Charlotte Kan, TelecomTV (00:08):
Hi everyone. Thank you for joining us here in Barcelona at MWC 2025 where we discussed the latest innovations developed in Telenor's Open Lab since we met last year. Joining us today are Martin Whitlock, CTO of Telenor IOT. Thank you for joining us. You also with us is Malina Borg Sigg strategic product manager, 5G expert at Telenor Sweden. Thank you for being with us. And Rimma Iontel, chief architect for Global Telco at Red Hat. Thank you all of you for joining us today. Alright, so Martin and Malina to start with, tell us about how things have progressed from the ICO experimental 5G platform and into the new Law Open lab initiative. So let me first

Malina Borg Sigg, Telenor (00:56):
Explain what ICO is. So Iora is an open cloud native multi-vendor platform where we are innovative with research and partners and customers in an ecosystem. And during this year we have extended that into Stockholm where we are building an Edge AI site integrated with our core network, which is really exciting. And before summer we were even launching a BSS, like a marketplace where the customers interacting out in an automated fashion using Red Hat a CM to perform that through accessing this new platform. And what we're launching now is even bringing this the next step forward. So we are now extending it as one platform where we are harmonizing all the different labs that we have in Norway and in Sweden. And now with one new site in Gutenburg where we will be even closer to the operation and the commercials we can bring customers and truly innovate for me. Yeah,

Charlotte Kan, TelecomTV (02:00):
Martin, and tell us about the new developments.

Martin Whitlock, Telenor IOT (02:03):
Yeah, I think one of the new developments is that tenor it, which is a separate company dealing with the international IT connectivity for large enterprises. We have also joined, we're happy for that. And I think partly the location of Gothenburg is also because we have a lot of customers in Gothenburg region. It's a big science park there called Lin Holman Science Park where automotive players and other high tech industries is situated. And I think the addition of this open lab environment is great because we will be able not only for ourselves, learn how to use this technology, but also expose it straight to our customers web counts and hopefully they identify together with them what will be the use cases that really want to drive business development going forward. So we're very enthusiastic about this.

Charlotte Kan, TelecomTV (02:52):
Exciting times indeed. Now Rimma, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this and your perspective on Tylenol's efforts, added efforts to find new 5G CN cases and adding not only Upco into the mix, but also the global IOT unit.

Rimma Iontel, Red Hat (03:09):
First of all, love the name redhead. Always enjoyed hearing anything is open and we are glad to see that the building, these new capabilities because they're going to allow to monetize the network faster and provide new services for their customers. Then we love that we are able to help with that through our platforms. We are expecting that things like allowing different customers to share the same infrastructure will come up with those different services that you might not get if you only concentrate on one type of customer. So we are very excited to work with Telenor on that.

Charlotte Kan, TelecomTV (03:49):
Fantastic. Now Martin Telenor has this new IOT test lab in Sweden and it's accessible to the full Nordic Telenor group operators. And you are also building out AI factory capabilities and internal AI efficiency. So how do you see all this coming together for Telenor connection?

Martin Whitlock, Telenor IOT (04:10):
Yeah, it's I think really like the idea of using test labs and I know our customers do as well. I think to start off with most of our customers, they deploy IT solutions globally or at least in many, many markets at the same time. And the cost of doing it wrong, sending out devices and it doesn't work properly when it's deployed in the field, it can be really super expensive. So testing in advance is great and we have some really unique capabilities in that sense, I would say in our test lab. But what we add now with this open lab thanks to technologies that we see from Red Hat and others is the ability to also test the business potential of 5G standalone, I would say, because I think it's fair to say the industry, we still are the face in deploying this technology. We're all exploring to what extent we can use the technology, but the lead time for some of the customers to get access to commercial solutions could be quite long because first they need to integrate it in their products, they need to produce it, they need to ship it, they need to sell it, they need to activate.

(05:24):
So we need to start now to explore this in order to build business in the coming years. So I think it's good timing and they're really excited about the first

Charlotte Kan, TelecomTV (05:35):
Rima. Could you now tell us more about how Red Hat is supporting all of this and how your approach and your solutions help create innovations and new services for IOT and Edge? Sure. So

Rimma Iontel, Red Hat (05:48):
With our platform, red Hat OpenShift, we enable our customers and our partners to deploy cognitive workloads that then turn into services for their end customers. We enable different types of hardware. For instance, you can put in GPUs in your hardware and use it for iot type of services. We allow multi-tenancy, we provide very rich feature set built into our platform that can be used to 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 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, right? And it allows you to give access to your own customers to do self-service, to give them faster to innovate and less effort. So that's where we try to help.

Charlotte Kan, TelecomTV (07:02):
Melina. Let's look forward now. What are your priorities for the open lab to help you of course launch new products and new innovations and solutions to the market Fast?

Malina Borg Sigg, Telenor (07:13):
Yeah, so first of all, it's about technology. So it takes time to get this in place. And I also think that's the reason why we are collaborating with research innovation in this kind of sector. So what we are doing in North Sweden right now is that we are securing the capacity and the coverage and the speed of the network, but it can be quite hard to understand what to use that for because the ecosystem, the phone and the apps that we are using, they are not really benefiting from that yet. So the next wave that we need to secure technically a rollout is about the advanced five D services and looking into the customer journey now having connection on board as well, which have global customers. And Telenor is also a Nordic company. We have a big Nordic presence and also president in Asia. We need to support a customer in a way to make the customer journey seamless throughout those countries.

(08:05):
In order to do that, we need a partner that is multi-vendor. We need an automation and scale in the backbone because advanced fiber services is really about securing the network outside the world with mobility as it was a fixed network. And this is really huge and even make it open in a way for developers to interact and make configurations in the network. And in order to do that, I mean with 4G our customer, that was like humans using tools and we are quite slow. So we can manage a bit of latency there. But the customer and the user for advanced fiber services is applications, is autonomous cars, it's drones, it's smartness. And now with AI where we need to gather more data in order to predict more with AI and use more AI in the world, we need a central place to collect all that data. So use cases or devices can gather that kind of insights and that needs to go really fast. So with all this together, with the network infrastructure, with the cloud edge infrastructure, with a public cloud environment, with a multi-vendor setting from a global perspective, we need someone who can tie this together, create automation and scale.

Charlotte Kan, TelecomTV (09:23):
Well. There's so much to look forward to. I'm very much looking forward to catching up with you in a year's time to see how much progress you've made. You're after a great start here. Many thanks to all of you.

Martin Whitlock, Telenor IOT (09:32):
Thank you.

Charlotte Kan, TelecomTV (09:33):
Thank you.