Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:05):
It is Wednesday, the 5th of March, and this is the slice on the program today. The role of telcos in the AI era, commercializing network automation, AI on Ran for edge computing, new telco business models, and preparing for six G. Hello, you are watching telecomtv. I'm Guy Daniels and welcome to Wednesday's edition of the Slice. Over the course of this week, I'll be reporting from the telecom TV studio while my colleagues Ray Le Maistre and the editorial team will be providing coverage from the show floor. And it may be day three of MWC, but there is still plenty of news to report. So let's hear once again from Ray with his latest daily analysis.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (01:10):
Another telco has joined the AI ran club. As we reported earlier this week, Nokia highlighted its AI ran advances with T-Mobile, US and KDDI on the eve of the MWC 25 show. And now the Finnish vendor has added Indosat Ooredoo Hutchinson, or IOH as it's known to that list, the Indonesian operators announced its working with Nokia and Nvidia to deploy what it refers to as a unified accelerated computing infrastructure for hosting both AI and RAN workloads. The three companies have agreed to develop, test and deploy an AI ran solution with an initial focus on managing AI inference workloads, using NVIDIA's AI aerial system, and then later on to integrate ran workloads onto the same platform. Now Nvidia, as you might expect, features in a lot of multi-company developments being announced here in Barcelona where references to artificial intelligence are absolutely everywhere. Tech Mahindra has developed a multimodal network operations large model for telcos that was developed using NVIDIA's AI enterprise software, meta's llama 3.18 B instruct model and AWS cloud infrastructure.

(02:28):
And according to Tech Mahindra, its model is, and I quote, heavily customized for telecom networks and enables those traditional networks to become fully autonomous. Meanwhile, global consulting and professional services firm EY has launched a suite of AI agents for telcos that was developed using a broad range of Nvidia software systems called the EY Telecom AI Agentic solution. The suite of tools is designed to operate across the network finance, customer service, and content lifecycle management functions of a telecom operator. Turning now to action in the radio access network sector and air span networks. The open ran supporter that dragged itself out of bankruptcy protection late last year with a new owner and financing has followed up its recent purchase of Corning's small cell business with the acquisition of Jabil's open ran radio unit portfolio, an associated patents for an undisclosed sub according to Airs span. The deal includes a range of single dual and triple band macro radios and jabs former radio r and d team.

(03:44):
And as a result, Airspan now claims to be, and I quote again, one of the most comprehensive open RAN vendors in the market and in the world of green digital networks, SK Telecom is teaming up with Giga computing, a leader in liquid cooling technology and SK Enmove as specialist in cooling fluids to jointly develop cooling solutions for AI data center solutions. Now in addition, the South Korean self-styled AI company has forged a strategic partnership with energy management and automation specialist Schneider Electric to co-develop mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems for AI data centers to enhance efficiency and sustainability in AI driven infrastructure. Now that might all sound a bit dry, but as the digital service provider world shifts towards cloud-based and increasingly AI enabled platforms, so energy efficiency innovations are going to become increasingly critical.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (04:52):
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. It's three years since UAE based telco Etisalat became e and and adopted a new broader technology and investment approach to target more sustained growth. We asked group CEO hHatem Dowidar how the current surge in AI engagement is impacting its strategy and how he sees Ian's role in the AI era.

Hatem Dowidar, e& (05:35):
Look, AI has many components, so AI needs connectivity, needs energy and needs the chip sets, so the operators by having the connectivity have a right to be part of that ecosystem. AI I think is divided into two parts. One is the operation efficiency, so having more efficient networks, having a better sales, better customer care. And this is I think to a great extent working now. The part that is now we are building and I think a few of the, let's say leading telcos are doing is the part where we use the opportunity of AI to generate additional revenues by building data centers, providing AI and computing as a service, consulting the small customers using the data sets we have to sell opportunities to customers to optimize their business. So this is the opportunity that's still untapped

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (06:29):
And you can watch the full interview with Hatem Dowidar right here on telecom tv. Just visit our spotlight on 5G pages for the very latest videos. Finland based operator, Elisa has built an international software business based on its internal automation solutions. Commercializing in-house technology and expertise is proving to be a very successful DSP strategy.

Topi Manner, Elisa (06:59):
We have this what we would like to think as world leading capability around network automation, which is very much about data, about predictive modeling, advanced analytics and machine learning. And today that translates to our customers with better quality of the network. We have all time high customer satisfaction at the end of last year and it translates to us as lower opex and now we have effectively taken this capability. We have turned that into a software product that we are selling to 100 telcos in the world.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (07:36):
Topi also spoke about how the current geopolitical turmoil is impacting markets and strategies and this will be something that we will discuss further on next week's after show. We've heard a lot about AI ran this week, whether that's AI for ran AI on RAN or AI and ran some not so subtle differences there, but are all these versions viable? Well, we asked the CTO of Deutsche Telekom about the prospect of AI on RAN to enable compute inference, essentially edge computing.

Abdu Mudesir, Deutsche Telekom (08:17):
There could be a time where edge computing become more relevant at the moment. For me, using GPU in the radio side is too expensive, too power consuming, not yet there for us to deploy. That's why we welcome the initiatives. We will see. We've been at the forefront of driving the edge. Computing edge starts from the device goes into servers that you have in your room to run, which is 40,000 sites in Germany as an example. That is something we have to see evolve and at the moment all of this is enabled with our strategy openness, driving openness, driving intelligence in a secure way.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (08:59):
Do try and watch the full interview with Abdu. He also talks about dosha telecom's 5G SA deployments, energy efficiency, and of course the requirements for six G. Vodafone has leveraged its internal operations and has this week launched a new commercial unit called Vodafone Intelligent Services with a roughly 50/50 split between technology and business services. We spoke with the new CEO of the company and asked what they were hoping to achieve by offering these services to other telcos.

Gary Adey, VOIS (09:39):
We have a very, very broad portfolio that's grown over the last 15 years, but it's born out of that rich sort of telco experience, which is a super solid foundation. What we didn't have as an internal captive is sort of that capability and the commercial edge of the SI and professional services ecosystem. So what voice is looking to do with our new model is combine the cost competitiveness and the culture that you get with a great captive with that commercial edge and the capability set of the si. And we've chosen to go to market with Accenture in a joint venture to take that to our customers and hopefully unlock more value for them and for the industry as a whole.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (10:24):
And you can learn more about this new business model by watching the full interview, which you'll find on our spotlight on 5G page. Whilst so much focus is quite rightly on building out 5G essay and monetizing the current mobile technology, early work is already underway on the next generation. The 3G PP is currently deciding on a work plan for six G specifications. We spoke with the new director general of ETSI, which is the founding partner of the 3G PP, to discover how the organization was helping the industry prepare for six G.

Jan Ellsberger, ETSI (11:07):
From an ETSI point of view, we are bringing European research results through Etsy into 3G pp. So ETSI is providing a platform where members are coming together to pre standardize some of the six G research results before they are coming into and being part of the 3GPP process. Six g, I mean 3G PP will next week have a very big workshop in South Korea where they will discuss the different use cases and requirements on six G. So we're in the very early stages how that process will play out. What will be the final requirements of six G? We don't know yet.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (11:46):
As Jan says, we are still in the early stages, but the major stakeholders are moving their pieces and ensuring that their voices are heard in the early planning phase, which is already underway and much more on this next week as part of our new defining six G networks series. We have also been speaking this week with several of our industry partners about the latest opportunities for telcos and the solutions available. So let's now hear from some of them now starting with Rimma Iontel, who's chief architect, global Telco at Red Hat, who discusses the OpenShift platform.

Rimma Iontel, Red Hat (12:28):
So with our platform open Red Hat OpenShift, we enable our customers and our partners to deploy cloud native workloads that then turn into services for their end customers. We enable different types of hardware. For instance, you can put in GPUs your hardware and use it for IOT type of services. We allow multi-tenancy, we provide a very rich feature set built into our platform that can be used for very advanced type of services that you can deploy at the edge that require performance, low latency, et cetera. Plus you can deploy a platform in different form factors. So at the edge, if you only need to put one node, you're able to do that, but if you need to deploy a smaller cluster, we allow you to do that as well or the whole data center and it's all supported and we provide that management layer that allows you to manage all of that just seamlessly and it allows you to give access to your own customers to do self-service, to give them faster to innovate and less effort.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (13:39):
We also caught up with HPE Aruba networking, which is using the GreenLake cloud platform to share data between IT operations and network management platforms.

Guido Kratgen, HPE (13:52):
So what we see with the customer challenges, especially in network operating is that they need to have the right visibility. So the networks already gets our really complex, so you need to have the right tools to get the right visibility because what we see is that customers have around five or six different tools to operate their infrastructure or their network infrastructure. Second, if there are any issues or problems, you want to solve them as soon as possible and as quick as possible. And then again, you need to have the right tools and the right resources to do that. So what we have done, like you said with our recent integration that we have two platforms that are hosted on our GreenLake Cloud platform. One is called Ops Ramp, which is an IT operations platform, and the other one is called HPE, Aruba Networking Central, which is a network management system platform. So they're both distinguished platforms. One is more focused on the network infrastructure and the other one is more focused on the IT operations. So two distinguished platforms. And what we now have done is because of the power of GreenLake, we can share the data lake together. So now we can use the data of Ops ramp and integrate that as an extension into our network management system.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (15:03):
Also, this week we spoke with Namrata Sharma of AWS about the impact of gen AI on mainframe modernization for telcos.

Namrata Sharma, AWS (15:14):
We've had customers that started mainframe modernization a few years ago, but they were doing it in stages like, let me modernize 20 applications this year, I'll do 20 more. But what they realized was that the mainframe usage was not coming down. With Genai coming, especially Q4 mainframe transform, customers can reimagine their entire mainframe modernization journey. So they can say, listen, over the course of next five years, I want to change my mainframe landscape. And this is where genai comes in and gives them a very prescriptive path to do that right, where they're actually seeing their mainframe utilization reduce their modernized applications, really providing those business outcomes, which was the reason why they signed up for it the first time around

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (16:05):
Earlier this week, we spoke with Circles to find out how the company works with mobile operators to help them create new non-telco digital services.

Bart Weijermars, Circles (16:15):
I think one of the key things is that what we do with our platform is that we actually enable entire ecosystems to connect to the telco world, but also bring the telco world to other industries, and it allows for partners to connect to the platform seamlessly and fast while making sure, let's say that you also get the insights from the actual customer usage. And I think that enables telcos to actually drive non telco revenues, whether it's financial services, whether it's gaming, you can think of many things that you can offer as additional services to your customer base as well.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (16:57):
Abdu Mudesir, chair of the board of the O-RAN ALLIANCE spoke to us about how the organization is working to facilitate network intelligence for the radio access network.

Abdu Mudesir, Deutsche Telekom (17:10):
So I think the O-RAN ALLIANCE lays the foundation for all the AI or intelligence required. If you look at what we are doing in all the AI initiatives in the radio access, it's either for AI for run, which requires the openness of the interfaces to allow for independent capabilities to orchestrate and run the radio access network. That's what O-RAN ALLIANCE enables or even using AI for other kind of compute require the openness of interfaces like Open fronthaul, which enables you to run the base band in gpu, CPUs or any other specialized hardware. And that's exactly what we do. So in a nutshell from the foundation, the O-RAN ALLIANCE had the vision to really see that intelligence will play a critical role. AI plays a critical role and that gets accelerated now.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (18:13):
We'll be bringing you interviews with leading CSPs and industry executives throughout the week, adding the videos to our Spotlight on 5G series on telecom tv. And then next week it's time for the after show, the return of our q and A program where I'll be analyzing the developments from MWC with our studio guests. That's all for today's edition of the Slice. Do join us again on Thursday for another report from Barcelona on day four of MWC, the final day of the show. Until then, from all of the team here at Telecom tv, thank you for watching and goodbye.