Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:05):
It's Thursday, the 5th of March, and this is The Slice. On the programme today, AT&T builds out its AI infrastructure. Telenor puts its AI factory to work. Orange details its sovereign cloud strategy. Vehicle OEMs call for more 5G standalone and the CPaaS view of network APIs. Hello, you're watching TelecomTV. I'm Guy Daniels and welcome to Thursday's edition of The Slice. Over the course of this week, I've been reporting from the TelecomTV studio whilst my colleagues Ray Le Maistre and James Pearce have been providing coverage from the show floor. It's day four of MWC, the final day of the event, but there is still plenty of news to report. So let's hear once again from James for today's news and analysis.

James Pearce, TelecomTV (01:15):
As Mobile World Congress reached its final stages, the key theme of AI continued to dominate the news with notable announcements from several Asian operators. Japan's mobile market leader, NTT Docomo, has begun recruiting pilot users for a personal AI agent called SyncMe that has plans to launch commercially in the summer. Docomo, which has more than 91 million mobile customers, says SyncMe is designed to understand each user's individual values and sensibilities, enabling natural everyday interactions, ranging from casual conversation to personal consultations. SK Telecom CEO, Jung Jaihun, met with 15 startups here at MWC this week and said the operator plans to revitalise South Korea's startup ecosystem in the next few years by becoming an AI partner to fledgling companies. He pledged to provide support for 500 startups during the next five years, starting with 80 this year alone. In recent years, the halls of the fair have impact, not just with humans, but also with robots.

(02:18):
But robotics at this year's event have taken a more humanoid guise from the robot cafe demonstrated by China Mobile to walking and talking bots found on various other stands. KDDI demonstrated a robot shop assistant and the Japanese operator has now revealed plans to roll these assistant bots out across its convenience stores in Japan. AI use cases and robots serve as a reminder of the cutting edge technologies demonstrated at this year's Congress. But as the show comes to a close, it's worth remembering that despite all these innovations, millions of people across the world still do not have access to connectivity. The industry is continuing efforts to overcome the digital poverty gap with the GSMA announcing new pilot schemes for the Handset Affordability Coalition in six African countries. The GSMA Handset Affordability Coalition brings together mobile operators, OEMs, financing institutions, and international organisations to lower the cost of entry-level smartphones and boost digital inclusivity.

(03:18):
Meanwhile, MTN struck a new memorandum of understanding with the UN refugee agency, which will provide meaningful connectivity and digital inclusion for displaced people across some of its key markets. The partnership aims to make connectivity more affordable and accessible in refugee hosting areas and begin in Rwanda, Uganda, and South Sudan.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (03:46):
That was TelecomTV's editor, James Pearce, with his exclusive report from the MWC show floor. And don't forget to sign up for our daily 7 AM Insights newsletter for more detailed coverage from the editorial team. As we have discovered this week at MWC, AI is having a profound impact on telcos, changing how they build their networks and on the products and services they offer to customers. We asked Shawn Hakl, SVP of Product at AT&T Business, about this evolution and how it creates more engagement with their hyperscaler partners.

Shawn Hakl, AT&T Business (04:27):
The way the hyperscalers' networks are architected, they're architecting the age of internet commerce and the age of agent-to-agent, agent-to-person communications, there's going to be some shifts in that. You've got to have very high capacity fibre between data centres. So that's where you start building super high capacity capability into the hyperscalers, into the neo cloud providers. So you basically have to build that physical layer out. Now to get that to be secure and to scale, you then have to move to the logical layer where you've got to get a lot more harmonised and a lot more simplified about how you execute policy, security policy, identity, load balancing, routing. All of that has to be simplified to be able to handle the increased volume of scale of these transactions. And then finally, you've got to present things as automated interfaces. You've got to make it agent consumable.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (05:10):
And you can watch the full interview with Shawn on TelecomTV, where he also discusses the value of network APIs. Telcos are increasingly looking towards deploying AI infrastructure. Norway-based operator Telenor was one of the first to take a productised approach and build its own AI factory to help support its sovereign service demands. We asked Cathal Kennedy, Group CTO at Telenor for an update two years after the telco first announced its plans right here at MWC24.

Cathal Kennedy, Telenor (05:51):
Now two years in, we've got enough customers for us to actually be satisfied with, and we've built a capability to put our own workloads, so we're able to drive our own network development. I think this has been a really innovative journey for Telenor. We've tried to shape it differently. We've built it as an MVP. We took it to market much earlier than we normally would. We're not the company that has bought 10,000 GPUs. We're buying hundreds of GPUs and we're scaling with our customers. And the other aspect is that I believe that our partners, NVIDIA and others, have learned a lot from working with us because we've had to wrap telco-grade security around it and really make it work in a sovereign state.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (06:36):
Cathal also talked about the telco's broader sovereignty obligations and how AI is impacting operations across the entire group. And you can watch that soon right here on TelecomTV. And as we've been hearing all week, sovereignty, including sovereign AI, has become an important business consideration for telcos. Well, we spoke to Steve Jarrett, the Chief AI Officer for Orange, and asked how the telco builds on its core skills to support this new demand.

Steve Jarrett, Orange (07:12):
For decades and decades, we've been providing really secure services in telecoms infrastructure, to customers ranging from other large French enterprises and other enterprises across Europe and Africa to governments who have really, really stringent needs for sovereignty and security. And so we now have a product offering that ranges across all of those needs, from things that are based on public cloud, to things that are based on trusted cloud, as well as sovereign cloud. And so Orange, I think, very uniquely, has this really strong set of portfolio like Bleu, which is our enjoined investment with Microsoft and Capgemini on a sovereign cloud that runs Azure. And then we have our own offerings from Orange Business that run in our data centres and grants.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (08:02):
Steve also talks about the need for great data, having an experienced research team and how AI fits into the new corporate strategy for Orange. And you can see that right here on TelecomTV. The 5GAA organisation brings together the global automotive industry with the telecom sector. And with 5G now a mature technology in many regions of the world, attention is turning to 5G standalone and distributed edge data centres. We asked Maxime Flament, CTO of the 5GAA, if he sees these as key developments for the evolution of vehicle connectivity ecosystems.

Maxime Flament, 5GAA (08:48):
One thing that is very important for the automotive is to have a vision on larger regions of the availability of these kind of solutions. So 5G standalone is great to have it in Germany or in the UK, but we need to really have a perspective at the pan-European level or in other countries around the world. Now when we are talking about edge computing, this has been perhaps flying a little bit or taking off a little bit slower, but there are still a lot of perspective, especially in terms of automated driving and software-defined vehicles where the offload of some of the functions that are running inside the car could be done by the edge.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (09:38):
And head over to the Spotlight on 5G section of the TelecomTV website for the full interview and also do take a look at our dedicated telcos and autos channel. Mobile network operators are focused right now on using CAMARA-based network APIs to expose their capabilities to application developers and generate new growth opportunities. We asked Laurinda Pang, CEO of CPaaS company, Sinch, about the role of communications platform as a service companies in this ecosystem.

Laurinda Pang, Sinch (10:14):
First of all, we're very supportive of the operators standardising. I think that's incredibly important for all of us. And the role that Sinch plays in that enables developers around the world to be able to access through our aggregation capabilities to be able to access all of those APIs at the same time. So we're supportive. Like I said, we've already deployed some ourselves as well, and we're excited to see where this brings us. We're very focused in on the verification side predominantly. And in today's world, verification, security, identity, trust are so foundational to communication services.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (11:00):
As with all of our exclusive interviews, you can watch the full-length version on demand from the TelecomTV website. In two weeks' time, the Aftershow returns. I'll be analysing the major developments from MWC with our special studio guests. And here at MWC, we've also been speaking with several of our industry partners about the latest opportunities for telcos and the solutions available. Final comment this week goes to Rami Rahim, EVP, President and GM of Networking at HPE. We asked him what he thinks is going to be the defining moment for telco networks.

Rami Rahim, HPE (11:43):
I think what I'd like the defining moment will be, especially at a show like this, which is very network operator focused. Will be operators that move from experimentation to actual creation of new businesses and new streams of revenue based on AI. And I think you're starting to see examples of that this year, but next year I think we're going to see full-fledged businesses and that's something we're helping our telco customers with. It's something we would love to see because we want to see our telco customers in a very healthy financial state. So the sky's the limit and we're excited about the journey ahead.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (12:30):
A reminder that all of our interviews, panels, and features are being added to the Spotlight on 5G section of the TelecomTV website. But before we go, it's time for a final update of our MWC Bingo card, and hopefully you've already got your own, which was part of our special MWC preview report. It's still available to download full of valuable insights from operators and vendors. Yesterday, we only managed to tick off one more word, which was so disappointing. So let's see if we can do any better today. Well, so near, and yet so far, I do hope that you did better than the Slice team. Well, that's all for today's edition of The Slice. Join us again in two weeks' time once you've recovered from Barcelona for the Aftershow programme when I'll be joined by studio guests to look back at the most important news and developments from MWC 2026.

(13:47):
Until then from all of the team here at TelecomTV, here in the studio and also from the event in Barcelona, thank you so much for watching and goodbye.