James Pearce, TelecomTV (00:05):
I'm delighted to be joined today by Andre Hassan, who is Director of Wireless Core at Telus. Welcome. Let's dive in by looking at how far you've come on your journey to 5G standalone.

Andre Hassan, Telus (00:15):
Sure. Thanks for that question. I would say, at this point, we've come a far way, but it hasn't been easy. We've been on this journey for the better part of four or five years. We turned up our 5G SA network about three years ago. We chose a very different path in terms of enabling 5G, in terms of how we built it. We built it starting to leverage our own infrastructure layer. So we chose actually not to go with the Ericsson CNIS product. We elected to build our own cloud-native stack, and for a couple of reasons. We're a multi-vendor environment, and we wanted to make sure we had consistency at the cloud layer. Now, this wasn't easy because the integration was very difficult. Building the automation was incredibly hard. We have been able to overcome these challenges over time working with Ericsson to help us with deployment automation and some limited tests.

(01:16):
In terms of where we're at today, we are live in production. We are in the process of migrating a large portion of our legacy customers onto the Ericsson 5G core, which is now supporting dual-mode functions, which means 4G/5G functionality. And that's really important because we've got a lot of legacy technology in our network and really important that we unshackle ourselves from that technical debt.

James Pearce, TelecomTV (01:42):
That's really interesting. Let's talk about the evolution of it, though. So how are you evolving your core network for future growth and cost-efficient operations?

Andre Hassan, Telus (01:51):
Excellent. One key pivot area has been around automation. The whole theme has been around leveraging automation, leveraging AI to really help to run the network. The networks are extremely complex now, and everything we do, from deployment of core network functions, upgrades, preventive maintenance, and what have you, needs to be done with an automation mindset. So automation and AI are top of mind. In addition, leveraging deep analytics to be able to detect issues a lot sooner. Because we're getting richer data from these nodes now, we can then start to extract interesting and pinpoint insights in terms of where we have problems in the network. In terms of new services, if I had to use a buzzword around killer enablement, it's really been around slicing and having that enabled. We do have some challenges with bringing use cases to the market, but our network is ready and enabled to support future slicing use cases, for example.

James Pearce, TelecomTV (02:53):
Brilliant. That's really interesting. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Andre Hassan, Telus (02:56):
Yeah. Glad to be here. Thank you.