Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:04):
We are in the wonderful city of Dublin for Fyuz 2024. Fyuz is the annual event of the telecom infra project or TIP. And it last couple of years in Madrid, this year in Dublin, and this year's event was opened up with a keynote address by Rob Soni. Now, Rob's day job is as VP of Ran Tech at AT&T, but he's the new chairperson of TIP. He opened up the event by talking about how the organization is now supported by about 180 different organizations in one way or another. Historically TIP was bankrolled and mainly supported by Facebook and then Meta, but that's not the case anymore. But Rob really stressed the fact that it's a broad industry support for TIP Now, and there's a lot of different companies fueling the efforts that TIP is making. Of course, what TIP is all about is helping telcos to shift from legacy architectures to new, more open programmable platforms.

(01:13):
And he mentioned importantly that this is going to enable ultimately the much more efficient and easier way to introduce new capabilities into networks. As an example that he used son or self organizing networks. And this was an application, a capability that was introduced in 4G mobile networks to introduce automation into mobile networks. But it was really tough to deploy and also it was done in a very kind of vendor specific and domain specific way. And AT&T actually ended up with three different SON systems. But now the aim here is to have a single programmable network management platform where you can have a single automation system for the ran, for example, which is what AT&T is planning to do with its partner Ericsson, and also to be able to introduce other applications as they're needed. Now Soni called out to the audience at the keynote addresses to ask them what they thought the key challenge for telcos is currently.

(02:30):
A lot of people shouted out monetization because of course if you're not making money, you're not going to be in business. And while he agreed that this was really important, he said the number one challenge or consideration for telcos right now is security. And he said that having these open programmable network platforms was going to enable telcos to introduce new security applications to make their networks and the services they deliver to customers more. So that was a real world example of how TIP is thinking about this evolution of telco networks. Rob also went on to talk about, put his at t hat on and talk about how at t is working with Ericsson on the evolution of its mobile network over the course of the next three years. And we'll be reporting about that on telecom tv, but it's really interesting that he bought up security as the main consideration for telcos. And we'll see how much that gets referenced over the three days here in Dublin.