiency and sustainability might even become a more important that we might see in a much higher percentage saying it's absolutely critical for their customers?

Ray, I'll start with I was very gratified that it was considered by important by almost everybody. I'd like to actually be slightly more of the off from a personal point of view. I'd like to more to be on the utmost importance, but I think we've got to be fair here. I think one of the problems that came up in Mobile World Congress in fact was that in fact actually last year was the year of energy efficiency. This year you wouldn't know it was there admittedly under an ai, a tsunami of AI there. So I do worry that we've kind of, I guess taken easy, the low hanging fruit in terms of energy consumption, better silicon, better hardware, energy arbitrage is a big opportunity here, green generation as part of the kit, but a lot of the really nuanced ability to improve are going to require some fundamental operational changes to the way the business works. If we want things like ran breathing, et cetera, we've got to have the confidence to be able to and turn on and turn off and have the confidence that it will come back up rather than the kind of semis static way, which we tend to run networks at the moment. So I think it is great that we've got the impetus here. It is a great boost to make sure that we keep up the efforts here, but I was slightly worried that it was quite so absent from then Mobile World Congress.

Yeah, you had to look much more closely this year. Absolutely. The green and sustainability messaging, if it was there was very often behind the AI messaging and the flying taxis and so on so forth. Beth, in terms of from the service provider perspective, do you see the emphasis on sustainability becoming greater, a greater demand on the service providers to deliver this to your customers?

Well, I'd like to separate into two answers because yes, sustainability is very important to Verizon. It's very important to the telecoms. It's obviously good for the earth, but it's also cost savings. So green energy is very important and sustainability is very important. However, I'm not seeing it in the RFPs for example. I'm not seeing it as our customers are not particularly asking for it. So that I was mean, yes, it's absolutely important to us. I was a little surprised that the responses were that our customers were actually interested. I suspect that may be coming from that The customers are just assuming that we're just doing it and there's not a whole lot that the customers can do to drive additional efficiencies and sustainability beyond what we're already doing. So I don't know, customers aren't putting it in their RFPs.

Okay, interesting. I'm sure it's probably there in the background, but maybe not top of mind for some of those customers, but what we plan to do here is to come back and get a year on year changes and see how things develop. So it'll be interesting to look back at this again next year. Well, we also checked in with our counselors about cloud platform choices and we asked should telcos build their own distributed private cloud platforms? Now, the split here is interesting. The majority feel that network operators need to have their own private cloud while a third believes that the public cloud platforms can give them what they need. Beth, what's your view here? Are you surprised by this? The high level of respondents in our survey who believe that it is pretty critical for the network operators to have a private cloud platform,

I would've expected the answer to be even higher. I'm surprised that one third of the telcos are saying that public cloud is good enough, private, ironically, somebody else just asked me this and I actually wrote a little response. Public cloud is in certain places, it's in the United States, it's in what's called the NFL cities. So it's in the large cities. And if you look at where it is globally, again, it tends to be in the large cities. Telcos are not servicing just the large cities. Telcos are servicing a more distributed network. So I firmly believe that for the most part, it makes sense for us to build and maintain our own private cloud. We've already done it for the most part, and it's not like we're going to have huge cost savings to switch over to the public cloud. If we did, we probably would consider it, but the public cloud is not built for the telco workloads and the telco workloads. So when we're building private clouds, we're building them specifically for our workloads. And I know Diego mentioned a little bit about, sorry, spin up and spin down, but the reality is most of our workloads are pretty steady, and so we have to build our clouds to address that and address the type of track. It's all about network traffic. It's not a whole lot about processing. So yeah, it makes perfect sense for the telcos to continue to manage their own private clouds.

Francis, in the conversations you have in the industry, were you surprised as well that maybe the figure wasn't higher as well?

I think the problem with the word private cloud, there's actually three things bound up in this. There are three private clouds and we kind of need to separate out which ones. There's the private cloud that will support the network itself, be it a cloud ran or a cloud core. And Beth is absolutely perfect right there. A lot of telco's, networks at the moment are very, very known loads, et cetera, and it is a very clear benefit to those to actually own that infrastructure and to maximize its usage for the way you want to load it. There's a whole series of where doing business administration systems that could very easily go onto public cloud are in fact going onto the public cloud. So in many cases, a lot of them don't need to be on the private cloud and are starting to make the way to the public cloud.

And the third area I think is it comes back to the innovation story. There's a whole load of private clouds out there that are the enterprises private clouds. They're the business opportunity for the telco to develop that one. Now, it could size its own private cloud, deploy that opportunity, or it could leverage the public cloud or public cloud outposts in terms of delivering that capability. And I think we need to understand three very different things. If you want to do the innovation, public cloud gives you a great huge opportunity here because it allows you to scale up. It allows you to scale down without you having had investment in terms of the capital, in terms of the network. If you've got a very static network that isn't changing a lot, you're not introducing a lot of services. Again, private cloud, let's call private cloud. What it really is, it's, it's your classic, you're owning your own infrastructure, your own network devices. I think we overplay what the word private cloud means. There's a whole series of technical capabilities, but it's basically owning your own infrastructure. And if you're very certain what it is and you don't have scale, upscale up, scale down, great healing opportunities, you're not usually using cloud healing for example, then probably build it yourself and own it.

Okay, thanks Francis. And Diego, from the Telefonica perspective, is this quite a clear case for telcos needing to run their own cloud infrastructure for all sorts of reasons? I mean, apart from controlling the processes, security very often gets mentioned here in the mix of this.

Well, I would say that the real important thing is not to go private or public. It's about we had to live with the fact that we'll be running hybrid clouds for, well, let's say forever. Why not? I mean, there are cases, as Beth was mentioning, that we have a much stronger distribution requirements for being distributed and we had to cover wide area. And this is something that I have insisted very much when talking about virtualization, cloudification, et cetera, that one of the properties of the network is that it's not only that we have topology, geometry cetera are made. When you have to respect the geometry, you have to run your own infrastructure. It's an infrastructure is tailored to your needs. On the other hand, it's true that in many cases there are very good business reasons to offload part of the work of the work that you need to do around the network or related to maintaining and operating the network and to upload it to a common infrastructure that can be reused for different purposes.

So at the end, I believe that the important thing is how we manage to build those hybrid clouds cloud, how we can manage to adapt it to the different situations that you can find in day by day operation. And there are things that are quite static that's true, and that probably will be candidates for private clouds. But again, if we move to these smart pipes, part of this smartness should be in an environment that is not localized in our on-premises, totally under our control, but we need mechanisms for making cating these different infrastructures in a secure and dependable way. So I believe that the real challenge is in building this hybrid and agile cloud that we'll need in the well we already need and we'll need in the future.

Okay. Yeah, absolutely. And of course doing that in an intelligent way, it's this intelligence we keep coming back to in many cases here. And of course, we couldn't really conduct this survey without asking about artificial intelligence, the topic du jour. So we asked our counselors, will the impact and use of AI systems result in a seismic shift in the way that DSPs and CSPs operate over the next five years? So the response was very clear as 79% of our counselors responded in the affirmative. But how surprising is it that 13% didn't think that AI would have a major impact on service provider operations in the next five years? I mean, Vern, I guess with this question, we were really looking at the crystal ball here, looking at the future, counting on the great amount of discussion and insight there is into the use of AI at the moment, but there seems to be that the prevailing opinion is this is going to change quite a lot for the operators. What's your view here? Do you think this is going to have a massive impact in the next five years?

I do believe it will. And I think those smaller percentages that weren't quite sure said no, it's maybe the word seismic that puts them off. But there's no doubt that I think artificial intelligence is going to have a significant impact and it goes from everything that the operators will touch. It's from the customer services side of the house all the way down to how you manage your network. When we speak with customers, it's very, very clear that they're looking at how do we utilize this technology and not just in the future, how do we use it today? What is available today to optimize our network, to harness all the information that comes, the data that comes of out of the networks and make it make sense for us in being able to manage it in a more optimized, more power efficient, more cost efficient way.

Those are all areas where we already hear that that is in the here and now. This is not out two, three years from now that want to use that. And the good news is it is available, right? We can certainly run a lot of artificial intelligence workloads on standard CPUs. It doesn't all have to be A GPU. And equally there's also a broader ecosystem out there, and it's not just one company that should play in this space. And that's also what we're hearing from the customers. They want to learn, they want to hear how can they utilize it all across the industry and not just in this industry. We also hear it from other industries as well. So absolutely, it'll have a big impact.

Yeah, absolutely. And the use of the word seismic was very deliberate, as was the term AI rather than generative ai. I mean, this is bigger than just the gen ai, but of course everybody's pretty excited about the potential that not everybody really knows where gen AI might fit in. And a lot of the operators I spoke to at MWC are very keen to hear about the use cases and not so much the technology. They want to hear about the use cases. I mean, Diego taking AI in general in five years is a pretty long time now. Things are moving so fast. Do you expect that artificial intelligence in all its forms, gen, ai, different machine learning tools and capabilities, is this going to make a massive difference to the way that network operators and service providers are going to be running their day-to-day operations?

I believe so. I think it's something that's a disruptive tool. It's a tool. I mean, we should not think that it's going to be something that is going to change the kind of services providing or business goals that we normally satisfy, but it's extremely important tool that will change many of the mechanisms that we're using right now. Think about is going to be something as disruptive as probably well think about databases, something that could, I mean probably in the sixties or so, it was the possibility of having all the information about your customers and your infrastructure, et cetera, centralized enabled to be queried and managed. Manipulated. The situation is somehow the same. I mean, did you have a way in which you can make things behave according to general instructions and not so much detailed instructions? When you think about the ai, AI has very much to do with telling what you want, talking about something that has become very popular, the recent times that intent.

What is your intention? What is you want? And not necessarily what's the steps to achieve this? And you can train, but at the end you are programming as well. But instead of programming with step-by-step, the different actions your corporate programming with data. So it's going to change very much because change very much the way in which you operate because it'll define a new way of how we express our goals, how we define our procedures, and how we can expose to third parties in general to customers or to even other elements in their smart pipe ecosystem.

The way of interacting with the network. And this has another important implication that is that data that is related to how the network behaves, how the network is performing is going to become more and more crucial. And how we move those data around how we make them available today, it's how we enable or disable access to certain sets and data sets, et cetera, is going to become crucial. And then we will become companies that are very much concerned about moving someone else's data from one part to the other because that's basically connectivity and concerned about how we move data about ourselves inside just to allow a much more evolved way of managing the network.

Yeah, lots of different ways to think about this. It's such an interesting, exciting topic and no wonder it dominated a lot of the discussions and the marketing of course at Mobile World Congress. Beth, do you think maybe the industry and our council is perhaps getting a little bit overexcited about the potential impact of AI in the next few years or can you already seeing it starting to manifest within Verizon?

Both. We're definitely using it. We're using it particularly on the operational side of things, on the more tried and true aspects of AI that have been around for a while. The large language models, the chatbots, those types of things, those have been around for a few years and I think they've been quite successfully implemented into our systems. What's kind of far out and not really there yet is the intelligent network. Everybody, you're absolutely right, everybody's got the, Hey, we've added AI into our systems. I was just talking to a company that does CICD oh, like oh, we have ai. I am like, okay. And I'm working on a project right now in the Linux Foundation networking that's involved in that. And we don't even have the data sets yet standardized. So how can we do intelligent networking with any reasonable sense that we have something that's working five years down the road? That's a different answer, but we're working on it furiously. So there you go.

No, there's a lot of resource and effort being put into this in the network operator community around the world. That much is clear. And Francis, from the companies you talked to, do you feel a buzz, a real excitement, a real sort of game changing aspect around how operations might change within the service providers within the next few years because of the use of different AI tools?

Yeah, I think I come back to my mobile World Congress experience. Honestly, the number here seems low compared to Mobile World Congress. There's definitely a feeling a hundred percent that AI is going to make a difference to the operator there. I think it's important actually to recognize AI is a tool. It's a tool that can help operations, but actually the fundamental seismic shift that AI could help with requires a seismic shift in the way that we look and operate the network itself. It's not simply apply a tool to what we do at the moment and mechanize it slightly better. In fact, Rakuten held a seminar on AI where they were looking at the use cases that are currently within operations within telcos, and they identified generally across the panel that about 95% of them aren't really ai. They're kind of like very, very strong analytics applications really.

So I think if you look at other areas where AI has been applied to some extent, it's not just simply applying it to what we do at the moment, but actually looking at and Diego go, mentioned it about it, it's going to be a lot more about driving our behavior, operational behavior by the intent of what somebody wants rather than the way we currently technically implement it. And the second thing is it's going to be about trust. We have to build into the operations the ability to trust the thing that AI determines and actions. And I think I call out two things that I saw here, which I think are very positive, is this idea of much more of a co-pilot idea for AI in the operational network. The copilot aiding a human being in making a better way in which they make decisions in the network and building that trust. And there were a number of areas. I had a long interview with Rakuten Symphony in this area in Rahul Ri who's been on a lot on telecom TV and these sort of things about this idea of a copilot, this ability to change the operations, but AI is a tool to do that, not a magic wand on it.

Yes, we've heard over the years about plenty of magic wands and we need to steer clear of that and stick to reality and Mobile world Congress isn't always the place to have a real sort of clear picture of the reality. Well, that was a great discussion. We covered so much ground, but we must leave it there for now. Thank you all for taking part in our discussion. And remember, if you want to see the full set of results, then please download the report from the telecom TV website. You can find it quite naturally in our reports section and it's free and you can't ask for much more than that. For now though, thank you for watching and goodbye.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

How mobile private networking unlocks benefits for businesses | TelecomTV

Hello, you're watching telecom tv. We are joining from the Mobile World Congress 2024 in Barcelona. Now I'm delighted to be joined by an WHO president at Combo International and Caroline Chen, VP of the Networks and Edge Group at Intel. Hi ladies, thank you very much for joining today. So first, Caroline Intel is a leader in high performance silicon, but we also see the company providing various solutions for mobile private networking. Can you please help us understand the strategic intent for this move?

So we do a line of high performance silicon platforms like you mentioned, targeting like the data center for example. But we also providing different variance of that versions of a high performance silicon for the mobile network. We are a leader in 5G, especially around the open ran and the desegregated network. We did notice that the trend is very clear when you roll out the 5G. There is a need for monetization to improve the return of investment, especially with the onset of H AI that everybody's talking about in the show. Everybody's talking about AI and AI everywhere. So when you combine private networks with H AI solution, it accelerates the B2B revenue accelerates the return of investment for 5G networks. So we put that as a strategic initiative. We are putting out both in terms of the silicon as well as enabling software to accelerate the path to private networks with the H AI use cases

And annabell mobile private networks are much about mobile radio technology and comm has a leading position there. From a combo perspective, how do you see your RF technology being relevant to the mobile private network market?

So comma, we have been always proud as an RF experts. I would say that since we started that's our bread and butter and nowadays we are seeing that your network is only as good as where you are, have capacities and also you have coverage. And this problem or this elements is even more critical and essential in a mobile private network setting because when you talk about automations, when you talk about digitizations, the delay and also the overall capacity requirement of the network is definitely essential for supporting the application that's running on top of it. So I would say our technologies continue to be very essential and very critical and we are very proud to be an industry expert and also technology expert on this and we'll continue to do great innovation on the RF side.

So Caroline Intel provides more than just silicons and it also delivers software solutions. Can you elaborate on those?

So there are two aspects of it. We provide software to our partners who can use them to adopt and adapt much faster to produce their own private network solution. The other thing we actually just announced at the show is our Edge platform, which provides secure onboarding edge AI platform. I mentioned security, which is a really critical part especially around private networks. This is all in the intent to run out of social. Remember I said at the beginning when you have private networks you need to have most of the comes with some kind of edge AI use cases. Having the AI on the edge will allow the enterprises to develop much faster the use cases and the data monetizing the data, which tend to get a lot more coming with the 5G, all the sensors you have around so that really justify and to launch instead accelerate the deployment of private networks

By building the network in order to monetize it. That's what everyone's talking right now. We need to have those essential applications that's running on top it be it automations, be it the ERP or software or any digitizations or IOTs that's running on top of the network itself. So like I said, application and software definitely would be a very critical and essential part and we start to see a lot of interesting AI and machine learning applications that start to run on the network that would definitely help the enterprise to realize the financial values or the social value of the network itself. And I think that would definitely accelerate the adaptation of the private network itself.

We've been collaborating with Intel since the year of 2018 and we are very glad with their flex rent solutions. Intel actually provided us with a very flexible and also very scalable platform where we can collectively come up with a solution that meets not only the technologies aspect from the customers but also from a commercial perspective. I would say the network that we are providing today through Intel actually would be able to more scalable, more future proof. And at the same time we're talking about edge computing, the edge capabilities that will enable our customers for the future when they start to see more applications in their network.

So which sectors are utilizing the benefits? Mobile private networking the most?

So we are seeing manufacturing, definitely logistics like ports and ports and airports and so on. Energy sectors or in gas anywhere has a lack of connectivity. They hamper them from really digitizing their business. We start seeing healthcare even some places you don't think that will be the first problem. We are seeing that and retail also coming up. So anywhere really that has a general loss of data from sensors where the data needs to be connected to make sense. People trying to do machine learning, AI on the edge, all of those required data and data has expiration date. Actually I'm not even saying stage should be expiration seconds, sometimes the milliseconds. So they're essential to have these data being connected and be analyzed on the edge. Again batch edge computing to in order to generate autonomous responses and actions onto those data. I think all of those really start driving the connectivity and the edge AI together.

Absolutely. Actually I would totally agree especially on the manufacturing and energy sector because we've run several commercial deployments around the world that's specifically for manufacturing and energy sector. They would be the one who's actually benefiting from the digitizations. They see the benefits of automations by improving their process, by improving their efficiencies overall. They are able to run the factory 24 hours in a row instead of only five to six every day. And I would say anyone who would benefit from digitization, they will see the immediate fact or benefits that would brought by the private network.

And how are mobile private networks being deployed around the world and can you speak to supply chain and how transformation specialists, system integrators, neutral hosts and MNOs fit in this?

I think unlike the public network, the private network space has a lot needs entire ecosystem. So everyone you just mentioned for example the role that Intel plays as a technology partner, the role that combat plays as the RF experts and the technology and the provider is essential. We also need SI and global system integrator as well as a very specific vertical in-country. Sometimes even regional integrators. We obviously need the MNOs but they provide the spectrum and many times we actually need the application developers. So having a common API such as what GSMA is developing called kamara actually really started opening what you need, the telemetries from the network that gives you the API, the data, the information that the developers needs to the application. I think all of that really becomes a much more complete and rich ecosystem.

Our network is only as valuable as the application that's running on top of it. Absolutely. What data we are carrying, what kind of application we are running, that's where the network got to be monetized. So absolutely it's the applications provider, the software enabler, and also the AI and machine learning and also the IOC provider who are part of the ecosystem is absolutely critical for the development of the private network. And also I would say the adaptation of the end users, the IT side of each individual companies. Very good

And if they are able to see the value and if they're able to monetize the network itself in their own system and procedures, they will see immediate impact and they will be able to continue to unleash the value of the network itself.

And what is next for Intel and Comba for building upon this momentum?

So we've been seeing a lot of talk about private networks in the last few years. People might even say hype, but if you see the trend that we are looking at since 2023, this is the year that we are no more POC, we are going to be doing scale business. We're going to start rolling out so combat and int L in addition to our technology partnership that we always been doing. We need to be doing some go to market together. We need to be able to reach out to developers and to the end customers showing them that this is a mature technology and there is a real return of investment TCO in there. So this is the year that we're going to start rolling this out and scaling business.

Absolutely, yes. And on top of Caroline, I would say that continue to innovate is definitely a key. Really understanding each individual verticals requirement is absolutely key. That's why a very close collaboration with company like Intel is very essential because we are able to talk together with the end users and also the application developers so that all together, everyone in the same supply chain or in the same industry can help the end users to realize the value.

Yeah. If I were going to add one more thing is private network plus H AI is a game changer. It's a game changer for network monetization.

Thank you. Thank you very much.<br><br>Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

Welcome to Mobile World Congress 2024. Where I'm delighted to be joined by Philippe Rase. Philippe is Global Sales strategic partnership lead at HPE, and Thomas Barnett, head of Partner Cloud Brand Solution Management at Nokia. Thanks for joining us today. Philippe, tell me about the partnership between HPE and Nokia.

Yes, well, HPE and Nokia have been engaging and collaborating now for more than 30 years. Together, we enable our enterprise and telco customer by packaging the power of our best in breed solutions from both HP and Nokia, from the edge to the core of networks or engagement at combining three key elements, as I said, the best in class power and powerful portfolio of our technologies. And secondly, our go-to market strategies that are based on

Thank you. Now, Thomas, what are the biggest challenges faced by telco operators in the ran?

There are actually many challenges they are facing, right? They need to evolve their networks from the traditional deployment we currently have in the classical side with 5G to what we are now building together with. HP means a cloud run deployment. And there you have challenges in itself when it comes to scaling mechanisms, power efficiency, and then even boosting the performance in cloud run. These are the challenges we need to manage jointly. Therefore, we have established these collaborative advantages working together for quite some time already in record times. For instance, we have established already the first proof of concept trials around the globe in order to deliver on our promises. But it means scaling, being ready for the next technologies like 5G advanced, six G, having zero touch provisioning networks, programmable networks. So those are all these challenges we need to tackle jointly.

Thomas, since you mentioned energy savings, sustainability is a hot topic for many operators and not just for climate reasons, but also because 70% of the power consumed by a typical telco is in the ran. So what are HPE & Nokia doing about this?

Maybe if I'm starting, it's important that we are sitting on the latest CPU technology on the latest server technology. It's really starts from the lowest level and then combining it, and we call it our Nokia 5G cloud run based on smart NIC technologies. Combining these new CPUs, these new hardware technology from coming from HP together with our inline acceleration card. It's a very powerful solution in the area of performance, the area of energy efficiency, and also in the area, what I mentioned before, to scale and to scale from a, should I say, very small deployment in an enterprise domain or scaling even out with communication service providers in a wide area network. And then being ready, as I said, for 5G, six G, the technologies of the future.

So it's a very good example of what I mentioned at the beginning. So we've been collaborating for 30 years now, and this is another example that we announced a year ago at Mobile World Congress, but that we have advanced into customer trials and now commercial readiness as well. So it is been a great journey. Absolutely. And it's only the beginning, right?

Just to underline, maybe because last year we had this Eran concept already launched at Nokia together with hp. Now we would like to boost it, we would like to kick it off and making cloud run commercial reality in the course of this year. So let's really a milestone. We are heading together.

And finally, one word to describe the relationship between HPE and Nokia

Thank you you very much. Thank you, Charlotte. Thank you. Bye-Bye. Thanks.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

Wind River: Vodafone “very excited” about Open RAN deployment in Europe | TelecomTV

Thank you for joining us and welcome. We are going to discuss the partnership between Vodafone and Wind River. And to do so, I'm delighted to be joined by Paco Martin Pinelli, who's head of Open ran at Vodafone and Paul Miller, who's Chief Technology Officer at Wind River. Paul and Paco, thank you so much for joining us. Now Paco, Vodafone has Europe's fast open ran deployment in Europe and you just announced your deployment in Romania. Both projects included collaboration with Wind River of course. So congratulations first of all, and could you tell us maybe what the key drivers for the project were?

Yeah, we are very excited. It's all happening now and we wanted for this time in Vodafone to be ready to be prepared to get big in open run. So we have now a very big tender that is going to be over 170,000 sites and there is a massive opportunity for us with open run. We are going to be enabling a fantastic opportunity to have better cost and innovations. And the collaboration with Windriver has been great for that.

Thanks Paco. And I think we've certainly been involved in Open ran for many, many years in contributing our technology into that open source activity and it's been an honor to have Vodafone as a customer and we've really enjoyed working the past couple of years to get to the success that we have in that deployment.

One of the main principles is the ability to have innovation wherever that is. So you can have that startup company somewhere that came up with an algorithm that is going to be improving the capacity in the network. Then you can use it in your open run architecture much more easier than ever before. So it's about innovation, but it's also about cost. We need to have the opportunity to reduce the cost for us to be able to deploy more as an operator. And Open Run is certainly enabling that. We see that today with the deployments that we are having, but even more we see the opportunity for the future to reduce much more and to innovate and deliver great stuff.

Yeah, we also see that Open Ran gives the entire approach as software defined infrastructure or architecture and that enables us to bring new applications and new revenue generating ideas into service providers using the infrastructure that's built out with Open ran, for example, connected vehicle systems, right? The 5G movement is really about generating revenue and providing applications for consumers. And we have a much more flexible environment in doing that with a virtualized software solution based on Open. Ran

Paco, your colleagues at Vodafone have discussed how the key KPIs for Open ran either meet or exceed traditional networks and Andrea Donna said that the UK works as a blueprint for success. So how did you achieve

This? Yeah, I think this is a very, very important point. We have been working with River and the other partners to get our solution and obviously we had some issues, but I have to say we dealt with them in a fantastic manner and Andrea was mentioning how the deployment was working in the UK and how good the KPIs are. But I really, really happy now because what we have been doing very recently is something slightly different. What we have in the uk, it was a deployment of the network replacing the incumbent supplier we had, but the kit that we were replacing was not exactly the latest version. So it was around for some time. So we were always thinking how would it work the comparison of the latest technology from all suppliers, hardware and software. So we've been testing here in Spain, we have a field testing city if you are L close to Madrid and we've been testing extensively our open run configuration versus traditional, and you know what the results are amazing. And open run comes always, always better than the lower part of any KPI. So I'm talking about downlink and uplink performance. Also latency for four, G for 5G SA, 5G NSA. So it comes always within the range, sometimes even exceeding the upper part of the range. So I think we can confidently say to everybody out there in the industry, every potential customer out there for you guys that the open run is working, the performance is okay, we tick the box.

Yeah, we were really pleased to see this as well. This is very real world testing. The sites we're in a city in Spain physically deployed and set up a configuration that allowed Vodafone to test identically the same day with the same atmospheric conditions. Testing against traditional RAN versus open ran and then seeing the KPIs. I was of course incredibly pleased to see a superior performance with open ran. And this is a real payoff for the work that we've done together over the past several years doing incredible optimizations on the infrastructure, getting down to single core support, doing these sort of things has really resulted in those KPIs being superior and it's really nice to see the promise of RAN coming to fruition.

And of course Wind River plays a role in this deployment. So can you tell us why you decided to work with them?

Yeah, well with the last part, when we started at the beginning we were working with many suppliers initially. For us it was a little bit of a challenge to go with so many for a given radio solution. I have to admit that initially look at the portfolio, it was looking good on paper, but we didn't have experience. So it was great to see, to piggyback on the effort from some other partners in the industry, you had a lot of work with Verizon, that is a company that we work very well with. So that was giving us the right confidence to start, but that was just the beginning. And then when we were actually getting on the project, the day by day has proven that it was the right decision to work with Wind River because we've been able to execute on time, we've been able to execute the right quality and even more. We have a very good story for the future. So we are going to be building the solution as we go. It was really the right decision.

Yes, and certainly quality and performance are a big part of our DNA as a company. We're in a lot of mission critical systems, aircraft, automobiles, telecommunications, infrastructure, and we were really excited to work with Vodafone. And you're right, we were able to springboard off a very large deployment at Verizon that we were able to use for years to harden the solution that we brought to Vodafone. And the work with Vodafone was actually very innovative. New timing solutions that were produced for the cellular network based on PTP architectures and a lot of novel ideas were brought to play to really build a cost efficient solution that optimized the hardware configuration in the field and drove us to this high performance that we achieved at Vodafone. So really, really successful journey

Paco, you have been leading the open ran development efforts at Vodafone for the past 10 years now. So based on your experience, what are the top three pieces of advice you would give to your counterparts at other CSPs? In other words, how do you go about it?

That's a very good question. Well, I would say first you cannot wait. So if you are doing radio networks is now the time to start doing open run. So maybe last year you could still be waiting a little bit, but now it's really the time so you really need to be working on it. So that would be the first point. Second is you need to be ready to contribute as well, because this collaboration is very important. So we have that principle ourselves as a big mobile operator, we're going to be helping others to come in. So anybody listening that wants to learn more about our experience in open run or our experience with Wind River, please reach out. But you need to be ready to keep something right. So ultimately this will work if we have a collaboration. And then I would also say that it's important that you start considering the operational impact of open run in terms of how do you deploy your business as usual your processes. So it takes time to get all that, but there is significant change because most, a good part of the benefit comes through transformation of existing processes. And that's very important as well.

And I'd certainly add as well that it's really not just the selection of a technology platform, right? The technology's proven and we've demonstrated that, but in choosing partners to help build out a telecommunication service providers network, you really need the people as well, right? And people with knowledge and experience having deployed this type of technology. The ability to overcome obstacles that you'll encounter in network engineering in your environment, really, really important. And then as you mentioned, the operational aspect, bringing in high levels of automation and artificial intelligence, the ability to remove a lot of human effort and deploying a disaggregated system is a key part of hitting the low cost metrics.

And finally, some people believe that 2024 would be a tipping point for open ran deployment. Do you agree?

Yeah, I think as we were saying before, we are ticking the box on performance that's already already done. I think we are also starting to see innovations on top of the foundation level for open run. For example, we have also recently also in field Royal performed some testing with a company called Go Here that is showing fantastic improvements in capacity. Spectral efficiency could go up to 50% potentially. We need to see how this is commercialized, but it's proving the way open ran works. So foundation is there, innovation is starting to be seen. We can get more out of open ran than before. And then yes, this year we have big tenders at and t recently announced and they were awarding a lot of space for open running their contract. We are running our tender in Vodafone and we are going to be deploying at scale and open run needs to be there. The 2024 is definitely the year. Yes, yes.

Thank you for having us.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.

Hello, you are watching Telecom TV and our special program on how Boost Mobile is leveraging Rakuten Symphony solutions to enhance network operations, service assurance, and customer experiences. I'm Guy Daniels, and in today's discussion we will look deeper into service assurance management through the partnership of Boost Mobile and Rakuten and discover the lessons learned along the way. Well, I'm delighted to say that joining me on the program today are Dawood Shahdad, who is VP Wireless Core Engineering at Boost Mobile, and Raul Atri, who is president of the OSS Business Unit at Rakuten Symphony. Good to see you both. Thanks so much for taking part in the program today. Can you provide an overview of the partnership between Rakuten and Boost Mobile and doward? Can I first ask you what were the primary goals and motivations behind this collaboration?

Sure. Yeah. So Rakuten has been a partner for us pretty much from day one of our network build journey. So we're now nearing four years together as partners and we're in the operating phase of our network and we heavily utilize the Observer platform provided by Rakuten. Okay. At a very high level, it's a centralized framework that allows us to manage pretty much all of our network performance, whether it's faults, whether it's KPIs, or whether it's performing correlations across multiple domains. Today, I can tell you 100% of my core network functions, if it's packet core IMS messaging, anything that I have feeds into Rakuten, OBF, the observability platform and allows me to monitor and manage the network using a single pan of glass. So why is this important? Simply put telecommunication networks today, they're not for people anymore. They're going to be for machines. They're going to be machines talking to each other very soon.

There'll be billions of devices connected to the network. These devices, the applications, the use cases, they're becoming more and more complex and the needs to slice and dice the network and its performance at the same time while keeping up with the SLAs, it's going to get more and more complicated. So it creates a real problem for us as network operators. We just cannot hire enough engineers to manage this growing complexity, especially we just can't pass on the cost to the consumers. The solution is to create a network that can manage itself, an autonomous network. So teaming up with Rakuten is really our first step in our journey towards building a fully autonomous network that can manage itself in the

Thanks Dawood and Rahul, can you add some additional background to this partnership?

I always believe Guy Magic happens when the right vision meets with the right team. I think that's exactly what happened with Boost Mobile and us. We, when Boost Mobile was conceptualizing the network they were building, it was all about cloud. It was all about network running, being dynamic and autonomous. It's so easy to look on the paper when we talk about automation, but the pieces are so difficult to manage together. Cloud networks are complex. Cloud networks are multiple layer vertically and horizontally. What we got as an opportunity was to stitch all these things together so we were able to monitor right from cloud infrastructure application services altogether, and when we are talking about core network applications, we're talking about 60, 70 applications coming together to deliver some of these services. So it's important and very important to create a unified view so that you can actually monitor the network services customer experiences proactively and also make sense out of it. So this partnership been wonderful for us both in terms of the practicality and use cases to deliver, but also to mature our product portfolio to also take it to the public cloud. And with partnership like this, we are very proud that we're moving into the right direction as industry to create a real-time telemetry driven network.

So let's look at this in more detail. Rahul, can you elaborate on the cloud observability suite provided to Boost Mobile? What are the key components and functionalities of this solution?

I mean, there are a lot of key functionalities coming across as solution Observability is a very abstracted term, but under the hood it is all about KPIs, telemetry, traces, logs, and a lot more in the end. Where we are heading towards is how to make dark knock really happen, how to observe the network even while we're sleeping and how to be proactive in terms of insight, action, river insights, and that's what we were able to do together. We have now more than 10 OEMs being monitored. We have over 60 applications being monitored in time, and it's all about near realtime telemetry. Anything which is coming out of those applications can be pulled into the cloud native platform and we are working towards improving that day in day out. It's also T because it's across multiple different data centers and zones, we are also able to provide much more insights even before the incidents can happen and also reactively to convert those hiccups and changes in the networks and also correlate them into incidents and also monitor them proactively. It's that how can you convert those insights into a correlated incident so that you don't look at multiple things, but you look at one incident, which can actually be the solution or the RCA for the problem.

Thank you. Rahul and Dawood, how are you adopting this and what do you see as the key functionalities?

Yes, so let me give a little background of our network really quick. So I think it's a well-known fact, we've talked about this before. Our core network is deployed 100% on public cloud. We are deployed on AWS, and we are in fact the only operator in the world that 100% runs the core network owned entirely on its public cloud. So it naturally made sense for us at Boost Mobile to implement the observability framework from Rakuten on the AWS cloud, pretty much co-located with the core network functions. So the way we have deployed rakuten's observability framework, we've actually got it deployed in three of the four AWS regions that cover the US naturally all of our core network functions that sit within AWS in the same geo-redundant manner, whether the functions are coming from Nokia, Oracle, Avenir metrics, pretty much everything feeds the performance counters, alarms, logging, and all of the critical metrics that we need to get insights out of our network.

They feed right into the Rakuten platform. So that's where the magic that Raul talked about happens. The flexibility that Rakuten provides, I mean it's immense. My engineers are able to create custom dashboards, whether we are creating dashboards for specific network functions, whether we want to monitor specific services, there's voice multi emergency services or special scenarios such as traffic, ramp up, traffic migrations. The platform itself, it is really easy for us to use and very intuitive and allows us to keep track of the different parts of our network and pretty much joined the dots as they were happening distinctly. So again, we've extended this platform to different parts of the organization and created customer alerts. NOC is a major customer for us. They rely on these alerts pretty much real time. So we're not having engineers sit and wait for alerts. We are actually having alerts delivered by the system to our noc. We then take action based on this. So again, tremendous help from this platform.

Yeah, and Dawood this transition from vendor specific element management systems, EMS and proprietary monitoring tools to Rakuten's solution. How has it impacted your operations? What are the key benefits that you've seen?

Yes, so let's talk about the migration itself. So I have been personally involved with the migration away from the vendor specific EMS systems that we initially had in our network for a very brief period. I think initially when we were building the network, we had a bit of a rush. We had some deadlines to meet that were pretty critical, but I can tell you we started off with the vendor specific EMS systems. The intent always was to go and converse towards a centralized framework. With Rakuten, the journey has been extremely rewarding. We've come a long way from having to manage our custom solutions that often required vendor support. We had to pull in vendors like Nokia, Mavin Air and others for even making sometimes the basic KPI formula changes, changes in the way the dashboard looks and feels changes in the way they display on the knock monitors and whatnot.

Our goal was to make sure that we are able to hand off monitoring of the network performance to our knock so we can focus on designing the solutions of the feature and not have to constantly be engineering and spend a vast majority of time on the tools itself. Our teams, they love the product. It's a critical component of our network today allows me to make changes to parts of the network. For example, if I have to include a second vendor for a specific network function, I don't have to retrain my teams, my support organizations, my noc, my customer face organizations about ai, AP got a new vendor in the network now and here's how they're reporting their KPIs. We're able to basically swap it under the hood report the same KPIs like for likes, and I'm not having to go through this massive recent process. So again, there are things like this that we're able to basically achieve only because of the centralized in the manner in which this platform designed in our efforts to essentially force all the vendors to comply and feed their data into this platform.

Now, we've referenced this single pane of glass approach already, but how does having a single pane of glass service assurance solution enhance Boost Mobile's ability to perform correlations across multiple networks and service layers? Rahul, maybe we could start with you. Can you provide some specific examples for us?

Sure. I think like Dawood was mentioning, we actually worked on three basic principles. Integration has to be super simplified. I mean, we don't have to take weeks or months to do integrations whenever a new node or a new partner comes on board. So integration has to become super simplified and easy. The scalability has to be there. The platform has to scale and become resilient so that it doesn't choke when the network grows to a certain level. And then on top of it, the programmability and configuration for the end customer in this case, we don't have to be there all the time. The customer should be able to program, create their own dashboard, create their own insights, even create digital workflows in case required to reach out to certain close loop actions. So I think we focus on these right things and internally we talk about this a lot.

Dawood and team have been the best product managers of the platform and being super supportive in case of how to use, how to elaborate, how to create this. And I think, like I said, a lot of things get simplified and sorted if we have a common vision and desire to reach out to this same goal. And that's how I think the unified observability platforms are done. There's all the data available, all the information, all the things insights available, but it's so simplified to take the next step of building autonomous networks goes into the zone where every operator wants to be because simplified, you have a unified view, you have unified telemetry, you can correlate them, and now you just need to switch them with closed loop actions.

Indeed. Thanks Rahul and Dawood, can you add any further examples for us?

Sure. Again, my background. I've worked pretty much core networks all my life with the big operators in the US across the world. So again, when it comes to telecom networks, so you could have a wide variety of problems that you could thrown at. You can, historically you are not good at predicting some of the things that get thrown at you, but tools like this make it better for us to go in that direction. So I'll give you simple examples, right? So we could be having cell phones losing their signal or for example, within the IMS space, the voice space sip editors four, xx, five XX, et cetera. I mean, they can be signs of complex issues within the network complex. When I say complex, there could be issues with the infrastructure. We could have problems with the routing. Changes could have gone bad, we could have power if we've lost and all of a sudden there's essentially an impairment of the network.

We could also have to deal with some buggy software that's been rolled out that you couldn't catch in the lap, right? Firewall issues. You could have a firewall that's erroneously starting to block actual internet traffic that our customers are trying to browse data and they get blocked. So to effectively manage these issues, we've got to have a comprehensive wheel of the entire network. That means bringing all of the monitoring data into a single place, reducing essentially duplicate and unnecessary alerts and trying to join the dots as soon as you can. At the end of the day, it is all about how do you converge and how do you get to the solution or pinpoint the problem in the network fast enough, that way you can make the correct action faster. Again, if this same data was going into the multiple EMS systems, we could definitely come up with in-house, complex business logic, create rules, correlate all this stuff.

It's neither cheap, it's not fast. By the time we're done implementing such complex rules, the technology stack would've moved on, may have gone from 5G to six G or whatnot, and you're stuck in the cycle where you're always trying to get these businesses perfected while the technology is moving and now you're already late. So what we have done essentially by using this single pane of glass, we've avoided this issue where using the rakuten's OBF platform, we're now not only relying on the vendor specific performance data that is being joined together, we're actually, as I speak today, we're in the middle of adding our Act two network probes into the observability platform. So what does that give us? That gives us a second source of truth. So in case the KPIs, there's a question about reliability all of a sudden something sound right now we have a second source of truth and we can actually correlate and figure out if it's a source that's gone bad. Again, these are the flexible things that the platform allows us to work towards. It's adding more robustness and resiliency not just to our network, but also the way we monitor our network and really enhancing our ability to manage the network.

So as I understand it, with this new solution, Boost Mobile can build advanced analytics and closed loop automation use cases. Then Dawood, can you discuss some of these innovative use cases you are currently exploring or planning to soon implement?

Yeah, again, I think one thing I want to clarify, it's not always just good enough to come up with new ideas. You've got to be able to look at the practicality and put them into practice quickly. So we are very particular about not only being able to detect issues across different parts of network fast, but also implementing solutions before our customers experience a disruption in service. So instead of looking for a one size fits all solution, we prefer a flexible framework that allows us to adapt to our specific network needs. We want to be able to address network issues and automate solutions quickly with without relying on our side help to build custom solutions that get outdated. Again, that's where Rakuten Observability platform in the partnership that Rahul talked about, where we're not really, it's not a vendor and a customer relationship that we have. We are partners in this. He allows by teams to feed in the usability requirements and whatnot. We're thinking how do we make this better? So essentially the uptake on this platform is wider and broader and we can simplify the challenges that other networks today are facing because they've been built over a period of time. They've got multiple EMS systems, they've got complicated use cases, they just can't untangle all of that mess. We're able to start clean thanks to the Rakuten platform.

Right, and Rahul, let me put this use case question to you as well.

I truly believe that one part of the problem is to collect all the data from different sources. The other part is to provide a flexibility to end user, to create their own antics and dashboards and probably insights even to create alerts on the runtime. Because as you know, when the networks are building up and they're getting into a zone where we are onboarding customers, a lot of things keep on moving. There might be change requests, there might be optimization, there might be other things which happens to different platform and every platform making some changes would impact the overall customer experience or the other nodes as well. Maybe adding a new node in the network while you scale out might impact some of the traffic patterns to change. When you onboard more customers, the network will behave differently. Having a simplified unified platform helps you to understand those patterns.

I'm very sure when we integrate those probes platforms, it'll also be integrated with the customer experience. So how your network is performing and how your customers are feeling or how your customers are feeling when your network is performing into certain way is a great use case to achieve. And I don't think if you don't simplify or unify the data sources and the Observative platform, those kinds of things can ever be done. It's always easy, like I was mentioning, that you can obviously build a layer where you can pull all the data, but then you're spending a lot of energy and time to do those things which are simplified to solve. You can actually log on to systems and create your logics. The no can spend time, and I'm very sure that will be in the day age very soon where every NOC engineer or every operations person would be a data science engineer or an AI engineer. So this platform I think is a wonderful choice for going into that journey, obviously step by step, but I think that's what we are achieving together.

Yeah, thanks. You say step by step, there's obviously a lot of collaboration already going on between the two parties here. Can I move forward then and ask how this solution can position Boost Mobile to expand into enterprise and slicing use cases for monitoring and assurance? Rahul, what potential opportunities do you see in these areas?

I always believe that Slice has two components to deal with. One is activating the slice and obviously you need to see which areas can actually support Slice, which nodes are able to support slide, what network components are loaded or would be able to support Slice. The other part is when somebody is paying dedicated amount of money for quality of service assured, they would love to have that experience coming through. So if you have given somebody, let's say an end-to-end slice, you would need to monitor that slice across the network. And if you don't have a unified platform, how would you do that? You'll probably have to indicate much more systems and Slice is going to be a dynamic network configuration. We are talking about quality of service on demand for certain users who are mobile and probably doing a lot of handovers in the network. And if you have to talk about those dynamic situations and let alone be the mobile network, whether it is a drone flying over cities or it's a smart car driving over on the road, these decisions are very time critical and are end to end and I think we are laying a wonderful foundation for those kind of use cases in the future to be taken care of.

Good to hear Rahul, thanks very much for that. And Dawood, you mentioned significant savings being made in infrastructure and financial resources as a result of using Rakuten solution. Can you quantify these savings and explain how they've impacted your overall business strategy?

So I won't be able to go into the exact specifics of the cost savings, but I can tell you they're extremely significant versus if I had to manage and essentially pay each vendor for their specific EMS systems that they were providing. It's not only allowing us to simplify our operations, which is a direct essential CapEx and opex savings, we're actually avoiding the cost of extra infrastructure software licensing with the alternate path. Again, the platform also allows us to be smart about the data and how we handle data. We can choose to store some of the data locally at the edge. We can also choose to send some of the essential information to centralize locations for analysis. Again, we've got, like I mentioned earlier, we've got a network which is deployed across three regions, AWS regions. We try not to send data east to west, there's a cost associated over there, but we are actually able to customize and control how we're actually spending on this stuff.

Again, extreme flexibility. The way this is deployed, Raul talked about in his previous answer, he talked about slicing in some of those use cases. When we are hosting the enterprise networks off the different platforms and whatnot, we're no longer looking at multiple solutions for observability for those. Essentially this platform is capable of being sliced, diced. That way we can keep the data secure custom and essentially serve each customer within their SLA and expose all of their metrics that we have contractually obligated to exposing to them. So huge part of this stuff and the alternate route is go with each vendor, pay each vendor, write each vendor a check, just features that's extremely, extremely expensive and I can tell you because I do sign those checks and so we're glad we're not having to do that on the monitoring aspect.

That's good to hear. And Dawood, as we've already learned today, Rakuten solution has enabled you to remove several vendor monitoring tools. Can I ask you how this consolidation has affected your network management and operational efficiency?

Yes. I'll start off with the history. Again. Our network is relatively new. We've been around for about four years. When we started building, I relocated to Denver. I had to pretty much hire all of the engineers from scratch here, right? So they come from varying backgrounds, but think about the cost involved in training each of the engineers or on these independent systems. Think about the constant need to do software upgrades, the underlying infrastructure upgrades. There are some, and I won't go into the names, there are some vendor specific EMA systems that don't work necessarily with the cloud, so I'd have to go deploy them on-prem. There's a need to constantly stay up with the security upgrades, do feature announcements, and essentially align all of this data together and make it look and feel kind of similar so that way the teams that are consuming this data, they're not confused as to this looks very different, but it probably means the same thing.

So we're no longer having to deal with all that complexity. We don't have to train our knock on multiple tools, engineering knock or even our customer experience teams. We all rely on a common tool for our network performance. So once you log into the tool, there's different views that you have. If I log in as an engineer from the engineering team, I may be seeing views that are specific to me. If I'm an executive, I may have executive dashboard access, nothing else. If I'm a troubleshooting engineer for specific domain, I will have access to those pages. Again, we're able to customize the different views and essentially provide each one of our organizations as well as the users, including execs, the views that they want so they get the maximum benefit out of this stuff. So try doing this with multiple tools and yeah, good luck. Let me know how that goes.

So this is all really encouraging. So let me ask you about the future plans for this partnership. Rahul, are there any upcoming enhancements or new features in Rakuten solution that Boost Mobile can look forward to

You not know Guy how it is to work without? Right, so I personally believe that this is just to start. There's a wonderful partnership and I would emphasize on the word partnership. We both see the same dream. I would see the platform as it is own. I see the network assurance to be my part of the job. It's actually real good partnership on the platform side, we're working on a lot of enhancements. We're working on a unified hotel based, open telemetry based agent system, which will be one 10th of the footprint currently. We're also working to enhance our ETL stack, which will become much more native to AI for search and semantic search vector DB kind of situations. We're also working on making sure that we are much more adaptive to public cloud and some of the things we do today hardened open source. We are also looking at what things are easier to integrate with the public cloud information system and that's how we talk about the partnership that we are enhancing each other's capabilities and seeing one goal in the end and maybe in the future. This will also become one of the foundational systems for ai. We are also working on foundation fine tunes of our models internally in the platform and I think it's a great way to look into future together.

You are always innovating Rahul well, a final question then. What are some of the key lessons learned from this implementation? Dawood? What advice would you give to other telecom operators who are considering a similar transition?

That's a great question. I can tell you over the last couple of years especially, we've been talking to a lot of operators around the world. We can definitely tell they're all challenged because they didn't get to build the network fresh like we did from scratch. But again, some of the lessons are to get the most out of your modern technology, the companies need to take control of their own network management. What does that mean? Take control of your own data. Data is an asset. That's an unbelievable asset that you have. If you outsource this task and you try to diversify and have each vendor manage its own, you will never be able to get all the benefit out of it. So that's where we've built a system where essentially our own software engineers can monitor and manage the network. Obviously it's with a platform, a great platform that comes from our partner.

It is really important for us to learn from others who actually build similar systems. That's where Rakuten actually comes in handy. They've actually used this platform in their own network. Rakuten Mobile in Japan. They weren't using it exactly the way we were. The stack was slightly different, but we've actually overcome all of that stuff and I can pretty much confidently tell you we are getting great support from Rakuten. We're actually benefiting tremendously from this platform. And any operator that I talked to, they would love to get to this single pane of glass concept. But again, we're looking to make this more and more mature. The whole idea is we don't want to be stuck in managing products and platforms. The network is built, the exposure of the KPIs and data is done. Now we need to worry about use cases, we need to worry about slicing, we need to worry about monetizing the network.

We need to sell the network. If you can't do that, then there might as well, what's the point in having a network, right? So that's where solutions that like this, they may be the building blocks of your transition to AI and autonomous networks, but they are super critical. You cannot jump in and start talking big about AI and all the stuff that you're going to do if your fundamentals are not there. And I think that's where Rakuten has definitely been a great partner. We consider this to be definitely a step one in journey towards that phase.

Great. Well we must leave it there. Dawood and Rahul, thank you both for taking part in our discussion and sharing all your insights today. Well, that's all we have time for. Watch out for more in our series, telecom reinvented by Rakuten Symphony. For now though, thank you very much for watching this program and goodbye.Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.