Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:05):
So we're at the Fyuz 2024 event in Dublin. I'm here with Rob Soni. His day job is as VP of RAN Technology AT&T, but also Rob, you are the new chairman of TIP, the Telecom Infra Project. So congratulations on that new role. Thanks so much for joining us for a chat today. So from your perspective, looking out and now looking from the inside, how much would you say TIP has changed in the past couple of years?

Rob Soni, TIP Chairman & AT&T (00:35):
I would say it's significant. I mean there are significant changes that are underway and I think more to come. First of all, thank you Ray for having me here. I missed that opportunity. Thank you. But this is an exciting opportunity to see that there's still vitality here. There's still a lot of interest in network transformation and doing things in a different way. What I think we often have discovered, and many of us who've been around this industry for a long time, and sadly I've been around for a long time, that their standards takes you one place, vendors takes you another place. But if you're looking for community driven involvement, there's still an opportunity to provide thAT&To fill the gaps relative to what standards are providing and relative to what operators want to consume. As solutions become more disaggregated and tend towards open, there's a need actually to create that kind of environment where people can just jointly discuss requirements with companies that are at the alpha level or the beta level because they often find it challenging to get that entertainment, those discussions with operators

(01:44):
Because operators are so busy with their existing vendor base that they don't often have time to actively engage those who can be disruptive. And 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 three GP. 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. So I think the shift is a little bit away from, and I mentioned this morning in my keynote, a bit of a model where you had one big brother that was taking care of everybody and that was meta into a model now where we have lots of very vital sponsors that are very interested incumbents, large capitalization companies that are very focused on trying to figure out how to continue to unlock value from our base connectivity network.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (03:07):
And you mentioned there as well that there have been changes, but there's more to come when positions like this when the chair changes. So Yago Tenorio was in the position for a number of years. Now you've come in, people think what's going to change? How's Rob going to put his imprint on the organization? I mean, is it like that in an organization like TIP? Are there changes that you will look to drive?

Rob Soni, TIP Chairman & AT&T (03:33):
Yeah, so for sure I'm a board member, so I'm not operational. I expect Christian and the team to really do and define the execution and the strategy and for us to give strong advice on whether we think the strategy is consumable based on our backgrounds as board members. And we have a mix of vendors and we have a mix of operators that participate in this. So I think we'll be looking to strengthen the board membership with those who can not just invest with their ideas, but also with their people, also with support of the labs themselves and provide support overall in building a community of communities. What we're seeing emerge right now, especially in the open ran world, is that there are regional communities to do certification and testing around the world happening in the US between what was created by the NTIA and we participate together jointly with Verizon and the Accord lab, right in Dallas and my hometown as well as with what they did with Dish, particularly I think between Montana and Las Vegas, don't quote me.

(04:35):
And then of course there are other labs that they've created with the Vivi team, with valor in Phoenix. In each case we start to develop requirements and it's small scope, community driven. And then finally you see similar things happening in India. You see similar things happening in Japan and similar things happening in Korea. And to a degree, a lot of it was started in TIP. I think what happens is that we now need to figure out what is the framework by which we can share regional community-based influences together and get to a process which is uniform and finally deliverables which are uniform so the vendors can build product that meets all of these regional requirements inside of one single box.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (05:15):
I was going to ask you, does the industry need an organization like TIP right now? But you've kind of answered that in a way there, but is there a greater need for this kind of community led organization right now? As the operators go through what are pretty dramatic changes,

Rob Soni, TIP Chairman & AT&T (05:34):
And I think originally in the TIP vision, I think they thought it could be driven by the smaller non-incumbent players. But what we see is it requires a partnership between them, the large cap companies, the traditional infrastructure providers, and finally government entities are strongly involved. You'll see walking around here, there are a lot of delegations from governments that are here from the uk, from the us, from Latin America that are here very specifically to try to understand how can they help and incentivize the development of solutions that are both innovative but also reasonably cost and reasonably skilled, meaning that they can expect that their workforce can consume them.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (06:14):
Now, of course, ultimately what we're looking at here is helping to drive a change in the way that communications networks are operated and run. I mean, do you feel that the telco sector is doing enough in terms of future proofing the architectures they need and is everybody on the same page or is it just like a whole raft of different approaches, different ideas and different timescales?

Rob Soni, TIP Chairman & AT&T (06:41):
I think there is a strong pressure from the operators to try to leverage what we've deployed for 5G or what we will deploy for 5G for what comes next, six G or next G or whatever. So from that perspective, there is a strong push from the operators is there yet coherence to say what would we consume and how would we be able to allow for things that are disruptive while also preserving as much as what we've deployed, especially as it starts to move on different cycles of hardware upgrades and software upgrades. Because now the underlying servers themselves will specifically be now not generation specific, the cloud infrastructure layers will no longer be generation specific. And to a degree now we expect the network management layers to no longer be generation specific. So this is an exciting time because we've never seen that before.

(07:31):
So from that perspective, I think we're aligned on that when we go with a cloud-based solution. But today 99% of the world is still appliance-based purpose-built hardware and the purpose-built hardware. The question is can it absorb the change? And so that's the challenge for the info vendors. And having spent roughly 24 years of my career on that side of the business, I understand the challenges around asics and around trying to migrate from one generation to the next. So we'll see if there is coherence from the operators and pushback to say, Hey, we don't want to generate what I often refer to as a forklift upgrade, which is what we experience from two G to 3G, from 3G to 4G. And finally, surprisingly, even though the underlying air interface didn't change from OFDM from 4G to five view, we still forced all new modems and all new devices

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (08:22):
And just finally as well, because we can't have any conversation these days without mentioning ai, is that helping with the strategies of the operators and with the work of organizations like TIP or is it throwing everything up in the air and everybody having to rethink? Again,

Rob Soni, TIP Chairman & AT&T (08:44):
I think what I see as the opportunity is that there will be a need to make sure that AI is interoperable, that AI meets a minimum performance for the sort of three or four different base use cases, whether it's embedded in the ran, which to be honest with you, I think can be isolated from the operator universe and Nexus to some degree. It'll largely be a vendor problem, but if we start to get to AI for the adjacent spaces where we hit provide AI agents that help with things like preemption prioritization, call admission, scheduling decisions, beam shaping, beam forming, as we start to see that evolution, then it's very important that the solutions that are available actually work across vendors and across devices. And that's an important thing because a lot of the data that will be used to train the models will go from the device infrastructure up to the network infrastructure, and so we need commonality in that. I'll be honest with you, I actually was wondering when I first started at t, does AI really need to be standardized at all? And actually, do we need target and reference architectures? The more I understand and study the problem and watch how we're deploying and what we're looking at in terms of exciting use cases? Yes, as much as possible, we need agreement on that because that'll give us the opportunity to have focus and not build bespoke things.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (09:59):
Right? Absolutely. Rob, thanks so much for joining us and good luck with your role at TIP. And like you say, great to see lots of people here still engaged and trying to push the industry forward and working together to do so.

Rob Soni, TIP Chairman & AT&T (10:16):
Thank you again for having me.