Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:05):
We are at Fyuz 2025 in Dublin. I'm here with John Brethericke, he's head of business development for Europe at 1Finity. So John, tell us about Finity. It's a name that may be, not everybody will be familiar with it yet. It launched operations just earlier this year, didn't it?

John Bretherick, 1Finity (00:22):
It did, yes. So 1st of July we became 1Finity. Nothing's changed. We're still part of the Fujitsu group. So what we did is Fujitsu network communications became 1Finity. What we've done is taken all of the network divisions part of the Fujitsu group under one umbrella. So we're still providing a full range of optical and wireless hardware solutions, software and services for our customers. It gives us, I think, the best of both worlds. We've got the heritage and the decades of experience of Fujitsu is our group company, but now also a bit more the agility and the flexibility to actually look at our own future from advanced technologies and an R and D perspective.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (01:12):
Now you mentioned wireless there and if we move on now to Open Ran one of the areas where 1Finity is a player. There are still naysayers out there who say that open ran is not suitable for mobile network operators, that it won't succeed. But 1Finity has been at the heart of open ran development since the beginning. How are you seeing the open ran market play out currently?

John Bretherick, 1Finity (01:39):
Yes, I think it's fair to say the telecoms market has had a history of challenges in adopting new technology and we've seen that new technology hasn't been adopted in the timeframes that's been predicted. What we now see is very much a steady growth in open ran here at Fuse we have a small cell on display, which is the small cell that we've just done the first live calls with Ericsson on at and t's live network. So we're now starting to see Open RAM deployed in Brownfield networks as well as Greenfield. We've also recently announced or been announced with Vodafone in Europe. So we're now starting to look at radios for Vodafone's open run deployment. So now starting to see more of the large mobile network operators embrace open run.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (02:45):
Okay, excellent. Yes, and we're certainly hearing a lot about that here at Fuse, so it's certainly not going away and in fact growing it would seem. You also mentioned Optical and with networking currently now seeing a surge in IP over DWDM, how can that multi-vendor end-to-end service best be managed?

John Bretherick, 1Finity (03:10):
It's a very good question. We're now seeing a large take up with the customers that we're talking to of IP over DWDM. It's demonstrated in a multi-vendor environment with different router vendors, different optical line system vendors that you do need that true openness and interoperability. We have, as part of our solution set a new optical pluggable optic called the P 300, which is our new 800 gig pluggable optic that we've demonstrated interoperability with. And also we're now seeing that you do need a really good understanding of the management and orchestration of solutions and that's where open networking will come to the fore and we'll actually start to see full end-to-end manageability of solutions for IP over DDM.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (04:08):
Now, some of that surge, I'm sure is related to the growth and expected future growth of traffic initiated by AI workloads and obviously AI is getting a lot of attention right now. How is AI manifesting itself in the 1Finity AI ran portfolio?

John Bretherick, 1Finity (04:29):
Yes, we're seeing a lot of interest in AI ran. We're having numerous conversations from our roots in Japan with now a number of customers in both in America and in Europe around AI ran trials and AI ran pilots. Very much we see that there is a initial interest from operators in AI for the run in how that they can improve energy efficiencies of the network and look to optimize the network. But more we're now seeing the requirements for AI on RAN and actually enabling RAN to be delivered on an AI platform. And one of the key aspects that we're seeing now is the potential and the growth with enterprise solutions, which sort of leans itself more for the network operators to be able to have a minimal investment where they can actually see the revenue gains or the business cases. They're a little bit easier to see versus large scale AI ran deployments. So that's what we're seeing now, very much working with a number to actually then prove those business cases and those applications.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (05:53):
Okay. Well there's no doubt that AI ran is a talking point in the industry and it's certainly not going to go away in the years to come and neither of course is open ran, of course. So John, great to talk to you today. Thanks very much for joining us. Thank

John Bretherick, 1Finity (06:08):
You very much.