Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:05):
It is Tuesday, the 4th of March, and this is the slice on the program today. The O Ran Alliance evolves its mission towards six G, the importance of local market solutions, how APIs will reshape telco business models, the challenge of zero bits, zero watts, and the long-term prospects for AI. Ran. Hello, you are watching telecom tv. I'm Guy Daniels and welcome to Tuesday's edition of the Slice. Over the course of these four days, I'll be reporting from a telecom TV studio while my colleagues Ray Le Maistre and the editorial team will be providing coverage from the show floor. So let's hear now from Ray with the second in his daily series of reports.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (01:08):
MWC 25 continues to be a show that is spinning on an artificial intelligence access as major players in the industry seek ways to benefit from telco AI developments and at this stage, be seen as influencers and leaders, but it's not always easy to make a tangible impact. The global Telco AI alliance, which is working to develop a telco specific large language model or LLM was back in Barcelona this week with its big name Telco founders, SK Telecom, Deutsche Telecom, e&, Singtel, and SoftBank holding a meeting here at Barcelona to discuss developments. But there was no big bang update from the group. Unveiling the alliance's logo appeared to be the most tangible development shared by the group, along with an appeal for collaboration with AI tech giants and policymakers, as well as a plea for more telcos to get involved with the alliance's work. Now meanwhile, India's Jio platforms, which comprises multiple digital platforms and assets including mobile service provider giant Reliance Geo has teamed up with Cisco Nokia and chip developer AMD to develop an open telecom AI platform to and I quote redefined telecom operations with cutting edge AI integration.

(02:33):
Now the new group will develop what it calls a new central multi-domain intelligence layer for telecom and digital services that will be large language model agnostic and utilize open APIs to optimize its functionality and capabilities. That's a collection of very big industry names with an approach that could well appeal to many a telco. Now turning to open, ran now and there's news of an interesting and slightly different type of development from Indonesia where OREX SAI, the joint venture between NTT DOCOMO and NEC has struck a deal with digital infrastructure play out surge to build a 5G open ran network designed specifically to deliver fixed wireless access broadband services to unconnected and underserved areas of the archipelago nation. Now Indonesia has a population of more than 280 million, many of whom cannot be reached by traditional fixed broadband connections. Surge, which runs a fiber backbone network in Indonesia will work with OREX to enable a field trial later this year, start commercial operations next year, and ultimately deploy more than 20,000 FWA radio access sites by 2030 that could reach more than 40% of the country's population. And finally, a quick mention for Red Hat, which stormed into MWC 25 this week with a slew of new telco engagements with Orange, KDDI and SoftBank to underpin Telco cloud Open Ran and AI ran strategies at those operators respectively, as well as extending its agreement with Fujitsu to enable AI virtual ran deployments. Red Hat appears to have a new lease of life in the telecom sector.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (04:31):
That was telecom TV's editorial director Ray Le Maistre with his exclusive report from the MWC show floor and Ray will join us again tomorrow with further news and analysis from Barcelona. The O RAN alliance held its annual summit on Tuesday to provide an update on the state of open ran and to share operational experiences. The summit also explored the future evolution of 3GPP and O-RAN ALLIANCE architectures for six G. New chairman Abdu Mudesir gave a keynote introduction where he reiterated the guiding principles of the alliance and outlined its ongoing evolution.

Abdu. Mudesir, O-RAN ALLIANCE (05:16):
It's very important that our mission remains as we laid it out in 2019, which is openness, intelligence, and virtualization. These are things that are fundamental in all the innovations that we speak about and we evolve the architecture towards six G. And again, yes, that's a journey. That's something we work very closely with three gpp working together with three GPP for a global standard that puts openness intelligence at the center of its design principle. And security is exactly the role of the oral alliance will be working hand in hand with 3G ppp.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (06:03):
If you miss the full keynote or any of the following sessions, then you will soon be able to watch them on demand. We have links for you on our spotlight on 5G page. One of the many operators deploying open RAN is Von Group. It's partnering with Rakuten Symphony to rebuild digital infrastructure in Ukraine. And open RAN is a major part of this work. Well we asked VEON's Chief digital operations officer how its telco cloud strategy connects with its network infrastructure work and how this differs between the various national operations within the group

Lasha Tabidze, VEON (06:45):
In Ukraine and Oran as an example, we look into network to rebuild the network on the OR technology. And we are partnering and exploring, for example, together with Rakuten. And at the same time we have deep partnership with Microsoft and AWS in terms of cloud business and enterprise solutions. So we're acting as an international player who really cares about local nuances and going into the multi-cloud solutions or local solutions which we establish ourselves. But the main goal, as I've said, is the customer. What is the need of the customer and what are the specifics of the market we operate in?

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (07:31):
And you can watch the full interview right here on telecom tv, the cross-industry network, API Venture Aduna continues to attract wider interest from telcos. Only yesterday it added e and as an equity partner. Well we spoke with una's new chief commercial officer, Peter Arbiter, and asked about the challenges around APIs and the need for telcos to rethink their legacy models. If they are to succeed as digital service providers,

Peter Arbitter, Aduna (08:06):
There will be APIs which substitute SMS. Let's face it. Number verification will be the substitution of SMS OTP. Now from a CSP perspective, you might look at your SMS revenues as of today and then you come up with the idea that you probably going to price number verification on the same level as the SMSs. That could be an option. The problem is your customers also have different options, be email, be it pass keys, be all kinds of authentication. And what we are currently seeing is that these customers are walking away from the telco industry. If we are not starting thinking about a different pricing strategy by not now protecting our business because with that we will be out of that game.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (08:53):
And you can watch the full interview with Peter here on telecom tv. He explains the a doing platform approach and what we can expect to see in the next 12 months. Deutsche telekom is determined to not let the perceived need for new faster generations of networks overshadow the need for better networks. And during the Telco's annual press event at MWC, Claudia Nemat spoke of her desire to reimagine the network.

Claudia Nemat, Deutsche Telekom (09:27):
What we want is networks that are radically simple inspired by data and AI and programmer. And what we also want are networks that react to individual customer's intent. But what we also want is that the networks are dramatically more energy efficient. Why? Because today even when you don't use the network, nobody's there 80% electricity consumption. So we want zero bit zero bot. We want energy efficient, intent driven programming networks and that's our concept for six G. You can have a look here, takes a bit more words to explain. I would really welcome to go and see, and this is how we want to reimagine the networks

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (10:15):
To discover more about dosha telecom's view of six G and the view of many, many other stakeholders. Make sure you watch our new defining six G Networks series on telecom TV starting next week. Probably one of the hottest topics at MWC this year is AI ran telecomtv, spoke with leading analyst Stephane Teral for his view on this new concept and whether or not it will be adopted by the global operator community.

Stephane Teral, Teral Research (10:48):
On the one hand, you take the intelligence, you bring AI workloads, and on the other hand you take the run functionality and you developed run workloads, you combine the two and you have AI run. So this is what it is all about. At the same time, it's interesting to look at who is behind this. This is the Samsung Empire, okay, SoftBank Arm, Nvidia, this is the entire family. They have plenty of money, right? So you throw hundreds of millions of dollars at it and you can break the run world and propose something totally

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (11:29):
Different. And Stephane has recently published a special report on AI run that's well worth reading. We have also been speaking this week with several of our industry partners about the opportunities and challenges faced by telcos. So let's hear from some of them now starting with Chris Marwood, director of product and portfolio management at Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Chris Marwood, HPE (11:58):
To compliment what Jen and Josh have been saying, we want to simplify the world of P5G. We want to standardize it so that it can be delivered across multinational boundaries. We want to make it really as simple as it can be to deliver wifi. That's where we want to go. That's what we want to do. And we want to make it so simple so that then our partners can take that as one piece of a bigger jigsaw, bigger environment and implement it with confidence. So that's what we are trying to set out to do.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (12:34):
We also spoke with Paul Miller, chief technology Officer at Wind River and asked about their automation partnership with Boost.

Paul Miller, Wind River (12:42):
The level of automation in this carrier is unlike anything we've ever seen. And we've made investments for several years now in that automation layer, as I mentioned, the day two operations and the management of the network is critical. As many people know, the open ran stack is a very complex stack. You have off the shelf hardware and a virtualization technology such as Kubernetes. You have virtual applications coming as containerized systems from many, many vendors. And the integration and deployment and management of those systems is extremely complex. And therefore, we've really found the only way to have a lower cost and a better performance than traditional RAN is to have a high level of automation. And the only way to really make it effective so that you can have a smaller operations team drive and run a large network is to emphasize automation. So we made investments in that space and that's where we really found a philosophical alignment with Boost that embracing that automation and making heavy investments there is the key to making Open ran successful.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (13:38):
My colleague, Ray Le Maistre spoke with Danielle Rios acting CEO of Totogi and asked her about a new plan AI deployment for a major tier one operator.

Danielle Rios, Totogi (13:50):
It was super great. I mean, one of the biggest problems we have in telco is revenue, right? We're closely looking for revenue chasing network APIs or enterprise ideas. But what this is is straight into the main core business of a telco on top of the to Toki charger, adding AI in two ways, predictive AI with machine learning and also generative ai. And so what we do is we create micro cohorts of subscribers that have similar characteristics and send out micro offers to them to uplift revenue. And we did. We got inactive subscribers to reengage. We got subscribers using data to use more and in a prepaid sort of setup that's actual revenue. And so within a couple of weeks we were able to drive revenue up 10 percentage points, but the cohorts that we were a couple of weeks in a couple of weeks. And the biggest problem, Ray, is that the humans want to double check the ai, right? And the AI is coming up with ideas that humans wouldn't think of. And so our biggest thing is getting the humans out of it and trusting the AI and letting it go. If they're looking for ways to get revenue. I think I embedded a money machine, so use it.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (15:02):
Ray also had the opportunity to speak with Laurent Laboucher, the newly appointed chair of the operator-led NGMN Alliance.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (15:11):
What message would you like to send to the industry As the new chairman of the NGMN Alliance,

Laurent Laboucher, NGMN Alliance (15:18):
We need all your expertise, all the expertise to jointly define the future of our industry. Its success is based on global standards that enable interoperability and economies of scale. And it's really a specific time where it really matters. The technology landscape has changed and much of it will be driven by software, but then still standards and interoperability remain extremely important to efficiently meet customer needs.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (15:59):
We'll be bringing you interviews with leading CSP and industry executives throughout the week, adding the videos to our spotlight on 5G series here on telecomtv. And then next week it's time for the after show, the return of our q and A program, and I'll be analyzing the major developments from MWC with special studio guests. That's all for today's edition of the slice. Do join us again on Wednesday for another report from Barcelona on day three of MWC. Until then, from all of the team here at telecom tv, thank you for watching and goodbye.