Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:00:10):
Welcome back from what was described yesterday, not as a coffee break, but as a cake break. I'm not sure if we've got a good cake break going today here at the Great Telco debate, but thanks very much for everybody to get back for our second session, which is focused on monetizing the Access Edge. My name is Ray La Matron. I'm the editorial director at Telecom tv. I'm helping out guy here today to give him a break from hosting some of the sessions, letting him vote in the audience for a couple of them. So monetizing the access edge. Should telco's package connectivity with Edge compute, ai, inference, local caching and security services, can they monetize access as a service for enterprises and developers through APIs? These are just some of the questions being put forward around this debate. So as with the other sessions, we are going to start off by hearing from our expert witnesses.

(00:01:16):
Now, we were due to have four expert witnesses, but unfortunately one has had to drop out this morning Francesca from Vodafone for reasons that couldn't be helped. So we just have three, but that gives them more time to deal with the tough questions that they are going to get from the room. I know. So we'll come to them in just a moment and then of course we'll come over to Graham and Chris for the motion and then we'll get into the q and a part of the session. So monetizing the access edge. Our first speaker for the three minutes is Beth Cohen, who is telecom product strategy consultant at Luth Computer and longtime Verizon employee as well. So Beth, your three minutes starts now. Do you want to just speak from there or do you want to come? Okay. Alright. Beth, no walk. The floor is yours.

Beth Cohen, Luth Computer (00:02:10):
It's nice being able to walk again, put it that way. So I am going to set the table here. So I'm going to be talking about where data is, where data gets generated, where data needs to be, where applications need to be at the edge and at the core and how the network fits into all of this. So let's think of this as, and AI certainly plays into this, but it's not necessarily only ai. There's plenty of use cases that do not require ai. So think about it. And IOT cloud if you will, or cloud lit or fog lit has thousands of devices all over the place and they're all generating data and they all need to be, that data needs to be processed and they also need to have feedback and act on that data or we want some applications to act on that data so that data is feeding into something. You probably don't want to bring it all the way back into the core because let's think about it. I'll use an example of an oil drilling.

(00:03:32):
Oil and gas. They have drilling platforms all over the place. They're in the middle of the ocean, they're out in the middle of nowhere and the data that's getting generated about what's going on needs to be fed back to them so that they can act on it. And do you really want to bring it back into the core, which is expensive, particularly if they're in the middle of the ocean and it has to go over satellite or it has to go over some weak terrible wifi, not wifi 4G link. And so monetizing the edge to me means making sure that the data gets processed where it needs to be and the applications are located where they need to be to process that data and provide the feedback that our customers need. And how does the telco play into this? Of course, we're providing the network to do it. It's not just dumb pipes because we also own those edge devices. We have routers, we have virtual routers, virtual network services out at the edge, and we have the capacity to provide a platform that our customers can use to feed those devices. There you go. And I gave next person 12

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:05:04):
Seconds. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you very much Beth. So Neil will be happy because there was a definite focus on the customer there, so that's keeping the audience happy. So our next expert witness witness is Jishnu Dasgupta, head of marketing network, monetization platforms at the cloud and network services division of Nokia. So Jishnu the floor is yours.

Jishnu Dasgupta, Nokia (00:05:31):
Thank you very much. I'm joined by my trustee AI assistant over here. So we've spent quite a few years being stuck in a fun, but finally as telecom we are changing. We've been investing heavily in automation cloud native networks. We build up a programmable service fabric and we are exposing the capabilities of the network for the very first time natively through APIs towards developers and audiences. What's also important is the fact that we are finally collaborating across the industry to provide these in a unified form to enterprises. So the store is ready but to clarify the value perception and attach it with the value which we are providing from our side, we need to collectively invest in more targeted vertical go-to-market motions. You're seeing early signs of clear demand signals. The first is in terms of the identity and fraud prevention opportunity. Now every digital platform, not just banks, not just financial services, but social media platforms, e-commerce marketplaces, all of these are looking at stronger trust signals which they can use in real time.

(00:06:49):
Now we as a telco industry, we uniquely own the real-time subscriber device and identity binding, which makes us critical to this use case. The second is the requirement in terms of deterministic high performance connectivity. Now whether it be automotive, drones, media and entertainment, and even the gaming sectors, there's a need for it. Our trials with quality on demand have actually boosted cloud gaming frame rates by approximately 70% reduced ping by 90%. And that has value, that has value to that gaming community. And where you have value you can monetize, but I would argue that that's just the tip of the iceberg. The AI supercycle will actually be the one which generates the next wave of opportunities, whether it be GPU as a service inference, as a service models, as a service agents as a service. Our differentiation as an industry lies in proximity. And for the first time our being regional is our friend, it's our advantage If you can somehow package the three Cs, which is compute, connectivity, and compliance, well we can play a key role in the sovereign access edge and then I don't think we'll really be crying about monetization anymore.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:08:15):
That's it. Okay, excellent. Thank you very much. Nu. So introducing there one of the hot topics at the moment, which we debated yesterday also in this building, sovereign and sovereign services. So our third speaker on this session back very quickly after his earlier appearances, Warren Baek, VP of the technology office at Wind River. So Warren, another three minutes is yours. And I

Warren Bayek, Wind River (00:08:44):
Have to say this was also a last second ad by the way.

(00:08:48):
One? Yeah, I might be. This is about monetization, so I want to go in a little different direction. I was planning to, and the apple door research said something really interesting, which is the last 10 years telco is in a low single digit growth pattern. And Neil mentioned in the last session in 2016, he said, if we don't get together with customer representatives and other reps with the telco people, we're not going to go anywhere. And you know what? We're now nine years later and you're an Oracle new. And I'll say the same thing today. If we repeat the past, that's the definition of insanity. If we expect something different to happen. So if we go through the same procedures we've been following the last 10 years or 20 years, 10 years from now, the telcos are going to be looking back and saying, man, Nvidia and all these other software giants saw 60% growth and we saw two and we don't want to be there in 10 years. We want to change that paradigm.

(00:10:03):
The value IT apps, cloud services, AI platforms that they've put on top of our networks have been incredibly lucrative these last few years. That's the opportunity we need to seize in telco. We need to work with these other industries and these other parts of the industries, particularly the customer side and make sure that telcos have a part in that new revenue that's going to be coming in and it will be coming in where it will come in. I don't know any of us have all the answers, but I will say one thing I've learned in the past few years is if Nvidia says something's going to happen, it's probably going to happen. And they are convinced that if they can put developer toolkits, they're all about empowering the developer to give the consumers what they need. If we can work with companies like Nvidia and if we can work together as a consortium across this broad industry, we will create value where we probably can't see it today.

(00:11:14):
And I can give you use cases that I can see happening in insurance and healthcare and CV two X and security and fraud prevention. That's the tip of the iceberg frankly, on where the possible revenue streams exist in this space. So we just need as an industry to keep building out what we already have. We already have the distributed footprint, this industry, this AI revolution needs. We already have the spectrum that it needs. We already have the sovereignty it needs. Now we have to leverage that and bring everyone to our table and we need to be a part of partaking in the revenue that will be happening in this space.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:11:54):
Okay,

Warren Bayek, Wind River (00:11:55):
Fantastic.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:11:58):
So well done. Warren borrowed three of Beth's seconds there, but I think that's allowed. We will let that pass. Okay, excellent. So three great expert witness statements to start us off, but of course we have a motion that is now going to be bought to the table, bought to the

Graham Wilde, Three Group Solutions (00:12:16):
Room. We have a motion here. It is telco control over access puts them in a unique position to provide sovereign services. And the am Amazon Alexa to coin toss came up with Chris speaking full the motion and me speaking against

Chris Lewis, Lewis Insight (00:12:35):
If only you were tongue tied throughout the day, it would be much better off me. Ladies and gentlemen, the question I know many people discussed the sovereign topic yesterday and it occurs to me that we're always looking for what uniqueness that the telco entry brings to the market. We talked about the on-ramp during the internet era and obviously we've extended that connectivity paradigm to include all of that mobility, all those mobile devices. And of course we're gradually extending it through cellular, through wifi, through satellite to mean that access is now available to connect everything that we want to connect. Building that network environment, providing that access as we know is not enough. We need to make sure that the survey is of course appropriate for the local environment. We've always talked about the localization, the hyper localization of services, the hyper-personalization of services. We talked about it in mobile in that 2016 era when 5G was coming in.

(00:13:34):
The issue today is of course a much more complex one and the point of control of the network in many ways has moved away from the network itself. And we should by the way, define network in that respect as well because the customer's view of what the network is is not the definition of what the telco thinks the network is, but the sovereignty, and I do like this pronunciation of sovereignty, which reminds me of severing, which was the Russian spy collection during all the John Leary novels, if you remember reading the John Leary novels. So think of sovereignty can be a bit threatening, but in this case it's a positive issue because what companies are looking for, what governments are looking for. What we are looking for is that safe environment when the connectivity brings the right services to us as individuals, right? Services as organizations, right services for us as society.

(00:14:22):
So that connectivity piece, and it touches upon the security angle that was touched in the last debate actually it becomes the point of focus where we can bring these services together so that on-ramp, that trusted nature of the connectivity, the trusted nature of the telco that we all look with our own national champions. We love them most of the time in terms of delivering the service. So actually becoming that focal point, bringing the security in, bringing those other services in and becoming that point of aggregation, but that trusted point of aggregation within that sovereign environment because we do need services delivered locally, we need services that match both local environment, local language issues. Yes, of course it'll benefit from all of the AI services that we've been touching upon in both debates already, but actually it does give us a unique position as providing that service is what we are known for. It's about building the portfolio around that, about building that. But it is that trusted anchor tenant of the future services. So I would ask you ladies and gentlemen to put the green paddle forward when you're voting this time. Thank you

Graham Wilde, Three Group Solutions (00:15:31):
Ladies and gentlemen, this motion is absolute horseshit and you have to vote against it like this. That's what you do. Now, why is it horseshit? Because look sovereignty, data sovereignty, what does that really mean? That means running data centers inside a particular country so that the data from customers or within inside a company never leaves that country. And that is already being done. It's already being done by the hyperscalers in Germany, in France, in the uk. They've invested billions in in North America, all over Europe. And in addition to that, there are local players. So for example, you could think of atos in France, which is also running a sovereign cloud service in France for the French government. You as telcos have no skills to be able to do this, okay? The only area where you might be able to get in is in the area of private networks where you could have local core in a port or an airports which hosts certain applications which need to be close to devices in that place. But even there, those other companies are eating your lunch along with major systems integrators. So ladies and gentlemen, reject the motion, stick to the knitting, say no thank you.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:17:06):
Another clarion cry from the 1980s that just say no,

Graham Wilde, Three Group Solutions (00:17:10):
Just say

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:17:11):
No. Wild. Yeah, to go with Bob the builder. Okay, so there is the motion. Please keep the motion in mind and let's come to the audience to see if we've got any questions for our expert speakers. Okay, I can see one hand up over there and another one here and another one here. So yeah, I

Kristian Toivo, TIP (00:17:38):
Did perfect. Okay, I got the box first. So I guess I'll start somehow. Miraculously it was behind me. I'm Kristian Toivo, executive director of Telecom Infra Project. My question was changing in my mind as I started to speak, so I need to kind of refocus. But because we talked a lot about the mobile edge and I think now here I'm thinking a little bit broader, but my basic question is really to do experts. What do you think about the level of cooperation partnership between operators? And see my thesis is that if you want to offer services to the broad public as a telco, as an operator, it's very hard to kind of bundle the services to your own access because you want to provide the access to the service for any subscriber from any access. And how do you see that influencing the actual opportunity here? I think that's the biggest ness for a mobile edge or edge cloud run by an operator. It can't be unique to Vodafone or Telefonica also, but it needs to be a common access. So that's my question. How do you see that

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:18:55):
You're asking particularly about access cloud?

Kristian Toivo, TIP (00:18:58):
Well in general offering services that are linked to the specific access of an operator, is that viable?

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:19:06):
Okay, got you. Okay.

Beth Cohen, Luth Computer (00:19:07):
Actually, yes, it is viable. I don't think you need to have that alliance and I can speak from personal experience from Verizon putting out products that had those capabilities that are basically within the Verizon footprint. Certainly when we went global, Verizon is global company. It does do lots of partnerships with lots of peering, peering relationships, but the services themselves are unique to Verizon. Customers buy them from Verizon, they don't know, don't care, don't need to know that Verizon's working with 50 other telecoms to make it all work, but the services themselves are at the edge. So they're within the customer site, they're not within the data center particularly. They're really out at the edge. And I used the IOT example earlier, but there's plenty of other examples where customers are doing it can be AI or not, doesn't really matter. Applications that really need to be at the edge. They were either for latency reasons or for reasons that there's too much data to transfer back to the core utilities is one. There's a product called GridWide that's been with Verizon for, I dunno, 15 years that basically tracks utility usage like water usage and gas usage and electric usage for utilities for their customers. Absolutely fabulous edge case AI is being added to enhance that. So that's my answer.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:21:08):
Okay. Maybe I can expand as well on the question because obviously Verizon is a very large telco. Verizon business is a large business in itself, but not all telcos have that scale and have such advanced B2B enterprise services. So is it only the very large tier ones with large enterprise operations that have that opportunity to go it alone? So does anybody else want to come in on this topic?

Jishnu Dasgupta, Nokia (00:21:36):
Yeah, so I think fundamentally we need to understand that the playing field has changed. Earlier operators used to compete with each other in new areas like network APIs. We see, for example, we have been engaging with Verizon, with at and t with T-Mobile. All of them come on to the same stage when we go for a go-to market. And the same thing for the end enterprise, who's actually going to be using the capabilities? It doesn't matter who owns the relationship, but that relationship needs to exist across and deliver that value across all networks irrespective of where that end consumer might be, whether it be enterprise, whether it be consumers.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:22:29):
Warren, did you want to come in or

Warren Bayek, Wind River (00:22:31):
Yeah, it's a great question and competition in this space can be fierce. Even in North America, the at t's and Boosts and Verizon's all do compete, however, and I saw my CEO stepped into the room after the first session. So Jay, hold your ears. Much like in my space, in the cast space, we have competitors, red Hat and others, and I never fully consider that competition, right? This is an industry that has to learn to work together. And Ray, it's the old adage, it's a cliche, but it's true, right? The rising tide lifts all boats in order to fully realize the potential of these services, all the operators are coming to the realization that we have to work together. And some of the services are absolutely capable of being compartmentalized. However, some of the ones, for instance, we're looking with our mother company active at things like CVDX where the cars are playing an interesting role.

(00:23:35):
Well if I only have Verizon playing with me and I roll into a place where T-Mobile or at and t is the only provider, which isn't really possible in North America, but let's just do it work, suddenly it doesn't work. That service won't work. So no one realizes the revenue. And going back to what I led with is as we pull these consortiums together, one of the consortiums are pulling together are the various service providers and that they have to realize we all have to sit in the same room and come up with a playbook where we're all going to make money in this space. There is a lot, and I keep emphasizing this and I'm maybe hyperbolic, but I don't think so. There is a lot of money on the table in the next 10 years in this space. A lot plenty for everyone in this room to make more money than 2% a year. And that's something we all have to start internalizing as an industry. That playing together benefits all of us. This is a bottomless pit of revenue coming if we really can take advantage of it and Beth wants to come

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:24:44):
Back

Beth Cohen, Luth Computer (00:24:44):
To that. So the reality is that all the telecoms have been partnering peering, I think as that's the official telecom term, peering together for decades. So your cell phone works wherever. I have a cell phone that's obviously, it's a Verizon cell phone, it works perfectly fine. Now that I'm here in the uk, the pattern, the set, the capability is already there. We just have to package it up properly.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:25:20):
So it's all about making the most of that access capability but partnering to make sure that everybody's getting a piece of the pie and you're not missing out on the opportunities by not partnering. I guess this is a key thing here. So I'm relying on my, because the lights are pretty bright. Okay, I can see a waving hand over here. Any other hands up? If you want to ask a question, really put your hand up high and wave it. And one of my colleagues with the microphones will, so, and if you put it up then somebody will bring you a microphone, but we'll go over there first.

Dean Bubley, Disruptive Analysis (00:26:00):
So leaving aside the on-prem business edge for a private network or an oil rig or something like that, which I think is a special case for the mass market, whether it's consumer or business or application developer facing, do we not need edge interconnect before we need edge compute? There's no point in having the peering point in Frankfurt. If you're talking about sovereignty or low latency and you're great, you're close to your edge, but I'm close to my edge and our interconnection point is a thousand miles away. It doesn't help. So do we need edge interconnect at a local level before any of this makes sense?

Beth Cohen, Luth Computer (00:26:43):
I think so. And again, so I use an example that's very personal to me, which is that there's a lot of AI being used for surgery now, like medical applications and stuff. So when I broke my leg, I had a lot of surgeries and they used ai, I was at a teaching hospital and it completely worked. Obviously I was asleep during the surgery, but they did talk again, they told me about it afterward, obviously you need extremely low latency, you need high feedback, there's huge bandwidth data being generated for all of this stuff. And absolutely it has to be at the edge. It has to be where it can't be, it can't be in the core, can't be at the hyperscaler location.

Jishnu Dasgupta, Nokia (00:27:42):
So to that same question, edge interconnect is essential, right? But we are providing that already as part of the overall telco community, whether it be in terms of data center interconnect solutions, we providing it from the nok perspective as well. But even after that first part where you have the Edge connect interconnect, we are talking about the possibility of a bigger picture, bigger picture where we have an opportunity in terms of the overall infrastructure. We have opportunities in terms of delivering certain services, in terms of offering even applications and services like LLM as a service, et cetera, et cetera. There are many different initiatives which are going on and arguably telcos don't have the expertise in all of it.

(00:28:40):
We can never say that for example, we know more about compute or we know more about storage than hyperscalers. So there needs to essentially be some sort of partnerships in place. Now partnerships with hyperscalers on the edge could potentially be challenging in the era of data sovereignty, especially with certain apps which have come through like the US cloud Act. I don't know whether all of you have seen that, but it provides extraterritorial access to data, which is resident on hyperscalers across any country in the world. And these are the things which are actually challenging. The notion of sovereign zones actually being implemented in different regions by hyperscalers. And that's where potentially we have to step in with local players. Local players, like what you were saying as atos in Europe. Those are potentially partners whom we need to engage with to truly get the sovereign cloud in life, at least until clarifications around things like the cloud act are solved.

Beth Cohen, Luth Computer (00:29:53):
It'll be interesting to see how the cloud act gets applied outside of the us. However,

Jishnu Dasgupta, Nokia (00:30:00):
There is an example actually, I'm sorry, alright, there is an example for this. Now there is this bank in the Netherlands called Amsterdam Trade Bank. Now this bank is completely resident in Netherlands, but it had tie-ups with one of the large Russian banks got impacted by sanctions. The US government overnight said that Azure put off access to their systems, put off access to their email, put off access to everything overnight. The bank went down, okay, the Netherlands courts went back, filed a case, then finally got them back access. But obviously it was never the same. Now, rightly or wrong, I'm not debating whether it was right or wrong for the sanctions to actually have been implemented, but the fact is that there is a territorial incursion per se, which can actually happen through the cloud act, which is what happened in Netherlands.

Beth Cohen, Luth Computer (00:31:07):
In that case it was because Microsoft is a US based company and that's how they were able to do

Jishnu Dasgupta, Nokia (00:31:11):
It.

Beth Cohen, Luth Computer (00:31:12):
So if it had been a Netherlands company or EU company, they would not have been

Jishnu Dasgupta, Nokia (00:31:17):
Able to

Beth Cohen, Luth Computer (00:31:17):
Do it.

Jishnu Dasgupta, Nokia (00:31:18):
So that's why there is inherently a little bit of concern right now. Even as hyperscalers like AWS Azure, Google, they're all establishing their own so-called sovereign areas, sovereign data centers in Europe, but their cloud lack act still looms.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:31:38):
Okay. Warren, did you want to come in or should we go to the next question?

Warren Bayek, Wind River (00:31:41):
I have a lot to add other than I agree. Hello? Is this working still? Some of the use cases that we're talking about will require what you've mentioned, but I think it's everything we're doing here does not require multiple connections across, but the local interconnects will always be there. And I think to your point, we've already got a lot of that in place, but I guess it's not, to me it's not. Of course we're going to do that and I don't think it's an either or, right? Yes, we have to get that done, but I don't think that should hold us up from moving ahead with everything else. Is that

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:32:16):
Okay? We're going to come here, so please say as well who you are, where you're from, and then we've got another couple of hands, but do keep them waving high so that my colleagues can see you. Okay,

Fran Heeran, Red Hat (00:32:28):
Thanks Ray. So Fran here on Red Hat again, I'm trying to correlate the motion with the discussion and I guess my question is why do we think access is key to sovereignty? I would've thought it was more on the operational side, data retention access. I'm struggling to understand why it's the unique thing.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:32:47):
Well, I think We know which way you're going to vote then Frank

Fran Heeran, Red Hat (00:32:50):
Probably giving away my hand, but no, maybe I'll be educated and change my mind.

Beth Cohen, Luth Computer (00:32:53):
But I'll say that data sovereignty, unlike what was said about that, it's within country. I think it actually is much more about within companies as well. I mean I know sovereignty means within country, but I think most people interpret it as I need to keep the data within the company, I need to keep the data safe from others. I know that's a big thing in the Asia, in the Asian area where ip, intellectual property has to be protected because there's no patent laws saving you if somebody manages to steal that intellectual property. So I really see it as a much broader issue than just, oh, it has to be within country.

Warren Bayek, Wind River (00:33:47):
Yeah, we talked about CI a lot yesterday and I agree we, I think it was explicit. We never had a talk on defining it. And I agree and it's why when I talked about it, I don't know if people caught this, but I rarely said country and I said entity for that very reason is that while the term itself implies, or actually Webster would say it defines country, I don't think that actually plays out in the way a lot of us think about Serenity and the way telcos do frankly. Because it really is about, your data is your data and your information is your information. I know having worked with Verizon and Networks and other companies, their of course, they're incredibly tight with everything about their network to the point that we can't even show network diagrams to anyone outside of the United States.

(00:34:41):
Not that it wouldn't even, we could obfuscate it in a way that wouldn't compromise them at all. But the data sovereignty to me, I'm with you. It really is a very localized thing. So that's where I think access plays into this is that it's a very local use of data and I think Manishh said it really well yesterday. Data will, it's kind of like water. It will find the right place to live and the applications will too. And being able to keep everything that those applications are doing and all the data that they're sharing, very localized to that access point is critical to making these services work out in the real world to allow telcos to actually implement them and put them in their networks.

Beth Cohen, Luth Computer (00:35:25):
And let me add that there was a big rush 10 years ago to move everything into the cloud. And we're seeing, we mentioned it yesterday, we're also seeing companies kind of moving back out to the edge again for a lot of good reasons.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:35:40):
But it's a good question, Fran. But it could be that the relationship that telcos have because of their access networks and because of those connectivity relationships, that puts them in a good position to be able to build sovereign services on top of that relationship. So I just want to bring that to the panel here and ask if that is the potential, as the motion suggests. And to come back to Neil's point earlier, and we'll come to your question in a minute, Neil, but I just want to ask the panel, do the telcos have what it takes internally in terms of their marketing, in terms of their sales professionals to actually sell this stuff to customers? They might have the access, they might have the network, they might have great ideas about services, but can they sell anything more than a connection?

Graham Wilde, Three Group Solutions (00:36:27):
No, they can't, right?

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:36:30):
I'll

Warren Bayek, Wind River (00:36:30):
Answer not I

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:36:31):
Wasn't asking you.

Warren Bayek, Wind River (00:36:33):
Oh my God. I'll say today. The answer has to be no. Right? The telco salespeople have a very, it's SIM and arpu, right? And they do need to change. It is changing. It has

Beth Cohen, Luth Computer (00:36:45):
To, it's s Sisyphean task, put it that way.

Warren Bayek, Wind River (00:36:49):
It's turning a tanker literally. But it's something they're going to have to learn. Again,

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:36:54):
It's been spending for 40 years, surely,

Warren Bayek, Wind River (00:36:55):
And I keep coming back to this, if it doesn't change in 10 years, telcos are going to be looking back to that 2% and saying what happened? It's obvious what happened, right? You were insane. You didn't change anything and you wondered why things didn't change. So I say no, the answer is no today for sure.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:37:16):
Okay. Justin, do you have a,

Jishnu Dasgupta, Nokia (00:37:17):
Yeah, see, it's a fact that telcos are not primed towards this market for selling anything other than connectivity. Today we are setting go-to market motions in place, but if we need to really accelerate this, and I've seen this from certain examples as well. One example from Indonesia, if I remember correctly, Insat now, Insat has been working on building up an AI sovereign cloud. Are they doing everything themselves? No infrastructure. They're working with a local data center provider, GPU, coming from Nvidia applications coming from companies like Tech Mahindra, Capgemini, et cetera, LLM. They are working on some sort of an open source LLM, but there are other initiatives as well in terms of having those things in place. So everyone, this access Edge opportunity is actually going to be serviced by consortiums and telcos will need to invest into those consortiums. The value which they receive will be a combination of the value which they extract through connectivity, which they're offering, but also in terms of investment into that overall concession. And

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:38:34):
Who do you think will do the selling to the end customers?

Jishnu Dasgupta, Nokia (00:38:37):
I'm sorry?

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:38:37):
Who will do the selling to the end customers?

Jishnu Dasgupta, Nokia (00:38:41):
And this is about hazarding a guess over here.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:38:43):
I

Beth Cohen, Luth Computer (00:38:44):
Think it's the applications people

Jishnu Dasgupta, Nokia (00:38:45):
There, correct. So there are this whole application people there, there are system integrators, et cetera, on top. These are the guys who are engaged on a day-to-day basis with that target market. They have the salespeople in place, they have the go-to markets in place. What we need to do is bring them as part of that consortium and go through, yeah, I'm sorry Beth.

Beth Cohen, Luth Computer (00:39:07):
I was going to say the hyperscalers. I mean the hyperscalers have been trying to get to the edge for at least a decade, and they're still failing at that. They still think core

Warren Bayek, Wind River (00:39:19):
And it's a trust issue for them too. But I agree with who's going to pay the money. And I say this a lot is I have a phone. I'm not giving Verizon another penny for that phone. I'm just not. But I will give them money for lowering my car insurance, right? The application that gives me the ability and gives the insurance company the ability to charge me less because I'm safer because I've used applications that run on the Verizon network. I will pay for that and the insurance company will give me a rebate for that. Verizon can take a piece of

Beth Cohen, Luth Computer (00:39:56):
That

Warren Bayek, Wind River (00:39:56):
Because they supply the required network. And that's the mindset shift and the collaboration shift that we all have to do is that these, the telcos are providing a service that is unrivaled and no one else can provide it. And they're not extracting the revenue they can out of it, right? They're providing a service basically for free because we're focused on connectivity, which we always will be and we should be, right? The telcos have, that's their primary objective, right? Delivering RAN is still the primary objective, but that's a 2% growth market. We need to find a better way.

Beth Cohen, Luth Computer (00:40:33):
Yeah. Well a good one is security because, and when I was at Network XA couple weeks ago, I guess a month ago now, it came up that actually selling security, which is becoming more and more important, is actually the telcos. It's a great opportunity for the telcos because when somebody gets phished, who do they call? They call the telco. True. So hey, we might as well sell security to all the customers because that's who they're going to call anyhow.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:41:13):
Fraud detection, right?

Beth Cohen, Luth Computer (00:41:14):
Yeah, fraud detection, all.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:41:16):
It's a bit worrying when you said that. I was about to shout Ghostbusters, but still stuck in the eighties. Should we come? Neil, you've been dying to ask a question for ages.

Neil McRae, HPE Networking (00:41:25):
It's partly a question more of a statement though. I think we're thinking about this a bit. One dimensionally. So what else can a fiber network or an access network do that isn't related to the way we build networks today? So for example, there's an organization I was working with in the past that was going to, weren't using a broadband connection, but we're using the fiber to do smart energy. So you bring your, more and more people are putting solar panels in, battery backup systems, electric cars. How do you bring that together in a way where you can, the grid is becoming a much bigger thing than just a few power stations and some transmission. It's extending into people's homes, is extending into factories, extending into data centers. So from that perspective, if you wanted a sovereign access service, I think you'd want that to be a sovereign service.

(00:42:18):
And I genuinely believe that's where the future is headed. Energy wise. It feels unlikely that a more collapse control plane around that something like that would be a requirement. We also see there's a company in California using fiber vibration to do early earthquake detection. And I think, again, some of these are niche, some of them, but I think some of them, I think in today's world, looking at what we've got, I think it's a harder case to make. But I think if you start thinking about, okay, let's not think about fiber just to deliver everybody's Netflix, let's think about fiber to what other applications that would need that kind of connectivity. And I think the kind of control plane of the countries or your infrastructures one, there's another one where, I think this was in China where they were using the data from, they were setting up neighborhood camera systems so that if something happened to you and your camera didn't pick up, maybe your neighbor's camera picked it up.

(00:43:25):
And again, I think those are the sort of things that you'd kind of want to have some sort of sovereign element on it more than, well, it's just we're tunneling it or we don't really care where the data's coming from. And then look, the walls a different place today than it was when we kicked off the internet back in the nineties. We're more fractured as a organization. And the need for defense to have sovereign capabilities, I would say has never been higher, at least in my lifetime. So that's another area. Are we monetizing that right now? Probably not, but I think it's an area where we're going to see developments, especially if the world kind of continues on the path.

Beth Cohen, Luth Computer (00:44:10):
What makes you think that it isn't being monetized today? I mean, it's running over the network.

Neil McRae, HPE Networking (00:44:15):
Unfortunately. I've signed the secrets Act, so glad you said that. Not me.

Beth Cohen, Luth Computer (00:44:21):
Yeah, it's running over the networks, of course. And the telcos are involved in all of those use cases. Of course. Allegedly. Yes.

Warren Bayek, Wind River (00:44:32):
Did you want to go in, well, I don't know if this is totally apropos, but your comment and your healthcare comment made me think about it. A potential use case. Everyone always asks us what's the killer access use case? And to that, I always answer, I'm not smart enough to tell you, but in one of my recent late night YouTube search discovery sessions, I ran across a really interesting thing and I could extend it into what telcos could do in the healthcare space. And it happened actually right here in London where two infant, this might take a while, but I'll bring it back to telco, I promise. Two infant surgeons saw a problem with outcomes between surgery and ICU, and you probably can guess what a problem and outcomes means in the infant surgery world. And they were obviously really disturbed by this because it's a very chaotic environment, a very disaggregated environment with lots of people and hands doing various things that seem unrelated but are all interconnected, sound familiar to anyone building networks.

(00:45:42):
And during one of their breaks, they were sitting in the break room and they turned on an F1 race and the car pulled in and they watched the pit crew attack that car. And in seven seconds, this amazingly choreograph dance effort fixed everything in the car to get it back on the track and off it went. And they said, oh my gosh, that's happening in the ICU right now, but not in the way that that pit crew does it, right? We're bumping into each other. The doctors aren't giving the notes, right? The nurses are hitting, they're drop, it's chaos. So they called Ferrari and they sent the pit crew and the pit crew looked at them and said, this is a disaster. And they told 'em how to fix it and they showed them and they went through. I look up the YouTube, it's really amazing.

(00:46:39):
Long story short, they transform the outcomes of that operating room and that ICU unit and they've expanded it worldwide. What's that worth? What would you pay for that? What would the hospitals, what would the healthcare systems, what would you as a parent pay for that? The telcos are in the same position in the healthcare industry, right? With remote diagnostics, with fleet management, with preparing ambulances and EMTs when they get to accident sites, what they're about to come across that they don't have to spend that 50 seconds or a minute and a half or three minutes preparing. And that if we could have connectivity with cameras that watch the accident and prepare the EMTs, I'm just thinking kind

Beth Cohen, Luth Computer (00:47:25):
Of off the top of my head. Well, they can get the patient records already.

Warren Bayek, Wind River (00:47:28):
All of those access that could dramatically save money, dramatically save lives. And it's something that telcos are uniquely qualified, I think right now to deliver. If we can build the services on top

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:47:39):
Of it, and I think that maybe comes down, if we gathered here a list of potential services and applications, it would be incredibly long. There's lots of great ideas. And there has been for many years. And yet the B2B revenues of the operators, it's the sales model.

Warren Bayek, Wind River (00:47:58):
Who sells it, who gets the money? How do the telcos, the applications,

Mark Gilmour, ConnectiviTree (Europe) (00:48:01):
Yeah. So it's Mark here, AKA Bob. I've been listening intently to this because I struggle with the edge use cases and this, and it seems to me that actually this has jumped over the use cases that we're talking about. The insurance one for example, that you mentioned, even that healthcare one, they're jumping over the telco edge and actually hitting the end device, the end, the CPE or whatever that is, it's jumping over the telco. I'm struggling to see how those use cases, brilliant use cases and definitely monetizable are actually intrinsically tied to a telecom operator other than it's running over the network that operators provide. But the key in there is operators, not operator. It seems to me that the only time that can be really tied in is with if it's fixed access that is going, because then it's the CPE that's being provided in by the operator and has control over that. And that brings up the question of sovereignty. The discussion on the bus kind of move towards actually sovereignty is control of your own destiny. And I think that's a very good way of capturing that thought. Anyway, am I correct in how I've understood that actually it's kind of jumping over the telco physical edge, access edge and actually into the CPE, certainly a mobile, but in the fixed it's a little bit more understandable.

Jishnu Dasgupta, Nokia (00:49:44):
So from an edge perspective, I think it's very important to get some definitions around edge clear. There are different versions. One, you have the device edge, one end, you have the near edge, then you have the forage. Arguably, a lot of edge cases, which we consider today are already happening on device. But there are certain use cases where, for example, there is a footprint constraint, there's a power constraint. I'll give you an example. So let's say that you have these new meta smart glasses which have come out. Have any of you seen that it's got this AI display on top and the for that today is happening on device, not on the glasses. The glasses don't have the power or the footprint for that, but it's actually happening on the person's handset. But meta now wants to delink that, right? They don't want, they're looking at it as a substitute for the phone. So they want to dealing from that, they have to have established the connectivity to an access edge where that processing will happen and provide that same level of service. So these are the sort of use cases which will be coming up on the edge, which potentially could have scale. There's also one more thing which needs to be considered over here that in many of these cases, the traditional asymmetric network which we have today, which is more focused on downlink than uplink, those will change. And that's where the telcos will have to play a role in terms of developing these sort of specialized network mechanisms which support these use cases.

Beth Cohen, Luth Computer (00:51:38):
So that ties into my earlier conversation about the data. Where is the data generated? How much of it is generated? How private does it need to be? Where does it need to be? Where's the applications? That's critical if you don't understand that and the network operators aren't in position to understand that they should,

Dean Bubley, Disruptive Analysis (00:51:59):
But those courses will spend 80% of their time on wifi and a fixed network

Jishnu Dasgupta, Nokia (00:52:03):
Where you get No, those are out in the open. These are not VR glasses.

Warren Bayek, Wind River (00:52:10):
These

Jishnu Dasgupta, Nokia (00:52:10):
Are the reamp meta glasses. Yeah. So they're going to be out in the open.

Mark Gilmour, ConnectiviTree (Europe) (00:52:17):
So who monetizes on those glasses?

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:52:22):
Sorry, have you still got the mic? Wait for the mic. Yeah, sorry. Can we get the mic back? Because otherwise we can't hear what,

Beth Cohen, Luth Computer (00:52:31):
While the mic is moving, another thing to consider is why are we talking about wireless and wireline as two separate entities?

Mark Gilmour, ConnectiviTree (Europe) (00:52:40):
I agree.

Beth Cohen, Luth Computer (00:52:41):
Let's be honest. Yes, I know the telcos are behind the times and it's still one of them separate, but that's crazy in the 21st century.

Mark Gilmour, ConnectiviTree (Europe) (00:52:51):
So the meta example there, the glasses, who owns the customer on that? Because at the moment it's onto the device and the device, correct. So it's completely separated from the operator

Jishnu Dasgupta, Nokia (00:53:05):
At this point?

Mark Gilmour, ConnectiviTree (Europe) (00:53:05):
Yes. Yeah. So when it moves and they say they move it to an access cloud, please. So does that mean then that the operator has to sell the glasses to the

Jishnu Dasgupta, Nokia (00:53:14):
No, the operator will not sell the glasses.

Mark Gilmour, ConnectiviTree (Europe) (00:53:17):
Okay, thank you. Because there, you've answered my question. Therefore, the operator doesn't get the meta has to then strike a deal with Verizon. It has to strike a deal with at and t, it has to strike a deal with people. And this is what we're trying to hang around. This is what we're trying to fix. It's got to strike a deal with all of those players in order to do that. And actually they turn around and goes, do you know what? We'll just leave it on the device. Yeah, so that's this.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:53:43):
And this is the conundrum. This is why we're debating this here because this industry is trying to figure out how to make more money. And every time they try to figure it out, somebody else makes the money. And these service providers,

Warren Bayek, Wind River (00:53:56):
And let's be honest, some use cases and the simple glasses of whatever simple thing you're going to do, you're probably right.

(00:54:04):
But that's a very small amount of what we're talking about. And eventually meta is not going to be happy with having a glass that does just things that can be done locally on the glasses. They're going to want to expand it and then maybe it will somewhat bypass the telco. But it's kind of like the other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how is the play? It's like if you take the telco out, you have no way to get the data. So even if the data isn't residing on the access edge, which it probably, I could argue that it still will be in many, many, many cases. Because the best point, you don't want that data going anywhere other than right there locally on the access edge. Even if it weren't, if the telcos weren't there, there's no pipe. So the telcos do need to get in collaboration with these folks. And I agree it's not easy because meta has to talk to a lot of people, but they'll do it if they want to make the money. It'll happen eventually. And I know we all don't think it will, but in five years I guarantee the world will be so different. We won't recognize it. We have to talk to

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:55:08):
Everyone in 2030. We'll all beam ourselves in and we can come back to this discussion. But listen, we've got five minutes left and that five minutes includes the vote. So we've kind of got about two and a half minutes left. I just want to get one question over here very quickly. Quick question for two and a half minutes.

Salim Khodri, SUSE (00:55:25):
Yeah. Hello everyone. So I'm Salim from SUSE. So the discussion around cloud act and extract, sorry, can

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:55:32):
You hold it a bit closer?

Salim Khodri, SUSE (00:55:34):
The discussion around here, sorry, I'm Ali from suse. So the discussion around the cloud act and extraterritorial risk was really insightful to me. And my understanding is that the cloud act applies regardless where the data is stored. And I think here we were focusing more on the hyperscalers. So how about the data that is stored at the core private clouds for instance, are the telco exposed to the same risk if for instance, they are deployed with a cloud service provider that is a US company

Jishnu Dasgupta, Nokia (00:56:17):
Lawfully, if even network data are core data is stored on a hyperscaler, which is of US origin, the government can access.

Beth Cohen, Luth Computer (00:56:32):
There's two components. So typically most of the telcos do not store their data in the hyperscalers for a lot of reasons.

(00:56:44):
But the telcos are subject to lawful intercept, which requires a subpoena from a court to say, hand over this data about this person who we think is a drug dealer. So there is constraints on that, and I do know most of the telcos are pretty careful about it because that particular lawful intercept in the US at least has been abused, let's say. And so the telcos are quite strict about, you have to follow exactly the steps before we'll release that data. And it's specific to a specific individual or organization. Also, telcos are common carriers, which means that, and that was put in the 1970s or sixties. It was very early when the whole internet first came out. Common carrier goes way back before that for voice. But when the internet started that the idea was carried over. And that's a really critical piece of information, which is that the telco is not responsible for the content that goes over the network. So we telcos don't need to police that somebody's passing porn over the internet,

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:58:20):
But they do want to monetize it. That's the

Beth Cohen, Luth Computer (00:58:24):
Hey, the porn industry. The porn industry monetize, monetize the internet long before anybody else did.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:58:32):
Absolutely. So I know we've got more questions in the audience, but I think you're going to have to ask those directly to the panelists in the cake break because we do have to stick to our schedule and we need to come back to the actual motion, which was argued for and against by Graham and Chris. And here is the motion again, just to remind you. So read it very carefully. Again, consider what you have heard from our expert witnesses and from the floor and then please give us a vote now with your super analog panels. Okay, let's see it. Remember, if you, you're voting for the motion, please point the green side at me. If you're voting against, I want to see the red side. Okay. Goodness me. Oh, whoa. Goodness me. Anybody else want to hazard a guess here? I think that's kind of split. That's really hard to decide. I am going to guess that I'm seeing more red. Do you agree? Okay, so the against have it, you're not red. The same GAR might come in on that afterwards and it was incredibly close. I mean, sometimes it's very obvious, but that was really, really close. But I'm going to say that was slightly in Graham's favor, so, alright, thank you very much. Let's give a round of applause to our expert witnesses.