Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:23):
Hello and welcome to our preview of this year's next Gen Telco Infra Summit, part of our ongoing DSP Leaders coverage. I'm Guy Daniels now, whilst we have been hosting an infrastructure summit for several years, we are adapting and evolving the format to better meet the needs of the industry. So this is the first in this new format. If you have suggestions for topics that we should be adding to future events, then let us know. Get in touch with us and do share your ideas. As always, we bring you a mix of panel discussions, executive interviews, and insights from our vendor sponsors. These programs will be available to watch on demand from 7:00 AM UK time each morning of the summit. We then bring you our live q and a programs, one per day streaming from 4:00 PM UK time. So watch the videos, send in your questions, then settle back for the live show.

(01:36):
Well, let's take a detailed look at the agenda for the NextGen Telco Infra Summit and give you a little taste of what to expect. Day one starts on Tuesday, the 19th of November, and our first panel discussion looks at the issues involved in building a future-proofed telco infrastructure, one that will provide a platform for sustainable growth. Now we invited panelists from Boldyn Networks, Verizon Business Group, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Rakuten Symphony. And one of the key areas we talked about was around abstraction. We debated the importance of abstracting the technology and network infrastructure layer from the services and the external customer facing view. We were recorded the panel last week, and here's a sneak peek for you.

Sree Nandan Atur, Rakuten Symphony (02:33):
Since there is so much chaos, abstraction absolutely makes sense at the top, and it gives you consistency with consistency, it gives you operational efficiency, which gives you cost savings. There's a possibility for automation, which gives you enhanced agility, time to market, room for innovation and all the good things.

Fernando Castro Cristin, HPE (02:51):
If we don't have something that centralized and enables the management of the overall infrastructure as one, you will have to go through consolidation and coordination of multiple different management platforms addressing specific silos, and that's not going to be something that allow the operator to have this flexibility. The scalability that we were talking about,

Beth Cohen, Verizon (03:19):
We have to integrate with older systems, BSS and OSS systems in particular. So there's a lot of infrastructure that surrounds the network infrastructure, if you will, that has to be integrated with, and that's not an easy task.

Brendan O'Reilly, Boldyn Networks (03:39):
I think the complexity is absolutely the key part of this. I don't think anybody argues that abstraction is vital for networks as we move towards the scalability that we all hope for the telco operators and those looking at active networks that the challenge is when

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (03:55):
In his ongoing quest to bring you the latest news on infrastructure developments, telecom, TV's, Ray Le Maistre attended the annual fuse event of tip, the telecom infra project, and for day one of our summit, we feature an interview with Telefonica's, Cayetano Carbajo, and Ray asked him how he sees Telefonica's networks evolving because by the end of this decade, telco infra is going to look very different to what it used to be. And as we might expect, AI is going to play a big role. Well, here's a brief teaser for you.

Cayetano Carbajo, Telefonica (04:34):
Delivering AI services will not be easy. The level of traffic will increase maybe more uplink than downlink. There will be the need of low latency because many of the AI inference application will need low latency. So we need to distribute edge, we need to distribute our cardinals. We will need a very efficient transport network. And I think by the end of the decade, all this transformation has to be done.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (05:02):
And at 4:00 PM UK time, it's our live q and a broadcast. Please, if you do want to ask a question and we really do want to hear from you, send it in nice and early. We receive a lot of questions for our live shows, so the more interest in the question, the greater the chance of it getting on the show. Day two follows, on Wednesday the 20th of November the second and the final day of our online event, we have a panel discussion that looks at how telcos can support AI and the recent emergence of AI factories. And we spent quite a lot of time discussing the role and impact of these. so-called AI factories, which are essentially a new type of data center built around GPUs. And we considered what the opportunities or the challenges may be for telcos. And here's preview for you.

Susan James, DSP Councillor (05:58):
So I think it's important to understand the AI factories themselves are going to be relatively new data centers. And the reason for that is that the GPUs that they depend on, they require GPUs because AI workloads in that development and training phase, which is where we put them in AI factories, require about 10 times more compute than your average data center.

Francis Haysom, Appledore Research (06:26):
One of the things that I think will make a big difference to the success of an AI AI factory, and if we specifically talking about telcos here, is how do you gain those sense that scale, that operational scale in your data centers and in your edge data centers. It may not meet the exact thing of the centralized high large scale systems, but that ability to scale to be able to operationally automate will also be a key part in terms of making AI factories success at the edge. Or more importantly, who is the successful one at providing those type of factories that have the edge?

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (07:10):
Well, we also have an interview with the new chairman of tip, Rob Soni. He talks about the infrastructure challenges facing the industry and the role that TIP can play, especially in creating a productive environment for the alpha or beta level disruptors who often find it challenging to get discussions with operators. And here's a little taste for you.

Rob Soni, TIP (07:35):
We say, what do we need the disruptors for? And I think the key thing is we can see that new technology emerges that is outside of the cycle of traditional SDOs traditional organizations that would normally feed the development of RAN infrastructure. So cloud and AI come to mind right away that we see, okay, cloud is evolving at a rate that is nowhere remotely near the normal TikTok clock of food GPP. And we can see that some of the STOs as well as well, even frankly Tip, are now looking at the opportunity to say, we can find a way to ensure interoperability of solutions. We can find a way to ensure that solutions perform at expectations and also create the kind of sandbox environments where they can be tested, validated, and improved continuously with some directed operator feedback.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (08:23):
And at 4:00 PM UK time, it's our final live q and a broadcast, we will be joined by more of our panelists who are going to answer as many of your questions as they can. Well, that's a preview of the programs we have in store for you, but we are also running a viewer poll, and we do this for every summit and are always amazed by the number of responses we get from you. This is the question we are asking this month. What are the most important investment areas to create a future proof telco infrastructure? There are seven answer choices. Just select whichever ones you think are the most important. You can cast your votes now. The poll is up and live on the website. Don't leave it too late. And we'll take a look at the progress of the voting during our live q and a shows.

(09:23):
Then the week after, I'll be joined by my colleague Ray Le Maistre, editorial director here at telecom TV for a special extra ExtraHop program. Ray will present his analysis of the poll results and the two of us will discuss the highlights from our panels and interviews and bring together some of the major themes and outcomes. Don't forget to register at telecom tv to view the summit videos. There's no charge. Join our community and be part of our ongoing DSP leaders coverage. And I hope to see you for the next Gen Telco infra a summit on Tuesday the 19th, and Wednesday the 20th of November. Until then, thank you for watching this preview and goodbye for now.