Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:05):
So we're in Dublin for Fyuz 2024. I'm here with Rob Soni, he's VP of RAN technology at and t, but also here at Fyuz in the role of chairman of tip. But we're going to talk briefly now about at and t's plans because everybody is kind of really interested in the announcement that was made last December, a shift in at and t's ran strategy, working very closely with Ericsson here at fyuz 24. You gave an update on how that relationship is developing. Can you tell us a bit about that? But mainly can you tell us why at and t took this decision to take what is quite a radical and very significant step for a tier one operator?

Rob Soni, TIP Chairman & AT&T (00:53):
Indeed. I mean I've heard it referred to as anything from courageous to, well, frankly not. So I think that the key thing though is we are in the middle of what I think will be a significant bellwether transformation for how do you deploy gear, but how you do a modernization in a very short time period. What we are looking forward to, a couple of things. I mean obviously we wanted to bring openness and programmability into the network. We wanted to have an opportunity for vendors, whether they come from the R app community or from the radio community or elsewhere, to have an opportunity to participate in our network and bring innovation at different layers and at different levels. So what we think we've done in the past year or so is make significant progress towards that. Pretty soon it will become more visible. We have a lot of things in lab at the moment that will very soon spill into the field and some of them are already halfway into the field themselves.

(01:51):
So for us, we tend to think of it in terms of basically four pillars and four domains of things that we are working on. So our traditional ran our purpose-built ran moves towards open, open network management, but also in support of open radio. So we'll be able to integrate third party radio directly and we'll have a significant announcement about our first step there with what we would consider to be a small cell or we often refer to it as quadrant three radio. So together with our partner, we'll be announcing something fairly soon about what kind of radios we'll bring in on our traditional baseband. That traditional baseband is actually also in the process of being rolled out right now in the field.

(02:29):
So first time we'll have an open, truly open baseband, truly open, capable baseband. We start with small cell radio, we'll move to das and then we'll move towards first high powered radio and then finally to mass MO radio in probably roughly that order. And I'd expect a cadence of things to happen to us on roughly around a six to 12 month guidance against those four things. And then of course we look at our ability now to introduce open network management. It's important for us because we moved to a space where now we can scale network management, which typically is an elastic application as we introduce new applications. Sure. But the thing is base stations continue to generate more data continuously. So we need to be able to scale and size it according to cloud-based rules as opposed to the traditional appliance-based rules. So open network management will give us an opportunity to bring new third party applications in cloud orchestration in consume real-time streaming events and build an application suite across that that will help us, for example, manage between indoor and outdoor networks, public and private networks, but also create some different experiences particularly for groups or categories of users.

(03:39):
For us, open network management is another critical pillar. No discussion around open RAN could be complete without cloud ran. We are ramping down what we would consider be our technology innovation trial and moving into a commercial realization specifically of cloud ran, we're hoping to be able to announce significant numbers of cells that are deployed running commercial software and commercial traffic early next year for cloud ran. It'll be running on Sapphire Rapids on Intel together with Dell. We think this will be the first time any significant traffic volume will be covered in a Brownfield on a full cloud ran based solution that is latest and greatest silicon as well as support for massive MMO with all respect to our competitors. So just leave it at that. And then yes, of course we face challenges because we are a Brownfield operator. So consuming all of these things does require transformation in the way you think about things. Transformation in the way that we deploy things, transformation in the way that we deal with and manage our vendors themselves. So a lot of transformation taking place underlying that is really about people and less about technology. And then the last domain of course for us is finally the openness piece around cloud run itself. So we bring massive MMO open, we bring traditional radio open, we bring network management open. So we are truly open when we get to that space. So overall, I think we cover the four pillars that I just mentioned.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (05:00):
And it seems to me, and the way you were talking about this morning as a brownfield operator, that what you are doing is probably very broadly applicable probably to the majority of mobile operators around the world. So far the excitement in open ran has been a lot about greenfield or rip and replace instances, but this isn't overlay. You are doing it isn't it? And do you get the sense that a lot of mobile operators are wanting to know what at and t is doing because they see what they might encounter in the near future?

Rob Soni, TIP Chairman & AT&T (05:39):
Definitely. I believe so. And I think this is the opportunity, especially with some of the world being a little slower to migrate to 5G and especially if you're talking about mid band buildout. So we prove out mid band, we prove out 5G as a layer specifically on cloud, it becomes an easily consumed solution against a 4G deployment. And if they have only done lightweight deployments of 5G, then they can migrate very specifically over and then of course they can look at the opportunities that are created with potential partners on third party radio or also specifically on third party applications. So yeah, we think we are providing that blueprint. We also are a very traditional in our ways of working the way that we consume things, we are very security conscious, we're very focused on that in particular. And we try to ensure that whatever steps we take as we move from a world where things are appliances and locked down into where they're now servers and they could potentially face disruption from unfriendly actors that we have, really this is the opportunity. So we think despite the public conversation about openness on O ran, we think there's probably a more coherent conversation that could take place amongst the operators about how to ensure the integrity and the security of open ran. And so that's one of the things that we'll be looking to drive more effectively as we learn more in 25 about deploying. Because I think some of the vendors that are out there and have done things in the Greenfield environment maybe not have the same security posture as us. I'll just leave it at that.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (07:05):
Okay. Alright. Brilliant. Rob, thanks very much for taking the time out of your very busy schedule. I very much appreciate having you and we look forward to the progress that at t is making. Thank you. Really interesting. Thank you.