Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (00:16):
Hi, I'm Tony Poulos and we're at the DSP Leaders World Forum in Windsor and this is Extra Shot. With me today, I'm going to have Diego Lopez, who's a senior technology expert at Telefónica and ETSI fellow. Welcome, Diego. Next to him is Andrew Collinson, who's a founder and principal at Connective Insight. And next to me, very fortunate to have Natasha Nayak, who's senior director of the fusion industry at GSMA. Welcome to all of you. Look, we've just had a couple of sessions talking about reworking the network edge for AI and also about financial services and how we build trust in those areas. Natasha, I'm going to come to you a bit later on the financial side because I know that's your specialty, but let me start with Andrew. Where do you see the network edge playing its biggest part?

Andrew Collinson, Connective Insight (01:04):
It's a really difficult question, Tony. I mean, you heard the panel today saying in a way it hasn't found its sweet spot. That's what I heard them, that's what I took out of what they said. I think there are use cases. I think security is a pretty important part of it, but a lot of edge is going into the enterprise because they need that continuity and some of it's in the cloud. So it's a hard sweet spot to find, I think. I don't know, Diego, if you have a different view. I think it's tough.

Diego R Lopez, Telefónica (01:27):
It's really hard. It's something that is finding the right balance between what is beyond or more part of the core cloud and the edge. The point is that with the current concerns around security and control over your own data and not disclosing this information that is not intended, there is not exactly security in terms of protecting your infrastructure, but is, well, if you like is data security, it's protecting about what you no longer do and you have probably things like federated mechanisms, federated learning, the sharing of knowledge but not of the data, etc., is something that could be an opportunity.

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (02:13):
But is the driver to the edge all about low latency? We keep hearing that as being a requirement or a necessity.

Andrew Collinson, Connective Insight (02:19):
No, because if you want low latency, you do it on the premises. What we've heard the panel say, which I thought was really good is about business outcomes. They want security, they want reliability, they want cost efficiency. So if you're thinking about building a solution, you're looking at all of those things as a holistic requirement. I think latency is perhaps overstated. In some cases, of course, but at the moment, not really.

Diego R Lopez, Telefónica (02:40):
And I would say that time-wise is more important the absence of jitter. I mean, that things are predictable rather than the lowest latency possible. That's something that this.

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (02:54):
Well, I'm presuming that the network operators will have to work with AI to get the network edge working well, but will they have partners in that process? Who will they be working with to get their network edge out there?

Diego R Lopez, Telefónica (03:09):
Well, there is trying to grow in the ecosystem a little bit. For sure, the traditional vendors are extremely interested on this because they see another opportunity for business taking into account that the expectations for the next G are on how stagnation and that they are not that much. So I think that would be interesting for them there for any innovator. And right now I think that the things we started all this journey towards cloud native even although telcos have gotten used to the idea of looking for wider ecosystems.

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (03:48):
Right. Well, I presume there's new business cases involved when you move to the edge. What are those business cases apart from security that you've brought up, Andrew? Do you think there are other real strong business cases?

Andrew Collinson, Connective Insight (03:59):
Well, my former colleagues at STL created a directory of about a hundred plus use cases for edge in about five, 10 years ago. And what we're hearing is most of those have not come to fruition because we're still at the starting stages of it. So yes, we'd love to see business cases, but what we're saying is the sweet spot's really difficult to find. And does AI matter? Well, of course it does, but AI doesn't necessarily need lots of edge unless you're using the sort of smaller models, which can work, but why not do that on-prem? That's the problem. And the network edge gets caught in the middle of the two requirements and finding the sweet spots are really difficult at the moment.

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (04:44):
Well, Natasha, we're going to come to you now and you've waited patiently. Today's session was all about building trust with financial services, but I'm not really sure why do we need to build trust? I thought telcos were very trustworthy already.

Natasha Nayak, GSMA (04:57):
Yeah. No telcos are still very trustworthy and it's not about building trust with telcos. It's about figuring out what telcos are capable of. And so the network capabilities that telcos have, how the telcos can be a trust layer in the fight against fraud and scams that banks and financial institutions are already fighting. And so looking at telcos as mere providers of connectivity is no longer the right way of looking at them. There's a huge shift and telcos are a core part of the trust infrastructure in the digital ecosystem. That's how we want to see it.

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (05:36):
It's not just about telcos playing the only role in financial services being connectivity and some sort of security as was mentioned and things like identity and location, it's a much bigger requirement, isn't it?

Natasha Nayak, GSMA (05:50):
Absolutely. So there's a whole stack of network APIs that we have under Camara and GSMA Open Gateway and they deal with fraud identity authentication as well as quality on demand. So I'll give you an example. Alipay is a huge payment platform. They're doing two million transactions on a daily basis using a quality on demand network API. It doesn't have to do with identity or authentication, but to basically reduce the failure rates in payment transactions when people are trying to make payments in congested areas in the train or in a shopping mall. So that is a huge advantage that network APIs are performing for the financial industry.

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (06:36):
Is that sort of getting priority traffic through in that case, Andrew, is it? Is that what we're talking about?

Andrew Collinson, Connective Insight (06:41):
Yeah. I think going back to your question about trust, I think it's one of the big opportunities. Trust in general is a big need that needs to be met because if you look at the world that we live in, it's a very complicated and become an increasingly difficult place. So you've got cybercrime, you've got military and international tensions building, you have vast inequalities in our society. So the tensions are building and what you need in an environment where life becomes difficult, you're looking for trusted sources and operators need to think carefully about how can we play that role because they can do it. They are national, they are trusted in many ways and they have assets to do it. But it's not, as Natasha was saying, just about connectivity. Connectivity is important though and sovereignty is important too. So you've got APIs, you've got sovereign models.

(07:34):
They all come under this umbrella of trust. Can you do that? But the other question is, how much are you going to pay for it? What sets the barriers for what customers want and what they pay? And it's all evolving at the moment, Tony. It's not yet crystal clear where all the boundaries are, where everyone wants values. So you're going to come and ask me in a minute about what's the business case. There's lots of them, but the problem is you're talking to people who don't exactly know what they want because they don't exactly know how the world is going to be. So actually you need to make strategic commitments and you say, "What roles do we want to play in this world?" And that's a tough one, but this is not going away. So if I was looking at the strategy, I would say this is a good place to be looking at putting money, how you build trust.

(08:18):
But the answer for every operator is going to be different.

Diego R Lopez, Telefónica (08:21):
And there is where the concept of agility may play as well, which is something agility people started to talk about agility with this transition to the new crypto mechanisms, etc. But for example, well, have just arrived from the US from a Red Hat Summit. I don't think there is an issue in mentioning anything. We are demonstrating a mechanism for attesting the location of the particular piece of infrastructure before you were going to allow the workload to access your data using the open gateway, the Camara APIs to assess the location of that because GPS can be easily hacked. And in that case, if you have the trust in the mobile operator, well, we have even part of the financial, a very big financial institution working with us on this and the idea is that we're making it extensible so you have the attestation can be regarding the location, can be regarding integrity, can be regarding the source of the execution.

(09:31):
So at the end is, well, we can provide you some trust roots of trust and then you choose what you want to attest.

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (09:39):
The one common thread between both the subjects has been the use of APIs and I'm starting to think that that's now becoming critical.

Diego R Lopez, Telefónica (09:46):
Definitely.

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (09:47):
Okay. So we're running out of time. I'm very thankful for you being and helping me understand something better. Natasha, Diego, and Andrew, thanks so much for being with me.

Diego R Lopez, Telefónica (09:56):
Thank you.