Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:11):
So we're in Dublin for Fyuz 24. I'm here with Cayetano Carbajo, who is Core and transport director at the Global CTIO's office at Telefónica. Cayetano, Great to see you again. Thanks so much for joining us here on Telecom tv. So the annual Fyuz event is always a great time to catch up with all the different strands of development in the telecom network in terms of openness and disaggregation and always a lot of talk about open ran, but there's so much more happening and you are very focused on the optical space. Can you tell us what you were chatting about here at Fyuz and the updates in the developments from the optical group at

Cayetano Carbajo, Telefónica (00:53):
Yeah, in fact, not only optical in Telefónica, we're focusing openness and desegregation as one of our key lever for evolving the network. And we are using that in all the network we're pushing, actively pushing open ran. As you know, we're pushing desegregation in IP and optical both in transport but also in fixed access. We have open OLT and even we can push in the CP in the home environment. So everywhere we're pushing for openness and desegregation, the main reason of that is that we need to increase the level of automation and we believe that this segregated product can enable us to do more automation because they are presenting standardized interfaces but also reducing TCO with desegregation when talking about a transport, that is what you are asking for. We have been working in IP desegregation, but in optical we are doing today a partial optical desegregation. And we see there we are doing that already in the network massively. And we can do that already in other areas of the network. We are more dependent on the evolution of the technology or in the scale, but in the case of the optical, we can do and we are leveraging already some of the benefit that I mentioned before. So happy to see this already working our production network. Okay.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (02:18):
And how is this playing into how Telefónica sees its networks evolving? Because in a few years, or certainly by the end of this decade, a telecom's infrastructure is going to look very, very different to what it did at the start of the decade, right?

Cayetano Carbajo, Telefónica (02:37):
Well fortunately in our job it's evolving always quickly and I started 30 years ago in this industry and every year we see the evolution and we see things changing. What is the beauty of our job? This is the case now as well. We are changing a lot of our network. For instance, remember that in Telefónica in Spain we have switched off copper network, we have no more copper. We have been one of the friends having that we have deployed massively 5G SA. But certainly as you said, at the end of the decade everything will be fiber and 5G and maybe we'll be ready to implement the next mobile generation. But it's not only that. I think there are clear needs that we have to tackle with, for instance, ai that everybody's talking about AI and a lot of people is talking about how AI can help in increasing the efficiency of network by automation.

(03:40):
But that's another angle that is what we have to do in network for facing the challenges that AI posts delivering AI services will not be easy. The level of traffic that 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 core nodes, we will need a very efficient transform network. And I think by the end of the decade all this transformation has to be done. We need certainly to treat traffic in a different way, meaning there will be application that will need specialized services with more stringent requirement in terms of latency or throughput. And all this implementation I think will be evolving during the years and certainly will be reality at the end of the decade as you mentioned.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (04:43):
What kind of demands does this put on the ecosystem in terms of delivering the underlying technology that will enable this? Because when we first started in the industry talking about virtualization, everybody was like, oh, you can just get a commercial off the shelf server and run a network on that. But it doesn't really work like that, does it? I mean the chip sets have evolved, but is there a requirement for specific underlying IT infrastructure to support what companies like Telefónica need to do?

Cayetano Carbajo, Telefónica (05:15):
It depends on which network layer graphic. For instance, in the core network we are from a lot of time already we are running our network function on top of the self XATC server. We're buying the LHP server and we have a specialized C in some cases, but we are running on top of the self server. So in core these are reality IT center other areas. This will take a while. I dunno if finally this will evolve there and there will be areas in which this aggregation and of the self component, it is more difficult to be, but I think this desegregation should not be a goal in itself. So we should not do desegregation just for having a desegregated network. So we have to do desegregation for having a more automated and a more efficient network. And if given network ledger disaggregation is not bringing us this achievement, we'll not do that. So I don't know if for instance, in service router LP, it will be more efficient and more automated, the segregated one than a conventional one. If this is not the case, I will use the conventional one. I'm not paid for using the segregated network I'm paid for. You're looking for the best solution? Absolutely,

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (06:47):
Yeah.

Cayetano Carbajo, Telefónica (06:47):
Okay. But normally, I mean what we are seeing is that the usage of aggregated element is going around all the network and we are using more and more in many network layers.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (06:59):
So finally, obviously here at Fyuz, a lot of the companies that are involved in pushing this kind of innovation forward, they're here for Telefónica and for yourself and what you are trying to achieve. What do you need next from this community? What do you want to see in 2025 that would help you take your strategy to the next level?

Cayetano Carbajo, Telefónica (07:21):
In general, for the desegregation solution, we need scale. And this is a problem not only of this company, of this supply companies, but also for operators. We need more operator to engage with the openness and increase the scale. If we have a scale, the economics of this company and the product they are delivering to us, we'll change and we'll make desegregation affordable because as I said, if we have not the right TCO, it'll be very difficult to come to desegregated solution. So scale is clearly needed and it's not only a problem of the vendors, it's a problem as well of the operators.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (08:03):
Okay. Well that's not the first time I've heard that request in the last couple of days. So the message is going out pretty clear for everybody to get involved and make this a reality. Cayetano, thanks very much for joining us today. Great to talk to you again and look forward to chatting again in 2025.

Cayetano Carbajo, Telefónica (08:23):
It is my pleasure. See you in 2025 then. Thank you.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (08:25):
Thank you.