Mobile World Congress 2022 treated its 61,000 participants to an experience that brought together creativity and imagination, future-thinking, and genius engineering. Andy Bryant, Telecommunications marketing, @AndyTelco looks back on an exciting week in Barcelona.
First and foremost, after a two year Covid-enforced hiatus, it was great to be back at the Fira Barcelona with over 61,000 telco colleagues from over 200 countries and territories around the globe.
This yearโs show participants had the ability to attend in-person or connect from their office or home and were treated to an experience that brought together creativity and imagination, future-thinking, and genius engineering.
What was hot
Sustainability and the race to net zero must be at the center of everyone's strategy.
- With climate change affecting every country on every continent โ disrupting national economies and affecting lives by changing, severe weather patterns, growing gas emissions, rising sea levels โ sustainability is fast becoming a boardroom issue for all companies.
In fact, according to Deloitte, if left unchecked, the economic impact of climate change in the US alone could reach $14.5 trillion by the year 2070.[1] This makes it imperative that we lower our carbon footprint as we help our customers lower theirs.
Some steps we are taking at HPE:
- The circular economy is key, with the work of the HPE Technology Renewal Centers and Asset Upcycling and Certified Pre-Owned programs keeping e-waste out of landfills while putting more money back into budgets.
- Marie-Paul Odini, NGA Green G working group Chairhas made other observations that she covers in an excellent blog article, Green G: The Path Towards Sustainable 6G. She also participates in a panel discussion, featuring telecom industry leaders, that was hosted by TelecomTV, Defining the Green Network. (This video is available on-demand.)
In the telecommunications industry, it is clear that we need to focus on reducing the carbon footprint necessary to build systems, the carbon footprint required to operate them, and better manage how those assets are retired to minimize e-waste.. Beyond that, the mobile industry can also help to de-carbonize other industries, case in point the growth of hybrid work models that reduce commuter traffic and resultant gas emissions; or IoT solutions that help to optimize logistics, reducing transportation miles.
While at MCW, I also noted other measures that IT and Telecom leaders are taking to foster sustainability. For example:
- Microsoft committed to being carbon negative by 2030. They also have committed to put back all the carbon ever emitted by the company by the year 2050.
- Meta is currently providing services to 3.6 billion people around the world and has already achieved sustainable energy power for all their data centers. They're aiming for total carbon neutrality by 2030.
Open RAN is getting real and is transforming networks today, but it still hasn't reached scale.
- Before we get into the debate of vRAN vs Open RAN, or the degrees of openness, we need to remember that, just like the cloud-native, open nature of 5G, Open RAN was an initiative driven by the operators, not the vendors providing equipment and software. Across the show there were many examples on the spectrum from virtualized with proprietary interfaces to fully open.
- HPE is collaborating with telecoms operators to provide a consistent near zero-touch operational experience for the deployment of its disaggregated RAN infrastructure and workloads. KDDI, a leading Japanese telecommunications provider, is using the HPE ProLiant DL110 Gen10 Plus - Telco server for the commercial network operation of O-RAN compliant 5G standalone base stations, and is accelerating construction of 5G base stations across Japan to expedite 5G availability.
- Vodafone CTO, Johan Wilberg, predicted that 30% of all of their mobile sites across Europe will be Open RAN by the year 2030.
- Telefonica forecast that, after 2023, 30-50% of RAN growth will be Open RAN.
- Back to sustainability, it will be interesting to see how the introduction of the RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC), a software-defined component of the Open Radio Access Network (ORAN) architecture, will enable app developers to optimize the network across the full spectrum, as well as optimizing the use of compute โ which will positively impact energy consumption.
- In mid-February of this year, HPE and Qualcomm Technologies announced their collaboration to create the next generation of 5G distributed unit solutions. The companies will deliver the industryโs first fully-optimized vDU solution, that provides up to 60% lower cost of ownership for operators.
- Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. announced its continued collaboration with industry-leading innovators โ including HPE, Dell, Intel, and Red Hat โ to expand the 5G vRAN ecosystem. This effort is intended to drive multiparty collaboration and innovation for the advancement of software-based networks. With this ecosystem, the parties continue to advance vRAN towards a more scalable, flexible network that delivers carrier-grade performance, management, and reliability.
The metaverse was big โ not least of all because it felt like there was a Meta speaker on most of the sessions I attended.
- We seem to have reached the period where we see the metaverse becoming the likely next generation of the internet, which will open up new ways to communicate across both personal and professional life. It's a demand-side innovation, pulling the telcos into a new space rather than the usual push that accompanies other advances. Telcos will need likely need to deploy edge compute to support the bandwidth and low latency requirements for effective experiences.
Beyond the metaverse, the importance of hyperscalers to the industry was clear โ but the balance between the private/hybrid telco cloud and hyperscalers is still an evolving one.
The need for 5G, the edge, and new applications enabled by slicing was clear,
- and they were visible throughout the venue. But how they will evolve, and how they can work across multiple telcos remains to be seen.
- The edge was less hyped, and frankly, more obvious because when customers can access new workloads via apps at the edge, it is easy to understand the benefits to productivity and reduction of costs. I firmly believe that 5G and edge compute are the future, but the industry needs to do a better job demonstrating how edge cloud federation can allow developers to write once, and make 5G/edge work in real use cases. Perhaps the best way to do this is by first exploring the societal benefits, rather than just focusing on the solution technology. 5G can be the true catalyst for innovation, transforming every sector, but the question of how telcos monetize with real use cases that leverage the technology is still up for discussion.
Enterprises are increasingly looking at the promise of a customized private 5G experience for low-latency, dedicated capacity, extended coverage and security across campus and industrial environments, while complementing existing Wi-Fi networks. It was good to see and hear his topic moving from debates between which of Private 5G and Wi-Fi are better, to โhow do I make Private 5G work for my organization?โ While 5G surpasses Wi-Fi in terms of wide area coverage, Wi-Fi has the edge when it comes to cost-effective, indoor connectivity. But with private 5G technology, such as the new solution, customers can enjoy the best of both worlds with seamless integration across private 5G and Wi-Fi.
Interested in learning more? Please check out:
- Tap into the growing market for Private 5G (Brochure)
- Ready to catch the next big wave in enterprise services (Blog)
- Private 5G: An opportunity for operators to create new enterprise services (Video)
- Why Wi-Fi is a great fit for private 5G network deployments (Video)
What wasn't so hot?
- Unlike previous years, the new phone announcements were less prominent at the event itself, being mostly replaced with announcements pre MWC โ although there were a good number of connected PCs to be seen throughout the show floor.
- Wi-Fi wasn't a hot topic either, and I think that was because most of the players were targeting the telecommunications market with an assumption that private 5G was the answer (vs both).
- Connected cars were conspicuously (almost) absent, which is probably a good thing because I think weโve had an overload here in years past. For the most part, we have come to take for granted the fact that all cars going forward will be connected, so this use case has morphed from โnew and excitingโ to a standard feature in all new vehicles.
- 6G. We are only really 2 years into the 5G adoption cycle, and unlike previous years the next G wasnโt overhyped this year, which is โ I think โ a good thing. The industry first needs to show the benefits of 5G and make it work well whilst continuing to leverage the power of AI/ML and automation to drive down the cost to operate networks.
What's on the horizon for the coming year
There were many signs of our industry making progressive and positive impacts on society and economics as we come out of the pandemic and recession. For example, we will soon see more examples of centralized AI/ML moving to more ambient AI, distributed throughout the network helping to both drive down the carbon footprint of telco networks while improving sustainability in other areas.
I believe that the metaverse will continue to grow in hype over the next year, although weโre a long way from it becoming the new internet. There is lots of work to do as we evolve to this next phase; not least showing some real examples of how it can be used to improve how we live and work. But โ we also need to start thinking now about the rules for this new entity, such as how customer data will be protected, and how personal identities will be safeguarded and authenticated.
Looking forward to MWC23
Mobile World Congress 2022 offered much inspiration for those of us who are excited about the future of the telecom industry. Opportunities abound to positively impact society and connect people around the globe.
To those of you who visited us in Barcelona, we look forward to our continued conversations. And if we missed you during the event, I would encourage you to start planning to attend next yearโs show. I can promise that the accelerating pace of change in our industry will be sure to inspire, delight and amaze.
Andy Bryant
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
twitter.com/AndyTelco
linkedin.com/in/andybryant/
hpe.com/info/5g
[1] The United Statesโ turning point on climate change: the economic opportunity of climate action in the US
AndyBryant
Marketing leader for HPE's telco solutions, working the strategy across our telco software, telco services, telco grade infrastructure, and Aruba at the enterprise edge.