By John Bugailiskis
TWO YEARS AGO AT the 2018 Canadian Telecom Summit, industry executives largely agreed that for 5G to live up to its hype, service providers would have to forge new partnerships with non-traditional businesses and industries across Canada.
Jump ahead two years to yesterday’s virtual 2020 Telecom Summit panel on 5G and the only noticeable change is the (virtual) setting, not the outlook. The deployment of 5G will be marathon, not a sprint and the revolutionary changes will eventually arrive, but not for several more years predicted this year’s expert panel.
For telecom giants used to forging their own path and largely call the shots as they deployed 4G, the somber reality of 5G and it unique complexities has forced them to “partner or perish” said panel moderator Eric Smith, SVP, Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association. During the 60-minute discussion on Tuesday he had the panel address a variety of issues surrounding 5G deployment from where will revenues come from, to the public’s understanding of 5G.
Bernard Bureau, vice-president 5G spectrum and wireless networks at Telus set the tone early in the discussion when he noted while he was “extraordinarily excited about the speed, low latency, edge computing and all those fantastic 5G capabilities… the reality is it won’t mean anything to customers unless we can answer the ‘so what?’ question. And especially for businesses.”
Bureau outlined how Telus is focused on utilizing the capabilities of 5G to solve people’s “day-to-day problems.” As a result, they are taking a “partnership approach with our customers to learn more about their unique operational environments and challenges,” he explained.
Telus has created a framework for 5G that Bureau referred to as the “four dimensions of 5G economic and social benefits. First, by offering new services, like mobile cloud gaming with low latency, it hopes to increase customer reach and revenue. It also wants to use 5G to increase productivity by “reinventing working experience with connected solutions.”
The third benefit of 5G that Telus is investing heavily in is to develop ways of lowering operating expenses by leveraging the data and insights that 5G can provide. An example of this said Bureau is how Telus is deploying 5G to improve agricultural production. Last week Telus announced its agriculture business unit will provide supply chain management and data analytics services to businesses at each level of the food chain.
“You can build coverage with the very powerful local mobility network even though the link to the rest of the world is much slower.” – Bernard Bureau, Telus
“A drone can capture a high-resolution video feed of crops in the field for example which can then be analyzed by artificial intelligence to detect abnormalities with the crop, but there’s a problem, many farms are far away from data centres. But with 5G you can have edge computing node that can host video processing by AI locally, so you can build coverage with the very powerful local mobility network even though the link to the rest of the world is much slower.”
Telus also wants to take advantage of the improved monitoring capabilities of 5G to improve safety and security. Bureau noted for example how 5G can power a 360 degree camera on a firefighter’s vest that can be used to guide them out of danger by somebody sitting a kilometre away providing advice.
In a keynote that proceeded the 5G panel, Rogers chief technology officer Jorge Fernandes (pictured above) highlighted some of his company’s 5G partnerships, including one with UBC to explore the future of autonomous mining.
“We are leveraging low latency 5G networks to perform remote operation of mining vehicles to improve worker safety and operations. And we are working with the university on an earthquake early warning system which will predict the trajectory of an earthquake using AI and machine learning to help save lives and reduce damage,” said Fernandes.
In the Q&A session that followed, Fernandes was asked his thoughts on ORAN (open radio access network), a carrier-led effort to enable mobile network operators to use equipment from multiple vendors and still ensure interoperability.
“I think the industry is ready for ORAN and we’re following very closely to what’s happening, whether it’s my previous employer Vodafone, or what’s happening in the U.S. with AT&T and Verizon. It’s important for us to ensure that there is not just sort of an open market of infrastructure, but also opening up the interfaces to allow entrepreneurs and new entrants into the industry to identify those problems and solve them quicker than perhaps some of the incumbents have.
“Now, it’s not to say that the incumbents are not involved and of course as I said in my statement, we have a very strong partnership with Ericsson and we encourage our partners to work with ORAN as well. But there differently is I think space for evolution in this area for new entrants and for new entrepreneurs and innovators to come and start building and delivering competitive solutions,” replied Fernandes.
Panelist Milan Rao, president of Wipro, cautioned that while trillions of dollars in added revenues is expected to flow from 5G, the reality is that over the past three years nearly $480 billion has already been invested globally in 5G “without that value being realized.”
To make the investment in 5G pay off, he maintained it will be critical for operators to find “the use cases that will derive this value.”
Phil Kippen, senior director, solution architects and field engineering at VMware wondered if “service providers will become integrators for these new services?
“Service providers have an opportunity to change their business model from being a purely a connectivity provider, or selling a few different services out of the catalog, to really being that integrator and trusted advisor for that enterprise customer,” he said.
Rao predicted the three leading areas for providers to take advantage of 5G will be in automotive, because of the move to autonomous vehicles; healthcare, especially in the area of remote care of the elderly; and in predictive maintenance for manufacturing.
For 5G to go mainstream the panel also agreed that marketers need to do a better job of informing the public about the advantages of 5G. “The industry has a real opportunity to expand on the value that 5G brings to the end user. But they have not done a great job of explaining the benefits to the enterprise and commercial sector which has a better understanding of where it’s going,” said Justin Hart, CTO, cloud and edge business unit, Ribbon Communications.
But the move to 5G will not occur by simply throwing a switch concluded Bureau.
“We believe in being honest with our customers. 5G is complex. What matters is the outcome. We are working today with our customers in creating workshops to really listen to them and how we can solve their problems. 5G will be evolutionary to begin with and gradually it will be revolutionary. But that will take several years until more spectrum becomes available.”
