Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:07):
We are at MWC 25 back in Barcelona again, and I'm here with Abdu Mudesir, who's group CTO at Deutsche Telekom. Abdu, thanks so much for taking time in your schedule as ever to talk to telecomtv. Always a pleasure.

Abdu Mudesir, Deutsche Telekom (00:20):
Thank you very much for having me.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:22):
So let's start with one of the most important things for many telcos around the world and that's broadband capabilities. Can you give us an update on where Deutsche Telecom is with its fiber to the premises and 5G densification progress and how important this is strategically to Deutsche Teleco?

Abdu Mudesir, Deutsche Telekom (00:42):
Thanks for asking that question, because it's really fundamental and it's important for us to offer the best connectivity experience and for that we continue to invest significantly our 5G and fiber deployments across our European markets. If you look at the progress we've made compared to last year, this year in 5G in Germany we have 98% coverage in 5G In Germany. In Europe we've reached 76%, which means excluding Germany, which is also a step that we've included significantly. We have more than 10 million homes now with fiber, which is great progress, both 10 million in Germany plus 10 million, and then the rest of our markets. So we've made a significant progress and we are building much more than everyone combined in our European markets.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (01:34):
Okay, wow. Okay. So that's a real financial commitment, but the payoff should be more than what you're putting in.

Abdu Mudesir, Deutsche Telekom (01:43):
It's a long-term commitment. You're not looking at a payoff just in the next years, but it's already based off in the way we deploy the way our quality is recognized and that's exactly what we continue to deliver.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (02:11):
And where is storage to telecom with its deployment of 5G standalone.

Abdu Mudesir, Deutsche Telekom (02:16):
So we have activated 5G standalone in our networks in Germany and a couple of European markets. So in Germany we have 98% 5G standalone cover it, and which of course enables us to do a lot of great things in the consumer space. We've talked about last year on the uplink capacity that we can provide for video use cases, video journalism that works very well in the European football championship. But what we recently also offer is the gaming slides for gaming enthusiasts who gets really low latency and the value of that low latency in gaming. We can ask our youngsters, and my son knows a thing or two about this, but this is exciting as exciting areas is in consumer space. The most exciting thing for us to innovate with 5G is the B2B space. And that's where we are working very closely with our industry partners that require dedicated connectivity and services to allow for use cases that they see, be it manufacturing healthcare, and that's something five D slices allow us to.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (03:24):
Okay, excellent. What kind of impact is the surge in AI engagement having on Deutsche telecom's network architecture plans? How are you having to think about capacity planning in the AI era?

Abdu Mudesir, Deutsche Telekom (03:39):
Oh, big, very big impact and I'm glad because that's exactly our vision. Our vision is autonomous networks and we talk about autonomous network means really networks that run serve our customer in the best possible way with close to no human interaction. And that's the point with ai, we can bring our vision of autonomous network closer. We integrate AI in incident management in our nos, which is now been very successful, predicted AI as well as now slowly generative ai. We are able to identify incidents in 70% of the time actually resolve them without any human intervention. And this is a great progress. We want to take it further to 90% or more. And I think AI integrating in our planning of fiber I just talked about in Germany, we have rolled out already 10 million household, 2.5 million last year in one year alone. This requires huge amount of planning on the street and we use AI in all of this from planning, deployment, operation and that goes across our network and it has a significant impact.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (04:48):
And in terms of the way that customers might use AI in the future, maybe with multimodal ai, are you thinking about how the network might be able to deal with that kind of uses? Is it flexible enough with the automated capabilities to be able to deal with whatever customers might throw the network?

Abdu Mudesir, Deutsche Telekom (05:08):
So at the moment I would say it's really flexible for the use cases that we know of today, and that's exactly the main point, right? So by the way, we enable, with our partnership with different partners like Plexity and others, we integrate AI into our AI forms for example, and play an aggregator role. And that of course we want the users to use multimodal AI capabilities. And now the question is how does that affect our network? Luckily for us, a lot of the compute is happening at the first layer of age, which is the device, and that means there's hardly any additional data transfer happening and we don't see a big increase of data coming from the AI use case as yet. However, our network needs to be much more modular, much more user centric to be able to serve the customer of the future.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (06:05):
Okay. Now another aspect of AI that's been talked about more and more and here MWC as well is the idea of AI ran and something that the AI ran alliance has been putting forward. What's your view on that? Is this something that you are keeping a watching brief on? Is it something that you think you'll get involved with? Of course T-Mobile is involved in that alliance and obviously getting a lot of insights and gained putting a lot into that.

Abdu Mudesir, Deutsche Telekom (06:34):
Yeah, no, it's actually, it's good. I mean AI RUN has a number of focus areas that I believe are really the right thing to, for example, AI for Run. We are fully in, you see our run Guardian agents where in a partnership with Google, we've been able to develop AI agent that helps us really plan, deploy and run our network and solve issues before the customers even sense it or really see it. That means you can use AI in run in multiple areas. We are fully in. We support that. Now there's element of using AI to run, to enable compute interference for enterprises and others, which is edge computing. I think we have been as Deutsche Telecom at the forefront of edge computing with mobile HX initiatives with GSMA initiatives and a lot of that. And I believe

(07:35):
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, to 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 RAN, 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.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (08:20):
And then obviously at MWC, pretty much every company involved in this sector is here. Is the industry delivering to Deutsche Telecom what you need to be able to run your networks in the most energy efficient way Because although this show might be predominantly about ai, green networks is still such a massive topic and at the top of everybody's agendas.

Abdu Mudesir, Deutsche Telekom (08:45):
Absolutely. It's also at the top of our agenda. And I think if you look at the network today, w e've made progress in becoming energy efficient. We have activated AI capabilities in our networks to be able to shut off layers to save energy when the users are not using it at 3:00 AM in the morning, not many people will need the run to be using all the frequency layers. Now that has saved us energy in the tune of five to 10%. But what we are talking about here, what we need as an industry is what do we need to do to save 80%, 50%? And that's for me the leap. And for that we really need to re-architect reimagine the network. A network today is designed for extremely high dimension to serve the most requirement at all times, which is good because we want to make sure that all customers get the best service, but it's also inefficient. And that's why we are talking about reimagining the network where a network is user centric, only switched on when needed and it's intent based that knows exactly what do I need. You and I don't have the same requirement on network. There's no need the network to be pooling with all the beams all the time. And that's the next level. And that requires a radical thinking that requires reimagining the network. That's what we need from the entire industry.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (10:14):
And just very quickly then, and with that in mind, are you factoring six G into how you're thinking about the networks right now? Because we're just getting to that stage where 60 planning is becoming a real thing.

Abdu Mudesir, Deutsche Telekom (10:28):
No, absolutely. I think, look, we drive innovation and we drive all the capabilities that we need and be it agent ai, what we are doing right now, we are also aware some of this requires standardization. And standardization takes its time and 60 is going to be the next standardization effort for our industry. So yes, we are factoring in, but 360 needs to radically address the power consumption, radically address the resource utilization question, the use of spectrum efficiency efficiently. And of course AI needs to be at the center of our thinking in six G, it has to be AI native. So all of that are in our minds. We will drive also six G towards that direction, but we will not wait for six G. Whatever innovation we can get our hands on through partnership, we will try to implement it starting from now.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (11:29):
Okay. Excellent. Abdu as ever, great to talk to you. Thanks very much for your insights and enjoy the rest of MWC 25.

Abdu Mudesir, Deutsche Telekom (11:37):
Thank you very much. Always great to see you.