Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:05):
It is Thursday, the 6th of March, and this is the slice on the program today. Verizon's RAN strategy to put the customer first. VMO2 sees consumer potential in 5G standalone. Telefonica makes progress on quantum communications. Orange gets down to business with network APIs and the AI CEOs team up with Europe's Telcos. Hello, you're watching telecomtv. I'm Guy Daniels and welcome to Thursday's edition of the Slice, our final daily program from MWC Barcelona 2025. For the last four days I've been reporting from the telecom TV studio where my colleague Ray Le Maistre and the rest of the editorial team have been providing coverage from the show floor. So let's hear from Ray with his final daily report from this year's event.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (01:16):
It's the final day of MWC 25 and things are most certainly quieter on the show floor, though not so much a Barcelona airport where many people are heading today. Now the dominant theme here at the show this week as everyone expected, has been the potential and impact of artificial intelligence on the telecom sector and in turn on the sector's customers, I get the sense that it'll be easier to quantify and qualify the impact of AI this time next year because as was noted by Deutsche Telekom's VP of Group Technology Strategy, Ahmed Hafez during telecom TV's industry Vision report panel held here late yesterday afternoon, the pace of technology and application development has never been as fast in this industry as it is now. As a result, by 2026, we should be seeing a lot more commercial ready for deployment. AI tools developed specifically for the telecom sector this year.

(02:20):
It was still largely blanket AI messaging and mission statements rather than actual tangible products. Though of course there are some that are ready to rock and roll such as it happens. Deutsche Telecom's automated mobile network management tool, the RAN guardian agent that was developed in partnership with Google Cloud. It's clear though that the rest of 2025 will witness the launch of many more such applications such as the Agentic AI system co-developed by Telenor and Ericsson announced here this week that is designed to optimize capacity and corresponding power consumption in the radio access network. And that application is currently at the proof of concept stage. And if the chat here at MWC 25 is anything to go by, we should also be seeing much more in the way of new mainly enterprise focused services that can help deliver the much sought after 5G return on investment.

(03:24):
That has to date alluded many network operators. While there's general confidence that the best of five G's impact on telco top and bottom lines is yet to come, it was clear from comments made by a number of NGMN Alliance board members during the industry body's annual MWC briefing that the tech teams at telcos are regularly being pressed by their management team peers about the prospects of greater returns from 5G and that a lot of hopes are being pinned on the capabilities of 5G standalone core platforms, AI and network APIs. As for six G, well some talk here but not so much in the way of in your face marketing on the show floor. I imagine that will also change by MWC 26.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (04:21):
That was Telecom TV's editorial director Ray Le Maistre with his final daily report from the MWC show this year. If you missed our earlier programs, you can now watch them. All right here on the telecom TV website last week Verizon announced that it has deployed multi-vendor RAN intelligent controller functionality in its commercial network, the US teleco successfully integrated Samsung's AI powered energy saving manager with Qualcomm's RIC. We asked Verizon's CTO Yago Tenorio if this will lead to a floodgate of multiple third party RIC applications and if it heralds a multi-vendor strategy.

Yago Tenorio, Verizon (05:10):
We're not chasing the headline, we're just doing the best for our customers. Yeah, at this point in time, the best for our customers and for ourselves is to save energy in our deployment and saving energy in the best possible way can only be done deploying some AI that can look at the patterns, estimate how the traffic is going to evolve, and then making decisions about what you switch off and when you switch it back on so that you don't impact the performance. That's exactly what we wanted. That's what we done. Now is it the last thing that we are going to be doing with vender? Trust me, no, there'll be more things, but I think we will follow our needs and what our customers need, not maybe what the industry is looking at as headlights.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (05:57):
We also asked Yago about Verizon's virtual RAN rollout and the telco's corresponding open RAN strategy.

Yago Tenorio, Verizon (06:05):
The stack that Verizon is using is very similar to the stack that I was using in my former top. We call that open RAN. We call this virtualized RAN. I am in the business of thinking that labels don't actually matter. What matters is what you deliver to your customers.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (06:24):
And if that's got you hooked and keen for more and it should, then you can now watch the full length interview with Verizon's CTO right here on telecom tv. Achieving a desirable return on investment from 5G appears to still be a bit of a challenge for the telco sector with a lot riding on the success of 5G standalone Virgin media. O2 plans to have 100% 5G SA coverage by 2030 where we spoke to CTO Jeanie York and discussed its impact on both the business and consumer segments.

Jeanie York, VMO2 (07:06):
We've just recently launched our standalone product for our B2B customer segment, which is really the real use case that we're seeing in mobile is in privatization for big customers, whether that's manufacturing customers, agricultural customers, that's where we've seen monetization actually come first. Of course, in the future, I think it's not going to be too farfetched to think that we can't do a consumer monetization as well, but that's still a little bit more nascent in thought. But the idea is of being able to go to your local rugby game and be able to potentially buy a slice is something that the technology allows us to do, and that's something that we're looking into.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (07:54):
Please do try and watch the full interview with Jeanie who has interesting comments on six G energy efficiency and also updates us on VMO2's open RAN strategy. One of the emerging developments in networking is the likely impact that quantum computing is going to have on telcos. Telefonica announced this week that it has created a dedicated center of excellence for quantum technologies to coordinate its work in this area. We asked Telefonica's group, CTIO, Enrique Blanco about its approach to quantum safe networking and whether the technology is currently viable.

Enrique Blanco, Telefonica (08:39):
Can we use the quantum capabilities even without quantum computing capabilities? Can we use it so these quantum communications in the natural connectivity in our network? The answer to this, yes, we can do it. In fact, we have been designing and defining connection with universities in Spain, in Madrid. We are now doing with the north in the bus country in the north of Spain, and we have today in our hands the possibility trying to be using quantum communications. It is true that still we have some restriction, no more than 70 kilometers, but with the repeaters we will manage. This is a matter of time. This is happening today, this is going to happen.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (09:24):
That was Enrique's final interview with us as the group CTIO of Telefonica, and we all wish him well in his future endeavors Network APIs is an area that holds much promise for telcos and their digital service aspirations. Orange is one of the leaders in this field and telecom TV's editorial director Ray Le Maistre caught up with CTO, Laurent Laboucher for an update on the company's activities. He first asked Lauren about the development of network APIs and the market approach that Orange is taking.

Laurent Laboucher, Orange (10:02):
First of all, it has become real. Now we have created a business unit called Orange Live net, and this business unit is now delivering those API. We start with easy APIs and we expect also to introduce some more advanced APIs that will leverage a core of our 5G network, 5G SA network.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (10:29):
Laurent also discussed the impact of AI and explained how Orange was collaborating with European AI leader Mistral.

Laurent Laboucher, Orange (10:38):
So we have a partnership with Mistral. We will have the opportunity to leverage their model in our professional and enterprise offers, but at the same time, in the same partnership, we will work very closely with Mistral from an r and d standpoint to leverage what they're doing in order to help us in our own operations. And especially on the network side. We work on two different streams. One is AI for network and the other one is network for AI in a way to improve also the new AI multimodal capabilities with the network.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (11:25):
Well, the CEO of Mistral was one of the keynote speakers at MWC this year, and he spoke about the potential for telcos to become major players in the AI ecosystem.

Arthur Mensch, Mistral AI (11:39):
I guess to build a proper data center for ai, you need three things. You need the electrons, you need the fibers, and you need the chips. Telcos already have the fibers, so they're already involved in data centers, discussions, et cetera, but why would they not build data centers themselves and connect the chips and work with companies like us to actually do the software stack? So for me, the AI revolution is also bringing opportunities to decentralize the cloud and make sure that there are more actors on the field and not only free hyperscalers in the us.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (12:16):
Arthur Mensch wasn't the only AI CEO in attendance at MWC. The CEO of Perplexity was also in Barcelona to talk about his company's partnership with Deutsche Telecom for its consumer focused magenta AI initiative.

Aravind Srinivas, Perplexity AI (12:32):
Using these AI should get even easier. Now it's just right there on your lock screen all the time. So whenever you want you can just touch and talk and you get answers, and then over time you're going to be able to give commands and tasks. So it's going to feel like you're just making a phone call and giving someone instructions and then AI is doing it for you. So we are just going to make using AI easier and easier.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (12:58):
We've also been speaking this week with several of our industry partners about the latest opportunities for telcos and the solutions available. So let's hear from some of them now starting with David Hughes, chief Product Officer at HPE Aruba Networking who talks about the best approach to dealing with cybersecurity threats.

David Hughes, HPE (13:19):
First, I think everyone recognizes that the cybersecurity environment gets tougher every day. There's new threats emerging all the time. The other thing is that many of the threats don't just originate with people or users, but with things. So there are approaches for securing communications between users and the apps and the cloud that work quite well from a cloud point of view. But in the modern enterprise, there are a lot of iot devices like point of sale terminals, temperature control systems on the factory floor, a lot of automation that all needs to be secured too. And to secure those things, you really need to implement the policy and identification of those devices in the network itself. And so those things are driving the need to bring security and networking together and the bigger networking footprint that you have, the better security you're able to deliver.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (14:16):
Telecom TV also spoke to Amir Rao of Amazon Web Services about this week's announcements around telco edge deployments.

Amir Rao, AWS (14:26):
It's all about edge. So the final frontier for us has been how do we bring AWS cloud at the edge, which we already do through our services AWS outpost, but do it in a way which is price performance oriented for the telecom networks, which can process extremely high throughput at a minimal footprint, simplifying their cost of operations. So is what we are doing. We are announcing AWS outpost services and in the process we are introducing two new AWS offerings and new AWS outpost tracks that can go on any traffic aggregation layer, which can be used to host the network 5G core UPF user plane function, the 5G RAN CU network function, as well as any other network function from a control plane perspective that can actually meet the requirements, the historical requirements of hundreds of gigabits of throughput, even going up to scaling up to terabytes of throughput per second per location.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (15:27):
We also spoke with Darrell Jordan-Smith, chief Revenue Officer at Wind River about the partnership with Rakuten Symphony to provide secure and high performance services on sovereign cloud deployments.

Darrell Jordan-Smith, Wind River (15:41):
In addition to that, service providers are looking actually to provide sovereign cloud environments and securing that data of everyone that's within that sovereign area or country or energy plant or post office is panel. So we are actually looking at this to address those use cases. Leveraging on our tagline, if it matters, it runs on Wind River because it has to be secure, it has to be available, it has to be highly performant and it needs to be tuned to run in those environments. And our heritage of delivering five and six nines availability, which is seconds of downtime and planned downtime in any year, is actually a key opportunity for us to leverage what we're actually good at from our heritage in our marketplace. And we can't do that without a great solution in terms of hybrid converged storage that Rakuten Symphony provide us in that part of the solution.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (16:35):
Ian Hood CTO of telecommunications for Red Hat discussed why StarHub has selected Red Hat OpenShift for its hybrid cloud transformation.

Ian Hood, Red Hat (16:46):
The key thing that startup is doing that's really quite different from a lot of our other customers is they're taking the platform from where they started in a managed service kind of offering on a public cloud, and then they've gone onto a private cloud. And the key thing is that they're able to actually decide where the workloads can live, the data sensitive ones, the network ones on the private cloud, the commodity SaaS ones on the public cloud. And now what they can do is they can actually take this and drive those services to the edge out to the regions, to the financial industry, the healthcare industry, and go drive that business that way. So they're really kind of taking the full blown forward approach of the complete platform and expanding to their entire business and making them not just a telco, but what we call a cloud native digital TechCo that's really kind of differentiation and their improving their own business efficiency by doing so.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (17:38):
Telecom TV spoke with Hewlett Parkard Enterprise about using automation to remove the complex integration challenges around assurance and operations.

Uwe Pecis, HPE (17:48):
One of the key benefits we have have been packaging together ready-made solutions for different domains which can be applied. And you rolled out taking away the challenge of having complex integrations. In the past, we have had complex integrations between things which we say on the assurance side we have an insurance stack, we have an orchestration stack, but we have to bring these two worlds together. If we talk about automation, we have to find a common view on assurance and operations side. One of the innovations which we are introducing here is that we have a common understanding of the policies between both sites of the OSS world, and we have packaged that into ready-made solutions. Like for instance, we have packages for RAN, we have end-to-end packages for slicing, and these are the things which we are demonstrating this year at mobile work.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (18:37):
And finally today, Toshiro Akiyama, CEO of KDDI, digital Life, spoke about using the Circles SaaS platform to support its market needs around flexibility, scalability, and agility.

Toshiro Akiyama, KDDI Digital Life (18:52):
I think the most significant things to the KDDI is has been more like a flexibility and scalability and agility. Agility is the most important things, and traditionally, whatever we want to do in product wise or marketing wise, we got the one shot in a certain period. It takes time for us to prepare so many things and so many stuff to go to the market, but with the circle platform that allow us to go to the market quite fast and tweaking our products on the way on the fly. So instead of having one shot during that, for example, one month, Teddy could have two or three or five shot, and we can keep tweaking listening to customer's voice. So that made a big difference for us.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (19:48):
We've been bringing you interviews with leading CSP and industry executives throughout the week, adding the videos to our spotlight on 5G page on telecom tv. And next week it's time for the after show, the return of our q and a program when I will be analyzing the major developments from MWC with my studio guests. That's all for today's edition of the Slice and indeed for this year. But do join us again later next week for our after show program and get in touch. We would love to hear your thoughts on MWC 25. So until then, from the team here at telecom tv, in our UK studios and our onsite facilities in Barcelona. Thank you all for your support and goodbye for now.