By Lynn Greiner
There is a lot of talk these days around the digital economy, and how cloud, edge, and 5G (the three buzzwords of the year) fit in. The short answer: it’s complicated.
During his Canadian Telecom Summit keynote, Bhushan Joshi, head of sustainability and corporate responsibility for North America at Ericsson, pointed out it is a multimodal problem with several drivers – access, affordability, and digital readiness.
“This multimodal nature of the ICT of the digital divide makes it harder to close this digital divide,” he said. “We need to leverage ICT solutions including 5G to close the digital divide this decade.”
With that as a backdrop, an expert panel put their heads together (virtually, in some cases) to discuss the current situation and what needs to be done to bridge that divide and fuel the digital economy.
Moderator and panelist Vanessa Little (in person, left), global chief technology officer at Interdynamix was joined by Zouheir Mansourati M.Sc., Ph.D. (in person, centre), senior vice-president and chief technology officer at Cogeco; Dr. Ibrahim Gedeon (virtually, left), chief technology officer at Telus; Robin Kaushik (in person, right), vice-president of digital services at Ericsson Canada; and Abdel Filali (virtually, right), systems engineering manager at World Wide Technology.
“I think it’s so critical to be together, working with the industry on the vertical so we don’t abuse 5G, because most implementations have been more doing 4G stuff with a little logo as 5G,” said Gedeon. “I think we as Canadians should be very proud, as 5G was birthed in Canada in 2014. The whole notion of putting a 5G white paper happened here in our country. I think it’s up to us as a community to do 5G right to move our industry and our economy and our country forward.”
Filali agreed and said all the developments make it the best time to be in the telecom industry. “When you think about these technologies (edge, cloud, and 5G), each one of them is a great innovation by itself. It’s really great that we see all the industry come up with these innovations across different domains,” he said. “But the game changing aspect of it is when you integrate them together, when you make them work together… to deliver an outcome to the business or the consumer at the end of the day.”
Cogeco is not yet a wireless provider in Canada, and is interested in becoming an MVNO, Mansourati noted, but doing so has to make business sense. That fuels his interest in 5G, and the services it can enable. He defines the digital economy as the infrastructure, ecommerce, and priced digital services.
But, said Kaushik, digitization itself is not new – people have been, in effect, replicating processes digitally for close to two decades. “The question which I always have in mind is, what is the fine line between digitization and digital economy? There are a number of times where the term digital economy comes, but when you do a double click and see what are you actually doing? Well, you’re actually still doing the same stuff, but in a slightly different way.”
So, he wondered, how will the business model change when more is happening at the edge – will it open opportunities for service providers, or startups, or let entrepreneurs disrupt industries?
“5G, and edge and cloud, all of this isn’t just a matter of getting faster service to your cell phone. It’s unlocking an entirely new set of market verticals, an entirely new set of opportunities, not only for B2B models, but B2C as well,” Little said. “I think we’re barely scratching the surface, especially up here in Canada, with all the new market opportunities that are going to roll out in not only the next three to five years, but the next 25 years. I think there’s going to be a huge uptick in the way technology is consumed in Canada, and globally, for that matter.”
And there is another new world, the metaverse, Filali noted, where transactions are purely digital. He thinks 5G and edge and cloud will enable the merger of the physical world and virtual world. “I don’t know what that economy will be called, but it’ll be interesting to live around that and consume some of those new services.”
The discussion then turned to the market verticals that will be realized once 5G and edge roll out.
Kaushik picked two areas: gaming, and industrial safety in areas like mines where people are in dangerous places today.
Consumer applications like healthcare will be big, Mansourati added, as will automotive, education, retail and advertising, and smart cities, especially in the realm of public safety.
“Let’s not forget the potential impact of 5G or the digital economy on the environment,” he said. “The expectation obviously is that this impact will be positive, not negative, and I think it will be good to keep an eye on that and pay attention to the increased introduction of devices in the edge.”
“When you can start doing things like have a virtual meeting in a VR simulator wearing a headset, where it actually feels like you’re sitting next to the person, once you start having those types of capabilities, I think the adoption of that is going to be almost instantaneous,” Little said.
Filali agreed, adding that 5G and edge will add more value when on a reliable connection. However, said Gedeon, “with the geography of Canada, bandwidth would always be an issue unless you’re in a city, let’s be very blunt.” There is no way a telco can provide adequate bandwidth in rural areas, but with 5G and local computing at the edge, data transmissions can be kept small.
“Do we have what it takes to really go in the direction of a very advanced digital economy?” Mansourati asked. “I think it will depend on the location, it will depend on the coverage, and it will also depend on how quickly the cost of bandwidth will drop over time.”
And, Gedeon added, “you cannot decouple 5G from your cloud and digital strategy.”
You also cannot do everything on your own, he said, and industry players will have to realize that and come to an agreement about their roles in the ecosystem and how to split the financial pie.
“I also think the carriers need to step up a bit, because it’s not just a matter of ‘we’re going to build you a better network, take or leave it’,” Little observed. “There’s no new money, and so in order to really accelerate and drive market adoption of 5G, carriers are going to have to extend some of their traditional offerings into things like offering an API or web-based portal to deploy an edge service offering end to end more disruptive self-serve capabilities that have never been in market before.”
“It’s not just the responsibility of the service provider, or the hyperscalar cloud to bring these new capabilities to market,” she added. “It’s going to take all of us, the vendors, the service providers, the end consumers, the standards bodies, the innovation engines that are funded by the government, the innovation engines that are funded privately – we all have to come together and galvanize to together to roll out these services, and to really realize what those market opportunities and really unlock them here in Canada.”
Screen grab from Canadian Telecom Summit’s online feed.
