MTN shows acceleration of webscalers’ blockbuster growth in telecoms

 

 

 

 

 Based on preliminary stats, overall webscalers ended 2020 with just over $1.7 trillion (€1.44 trillion) in revenues, up from $1.45 trillion in 2019.

 

 

While the growth is due to several factors – including acquisitions, a strong digital advertising market and increased cloud spending across verticals during the pandemic – MTN comments, “Webscalers have been attacking the telco vertical for several years. Since the close of 4Q20, over the last three months the webscale sector's efforts to engage telcos have picked up steam.

“A number of telcos have recently announced new deals with webscalers in the areas of edge computing, service development, digital transformation, and workload shift.

“At the same time, more traditional suppliers to telcos (such as Nokia) have expanded their own collaboration with the cloud providers who dominate the webscale market.

“These deals aim to differentiate [between] traditional telco vendors, prevent webscalers growing too fast in the market, and save costs for telcos.”

Key developments in Q1

Telefonica engaged IBM to act as a systems integrator for an open RAN trial in Argentina.

TIM Brasil announced it migrate all its on-premises workloads to the cloud, using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and Microsoft Azure, including mission-critical applications. The idea is to optimise and simplify the management of its IT infrastructure while improving scalability and agility.

In March, Liberty Global's Belgium unit, Telenet chose Ericsson, Nokia and Google Cloud for 5G deployment.

Nokia in the clouds

Nokia was by far the most active of telco-focused vendors in 1Q21, announcing several collaborations with the webscale sector.

In January, Nokia announced partnerships with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to develop cloud-native 5G core solutions. Nokia is supplying its voice core, cloud packet core, network exposure function, data management, and 5G core, while GCP's Anthos for Telecom platform will be used t deploy applications.

In March, Nokia expanded its work with GCP, announcing it would also partner to develop cloud-based 5G radio solutions. The collaboration leverages Nokia's RAN, Open RAN, Cloud vRAN and edge cloud technologies with GCP's edge computing platform and application ecosystem.

Initial efforts centre around Cloud RAN and aim at integrating Nokia's 5G virtualized distributed unit and virtualized centralized unit with Google's edge computing platform running on Anthos. Nokia aims to certify its AirFrame Open Edge hardware with Anthos.

At the same time as the March GCP announcement, Nokia announced deals with Microsoft and Amazon.

Playing the field

The Microsoft agreement is intended to develop "new market-ready 4G and 5G private wireless use cases designed for enterprises", combing Nokia's Cloud RAN, Open RAN, radio access controller, and multi-access edge cloud technologies with the Azure Private Edge Zone.

With Amazon Web Services, Nokia and AWS will conduct joint R&D into enabling Nokia's RAN, Open RAN, Cloud RAN, and edge solutions to operate "seamlessly" with AWS Outposts. The goal is to develop new customer-focused 5G solutions.

Per Nokia, "operators will be able to simplify the network virtualization and platform layers for the Core and RAN network functions by leveraging the agility and scalability of cloud." Ultimately Nokia will be able to leverage Amazon services like EC2, EKS, Local Zones and others to help automate network functions and deploy end customer applications.

Intel attacks

MTN points out that Intel, which has attacked the telco market aggressively over the last few quarters, signed a deal with GCP in February to develop "reference architectures and integrated solutions" for telcos to enable 5G and edge network solutions.

The collaboration involves three main aspects: virtualised RAN and open RAN solution development; a network functions validation lab; and service delivery to the edge.

Israeli telco vendor Radcom announced the integration of its 5G assurance solution (ACE) with Microsoft Azure. Radcom says that the integration of ACE with Azure "enables operators to assure the quality of 5G services by leveraging AI and machine learning-driven assurance and automation" ACE runs as a cloud native function over the Azure Kubernetes Service.

MTN reckons that vendors’ collaborations with webscalers will continue throughout 2021, no doubt.

Mavenir's SVP for Business Development, 

 John Baker, addressed this trend indirectly in a January interview with SDx Central: “I really do believe the hyperscalers are going to become the new telecom providers going forward...Apart from the physical radio that goes on a tower, everything we’re doing now follows the data center model, and these guys know how to manage data centers, software, and applications."

For webscale operators to support all these new activities requires heavy investment in network infrastructure. The figure below shows CapEx by type, on an annualized basis, for the total webscale network operator market since 2016.

Mobile World Congress 2021 will require a negative Covid test for entry

 

 

 

 

 

 

The GSMA is determined to make MWC happen this year but is having to ask potential attendees to make a lot of concessions to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The event, which would normally have taken place by now, is scheduled to start on 28 June in its usual location of Barcelona. But with the pandemic still far from over, cramming thousands of people into an enclosed space for four days is pretty far from epidemiological best practice, so something’s got to give.

Today the GSMA, which runs the event, announced its health and safety plan for the event, even going so far as to brand it ‘Committed Community’. Not to be confused with mental hospitals, the plan indicates that everyone has got to muck in if the event is to go ahead and be a success. Essentially that means doing all the stuff we have becomes used to, such as wearing masks, washing hands and trying not to pant in each other’s faces, but there are some specifics.

The most important feature is that proof of a negative Covid test (rapid antigen) will be required for entry, which will be entirely managed by the MWC app. Since that’s likely to be a prerequisite for getting into Spain at all, that’s not really any extra hassle. The tests are only considered valid for three days, however, which means most people will have to take at least one more while they’re in the country.

MWC will be setting up testing centres within the venue (the usual Fira), where you can get your top-up test. The health services partner has yet to be announced, but we expect it to be in the next couple of weeks, at which point the cost of such services should be revealed. There will also be regular temperature checks of the kind you get at the gym, the results of which may compel people to take a test even if their previous one hasn’t expired.

Other than that the big difference, other than the demand that everyone wear the masks that have become such a regrettable feature of modern life, will be a strict one-way system in the venue, made more plausible by the fact that the GSMA is using the whole Fira despite there likely being fewer exhibitors. On that note it’s still optimistically hoping for up to 50,000 attendees.

“We’ve worked with partners, health authorities and medical professionals to create a plan that builds confidence in our return to in-person events,” said John Hoffman GSMA CEO. “The GSMA has safely and successfully organised premier mobile events for many years. Since 2006, we have worked closely with the Host City Parties and Fira Barcelona to keep everyone safe and secure at MWC events.

“No doubt Covid-19 is our biggest challenge to date. But our experience gives us a rock-solid foundation from which we have built our plan. This foundation means MWC21 Barcelona can go ahead safely, in person, with a digital online component for those unable to attend.  It will remain the unique, unmissable experience that has made it the world’s most important mobile event.”

“Working together with the Shanghai authorities, we’ve just concluded the first in our MWC series in Shanghai,” said GSMA’s Director General Mats Granryd. “Our partners, exhibitors, board, and local businesses’ support was heartening, and everyone contributed to creating a safe environment by sticking to the safety measures. I am now looking forward to MWC21 Barcelona; it is time to bring together the mobile ecosystem in-person. I relish the discussions that will emerge from this essential event.”

The Shanghai experience should offer some useful insights but the Barcelona event is much bigger and more international. If last Summer is anything to go by Covid cases should be very low by the end of June, However the psychological damage is done. While attending MWC 2021 shouldn’t pose much more of a health risk than any other year, we have been conditioned to become risk averse over the past 12 months. It remains to be seen whether all the precautions announced will reassure people enough to persuade them to get on with their lives.

What’s behind telecoms automation push?

 

 

 

 

 

Telecoms.com periodically invites expert third parties to share their views on the industry’s most pressing issues. In this piece Régis Lerbour, VP Product and R&D, RAN Engineering at Infovista, looks at the role automation plays in 5G.

The industry’s focus on 5G has prompted a slew of enabling technologies that are critical for delivering a new range of high value services. Chief amongst these are virtualization followed closely by network automation as highlighted by a recent survey by analyst firm Forrester. The study that questioned over 100 senior executives at telecommunication providers across the world found that over the next 12 months, deployment of Network Function Virtualization (NFV) was the most pressing concern (64%) while automation capabilities for internal teams was a close second (61%) – with network monitoring, management, testing, simulation, automation, and orchestration (50%) running just behind.

The survey offers an interesting read, and it highlights that: “Senior industry figures appreciate the problems that non-automated tools bring to managing their network lifecycles smoothly and profitably. Many understand the benefits that an end-to-end network lifecycle automation solution from a single vendor would deliver, such as increased productivity and reduced costs; and their infrastructure and investment priorities are geared towards adopting automation as soon as they can.”

However, there is a note of caution as the data shows that many “…have a long way to come to turn their plans into reality; and a number of structural challenges are competing for their attention, something that COVID-19 will be exacerbating.”

The combination of moving the network towards a more software-centric approach, along with automation, orchestration and monitoring sit with the category of Network Lifecycle Automation and the concept has been growing steadily over the last few years. The recent catalyst has been the need to deliver successful and timely 5G rollouts while overcoming complexity of overlapping and non-integrated tools. The need to automate functions is also critical in easing the impact of the skills shortage made worse by ongoing belt tightening across the sector.

The 5G catalyst

Many within the industry see first-mover advantage as key, and as such getting 5G to market quickly has been of paramount importance. The first wave of deployment focused on shared infrastructure with 5G implemented on existing 4G core infrastructure to allow for marketing launches – aimed at generating awareness and initial user demand. However, much of the core network upgrade is still ongoing and as operators start to deploy full-scale 5G standalone networks, there has been a marked increase in the use of advanced planning and design software to speed up key tasks such as site selection to ensure that 5G can be deployed with adequate coverage.

Even with much of the attention looking forward as it relates to 5G, the existing 4G and even 3G networks are still the real breadwinner for operators. Which means that 5G investment must be tempered with the reality of keeping 4G networks thriving and meeting the shift in consumption models that issues such as the pandemic and intense competition has placed on operators.

Network lifecycle automation

The research highlights other challenges around operations and the corresponding sets of management tools currently in use. In the telecoms space, the survey reveals that 56% of operators currently use a collection of tools that address various parts of the infrastructure. Only 1-in-7 of the organisations surveyed has an integrated, end-to-end network management and automation solution. Part of the reason is the organic way in which networks have grown across generations and the survey states that nearly half (46%) report that they face difficulties getting these tools to deliver consistent end-to-end automation. In fact, the survey found that only 1% of respondents were completely satisfied with their network management tools.  This situation is made more challenging for operators that need to maintain service across potentially 4 different generations of (2G, 3G, 4G and 5G) networks.

The desire to unify management technologies, along with gains offered from automation are focused on several key areas. Not unsurprisingly, the primary expected benefit is around cost saving (73%), although improved network performance (71%) and accelerated 5G roll-out (70%) are not far behind.

One of the most interesting findings was where operators see themselves today on the journey to 5G along with their contrasting priorities for 2021 and 2022. This year, only 19% were focused on the creation and delivery of new services on top of 5G such as IoT or low-latency use cases. This suggests that most operators recognise that there is still a lot more infrastructure work to carry out.  Looking out to next year and new 5G services jumps to almost the top of the list of priorities (55%) suggesting that many see 2022 as the year when the rollout will be complete, and they can start testing the water of new products.

Overcoming challenges

The optimism about the speed of 5G rollouts needs to be tempered by several factors. The first is that operators still need to spread engineering time between existing network operations and the 5G push. This is hampered by limited RF expertise and a broader trend to reduce back-office staffing due to highly competitive trading conditions.  Increasing productivity has been a clear demand from the industry over the last few years; a sentiment reinforced by the survey that found 61% of respondents equated the use of network lifecycle automation as a way of improving productivity.

Another major disruptor is the arrival of the new OpenRAN ecosystem that – although still only adopted by a few operators – is gaining interest rapidly. OpenRAN may well make it easier to develop lower cost and more flexible networks – but brings another set of skills and management requirements into an already crowded arena.

The recent survey is just a single snapshot into an industry going through one of its most significant periods of upheaval. It mirrors, in many ways, the IT industry’s decade long shift towards microservice-based architectures and the cloud – much of which enable more and more automation. The need for tooling that can work independent of vendor and network generation is a clear priority for many – and the next 24 months will witness pioneers that can translate the vision into highly efficient processes as the first to market with innovative new 5G services.

Bouygues throws down the gauntlet to SFR

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bouygues Telecom wants to be France’s second-largest mobile operator by 2026.

This is doubtless a long-harboured ambition, but the telco made it official at its capital markets day late last week, at which it unveiled an aggressive growth plan for the next five years.

The company marked its 25^th anniversary with the launch of its Ambition 2026 plan, a multi-faceted strategy through which it aims to become the second-largest mobile operator in France after incumbent Orange and, in its own words, “a major player in fibre,” amongst other things.

In many ways, the plan lacks detail, but it’s pretty clear that is essentially centred around the integration of Euro-Information Telecom (EIT), the alternative operator acquired by Bouygues Telecom last year; the deal received regulatory approvals and closed on 31 December. EIT styles itself as France’s fifth telecoms operator, offering Internet and TV packages as well as MVNO operations under various brands with 2 million customers.

That deal, as much as Bouygues’ subsequent overt targeting of the number two spot, will have given its current holder SFR pause for thought.

According to Bouygues, its mobile market share excluding M2M stood at 16.4% in Q3 last year, putting it in fourth place behind Iliad with 18%, SFR with 24% and leader Orange with 30.3%, although it is bigger than Iliad when M2M customers are factored in. The telco’s mobile customer base at that date was 12.3 million, thus we can extrapolate that the addition of EIT’s 2 million customers would up its market share by somewhere between two and three percentage points. That puts it ahead of Iliad but still leaves it some way behind SFR.

However, it’s about much more than the additional customers EIT brings with it. Bouygues acquired EIT from Crédit Mutuel and at the same time signed a long-term distribution deal that will enable the sale of its fixed and mobile services via the French bank’s network of 4,200 branches.

While areas of Bougues Telecom’s growth plan might seem a little vague – its intention to “benefit from” last year’s brand revamp, for example – adding customers, sub-brands and a broad distribution network via M&A is pretty straightforward. It’s questionable whether that will be enough to see it snag the number two spot in mobile in as little as five years, but it’s certainly a good start.

Other facets of Bouygues’ Ambition 2026 plan include the goal to gain 3 million new FTTH customers in that period; double FTTH network coverage from an estimated 17 million premises at the end of last year to 35 million at the end of 2026 (with an interim target of 27 million by end-2022); double market share in fixed B2B; and become a wholesale fixed player.

On the financial front, Bouygues Telecom expects to significantly increase revenues and earnings during the period. It has set a target of generating more than €7 billion in sales from services in 2026, up from an estimated €4.9 billion in 2020 – its full-year results are due for publication on 18 February – and EBITDA after Leases of around €2.5 billion, up from €1.5 billion, increasing its margin to 35% from 31%. It is also aiming for free cash flow of around €600 million, compared with an estimated €250 million last year and €300 million in 2019.

Those are ambitious targets. Bouygues Telecom did not call its new strategic plan Ambition 2026 for nothing.

What is lying in wait for telecoms in 2021?

 

Observers and practitioners take it on the chin to predict what the telecoms industry may look like in the coming year.

A piece of witticism goes something like this:  It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future. There are slightly different ways to put across the idea, which has been variably attributed to Niels Bohr, Yogi Berra, Piet Hein, Mark Twain, Samuel Goldwyn, Robert Storm Petersen, the Buddha, and Nostradamus. It is such a truism that there is plenty of truth in it, as those of us who have been involved in looking into a crystal ball, or a blank spreadsheet, can all relate to.

Presumably, though, some predictions are more difficult than others. For example, it is more likely that we get long-term trends more correct than short-term forecasts. John Maynard Keynes famous said, “In the long run we are all dead.” This is clearly correct, though it doesn’t solve the problem, or easy the pain to recognise that in the short-term we’re more often wrong than right. As a matter of fact, immediately in front of that often misunderstood revelation, Keynes wrote, “The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs.”

Even the brightest brains have struggled to get short-term predictions right. Bill Gates was one of the few high-profiles voices that have warned the world the danger of a pandemic but even he was unable to tell us such an apocalyptic strike could hit us this year. So we could in a way stop being too harsh on ourselves for failing to foresee the coming of COVID-19 this time last year. And it should also make us feel slightly more comfortable when we are at it again.

If there is one thing that we can almost be sure of about 2021, it will be that “it will be very different to the one just closing,” as James Crawshaw, Principal Analyst at Omdia, puts it. Crawshaw also tells an inconvenient truth about the industry: telecoms is a utility and we have to accept it. “We can all look forward to a gradual return to normality in 2021. The telecom industry has come through 2020 relatively unscathed, as one would expect of a utility service. The market for IT systems that support telcos barely declined in 2020 and should return to low single digit percentage growth in 2021. Not a very exciting headline growth rate compared with some other technology fields but within that overall market trajectory there are some faster growing segments. Omdia’s ICT Enterprise Insights Survey suggests that the majority of service providers will increase their spend on AI tools in 2021. More than half plan to up their spend on customer engagement systems (CRM, mobile apps, etc.). A microservices-based architecture is a pre-requisite for most new software purchases, as is the ability to deploy the software on public cloud. IT budgets remain under pressure in the telecom industry but there is an increasing realization by the C-suite that without IT modernization, telcos will remain commoditised connectivity providers. That is not a future that many boards are prepared to accept.”

“Unprecedented” has become a cliché when used to describe 2020 and the impact of COVID-19 has on every aspect of life, but it doesn’t make it less true. Some changes brought about by the pandemic will go away when life goes back to normal, other changes will be here to stay and become new normal. One of such likely long-term shift is remote working, enabled largely by the communications industry. A result of this change is likely to be a “significant urban-rural migration”, as Mark Evans, CEO of O2 sees it. “The enforced requirement to ‘work from home where possible’ has changed the face of global business and proven the effectiveness of remote working. As a result, an increasing number of people are quitting urban areas in favour of more rural ones,” Evans reckons. “I expect to see this trend continue well into 2021 and beyond and, in turn, increasing pressure will be placed on rural infrastructure. This exodus to the countryside will put pressure on leaders to put rural Britain first for a change. As well as constantly investing in hard-to-reach connectivity, O2 is working with its fellow operators, the UK Government and Ofcom to deliver the The Shared Rural Network (SRN). This will ensure the best possible mobile connectivity for everyone, in all parts of the UK.”

COVID-19 has undoubtedly wreaked havoc to millions of lives, but not everyone has suffered in the same way. Some have even benefited from it, an indication that the pandemic has further polarised the consumer demographic. “There will be ‘the new poor’, those who lost their income, often young and willing to spend on technology, and ‘new rich’,  those who have saved a lot during lockdowns but are reluctant to spend it,” Dario Talmesio, Research Director of Omdia acutely observes. “Cracking such a commercial dilemma will be crucial for CSPs in 2021 because 5G consumers are instrumental for a more critical 5G-related business opportunity. CSPs will start commercializing 5GSA with network slicing, and many more CSPs will deploy 5G core in 2021. After having spent a good part of the past two years in technical and commercial ad-hoc trials, CSPs will be able to start mass-customizing networks for enterprises and industries and demonstrate the benefits of these networks.” Talmesio also believes that there are things that will not change for telcos. “The drive to automation and digitization, the perennial quest to remain relevant beyond connectivity, the cloudification of networks, and the increased involvement of hyper-scale operators in CSPs’ networking businesses will continue to happen and eventually accelerate the pace of a decade-long transformation of the telecom industry into something that is more Tech and less Telco.” When it comes to 5G markets, Talmesio sounds a more optimistic note. “2021 will be the year for 5G mass-market readiness: there will be 0.55 billion eMBB connections by the end of the year supported by more than 270 CSPs globally. With 5G devices in the hands of consumers and Apple’s marketing dollars’ superpowers, some of the anti 5G conspiracists will finally dissipate.”

There is no denial that having the new iPhones supporting 5G has vastly improved the awareness of and enthusiasm about 5G among consumers, but for most consumers the cost of a 5G device is still a key barrier. To this end, Neil Mawston, Executive Director and Devices Analyst at Strategy Analytics, believes that we’re going to see the first 5G phone go below $100. “The average price of 5G Android handsets has halved in 2020. They will halve again through 2021. Surging global volumes, chipset innovation from Qualcomm or MediaTek, and intense rivalry among Chinese device brands mean there will be a race to the bottom on 5G Android smartphone pricing. Expect to see the first sub-$100 models in China, Europe and elsewhere toward the end of next year,” Mawston tells us.

While 5G is going mainstream, so are its failures to deliver on some of its high promises. This has driven certain quarters of the industry to start talking about 6G, though there has been plenty of uncertainty on what 6G is about. Alan Carlton, VP of InterDigital Europe, among many industry executives, believes that 6G must finish the work 5G set out to do but has failed to accomplish. Carlton sees 2021 as “the year that industry attention will turn to 6G. While 5G has made significant moves to a more software defined Core Network and RAN, there are some big steps remaining. Take extended reality—mainstream adoption requires the technology to facilitate both augmented and virtual reality as well as piece the experiences together in real time. This roadmap is very rich, and the truth is 5G may only take us so far.” Another issue that has troubled the 5G ecosystem is power consumption. Despite skilful spinning by companies like Nokia, who argues that energy consumption per gigabit in 5G is lower than 4G, it doesn’t change the fact that 5G’s overall energy consumption will significantly increase because 5G will require much higher data units than any previous generation. Carlton therefore calls for action from the industry to address this issue. “6G must fix 5G’s sustainability shortfall. Put simply, to claim 5G is more sustainable is to say that a Bugatti Chiron is more efficient than a Toyota Yaris because it uses less fuel per horsepower,” Carlton muses.

When it comes to new experience, immersive experience, including AR, VR, or collectively know as XR, has gained much attention, but the total market volume has remained small and consumer purchase limited. This is because, according to Peter Richardson, VP, Partner & Research Director at Counterpoint Research, XR is not a consumer-led market segment, at least not yet. “Throughout most of human history, military arms races drove technical innovation. In more recent times, enterprise needs to enable productivity gains took over as the catalyst for technical developments. From the late nineties, however, the consumer market has been the leading driver of technology innovation. But in VR and AR, military and enterprise needs are, once again, the most powerful forces for change,” Richardson observes. “The launch of Oculus’ 2nd- generation standalone VR headset in October 2020 excited interest, and its relatively low starting price is driving sales, but poor optical quality and a narrow range of either dull or expensive content means we’re not yet an inflection point in consumer interest. However, in the enterprise market, players like Varjo are solving many of the limitations to delivering truly immersive experiences, and this is changing the way enterprises can work and military operatives can train, in fundamental ways. Consumer interest is likely to remain muted in 2021 with VR acting as little more than a niche within the wider gaming market. But as enterprise-focused innovations begin to filter through to consumer-orientated devices, the market will gather pace, multiplying more than six-fold between 2021 and 2025 to be worth over $40 billion,” Richardson predicts.

2020 has also been a year when Open RAN has become the focus of many discussions, ranging from FCC hosted webinar to many inches of columns, including those on this publication. Despite the buzz the technology has generated, its large-scale commercial success has proved elusive, especially in 5G. Robert Finnegan, the new boss at Three UK, recently suggested that Open RAN has already missed the 5G boat. John Strand, Analyst at Strand Consult and often a maverick voice, believes 2021 will be a year of reckoning for Open RAN. “In 2021 the OpenRAN movement will be hit by a reality check. People will recognize that it will take many years before OpenRAN can replace classic RAN on a 1:1 basis. Promised savings for operators will not be so great, and the purported openness of the solution will not necessarily deliver security, at least in the expectation of OpenRAN reducing reliance on Chinese vendors,” Strand predicts. “China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom are among some 41 Chinese technology companies which are members of the OpenRAN Alliance. Among the member companies are ZTE and Inspur already banned in the US because of their links to the Chinese military. OpenRAN was purported to give countries an option that was not Huawei, but instead they offer other Chinese entities which have the same security threats.”

This leads us to a prediction of the grander scheme of things, from our own Telecoms.com’s editors. 2020 has seen continued escalation of disputes between the western world, especially the US, and China across many sectors, with Huawei at the centre of the storm. Many have blamed the outgoing Trump administration for the situation we are in due to its combative style. If Huawei, and other Chinese companies caught in the crosshairs (for example SMIC or ZTE), should wish for a reprieve from the incoming Biden presidency starting in January, or even expect an complete change of fortune, or at least to go back to the “good old days”, they may well be in for a big surprise. In a polarised political landscape that is the present-day America, one of the very few policies that can win and has won bi-partisan support is to stand up to China. Recent events do not help. In particular, the Chinese government’s role in the botched IPO of Ant Financial, an Alibaba affiliated company, have pretty much nullified Huawei’s carefully crafted and persistently delivered narrative that it is a private company and the Chinese government, or the country’s ruling political party, has no power to coerce it to do anything. If there is any change in the American policy towards China, it will likely be a more concerted front adopted by the western countries, thanks to Mr Biden’s team’s more collaborative approach towards its allies.

With that we wrap up this list of predictions for the telecoms industry in 2021. Depending on where you stand, some of what is predicted may be good read, some may be bad, and some may even be ugly, but it will not be dull year. None of our contributors has chosen to predict another black swan event like COVID-19, which is probably the last thing this industry, or the world, needs to go through again.

Incidentally, when this piece was going to press, Bill Gates, who has been in the thick of the battle against COVID-19, shared his insight into next year. “In the spring of 2021, the vaccines and treatments you’ve been reading about in the news will start reaching the scale where they’ll have a global impact,” he said. “Life will be much closer to normal than it is now.” Plenty to look forward to.

The role of OpenRAN in securing 5G networks and the IoT

 

 

 

 

 

Telecoms.com periodically invites expert third parties to share their views on the industry’s most pressing issues. In this piece Martin Rudd, CTO of Telesoft Technologies analyses the opportunities presented by OpenRAN technology.

With recent announcements of joint initiatives from the likes of Rakuten and Telefonica, Dish Networks and Nokia, it comes as no surprise that OpenRAN is featuring prominently on the list of the most talked about telecoms trends of 2020.

Even the Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) has championed OpenRAN’s role in helping to make the UK less dependent on larger incumbent suppliers. The benefits are clear – reducing cost and increasing the resilience of mobile networks, as well as speeding up the development of interoperable solutions that can become the much-needed industry standard.

But, OpenRAN was initially heralded as a way for operators to improve network economics by cutting the cost of building mobile networks. The most significant cost in building a mobile network is the RAN. 5G is set to increase these costs further due to increased cell site density, the need for more backhaul capacity, plus various infrastructure improvements to enable new low latency services and applications.

OpenRAN has the potential to provide a much-needed platform for innovation, which helps drive new revenue opportunities and streams for operators and their customers. It’s something that is garnering attention from the wider technology community, beyond the traditional telecoms players. OpenRAN lowers the barriers to working with new vendors, creating a level playing field that enables the introduction and delivery of new applications at the edge of the network.

With vendor-neutral hardware, OpenRAN can reduce the reliance on a small number of vendors by decoupling the hardware and software components of the network. This disaggregation of hardware and software, and the development of isolated network sharing capabilities like node slicing, is making it increasingly feasible for mobile operators to realistically, and securely, share physical network resources as part of their 5G deployment.

The virtualisation that OpenRAN brings allows operators to run more easily and reliably create a distributed edge cloud that can deliver software-based network functions on standard servers. The move to a cloud-native architecture enables network functions and applications to be broken up into small microservices that can be mixed and matched to best suit the application required.

This, in turn, opens the door to local vendors and suppliers across the board, boosting the economy and enabling innovative solutions to the specific needs of that community. Whether it’s an organisation supplying white-box networking hardware or virtualised network functions, or someone deploying an application or service at the edge of the network, anyone adhering to the correct standards can be part of the makeup.

As a result, smart devices can be more tightly integrated into the network, rather than just as connected end points. This is vital to the development of ‘digital twins’ – physical objects that have a virtual online counterpart. These can span everything from simple IoT devices, through to connected multifunction devices and autonomous vehicles, and they extend all the way up to manufacturing, buildings, smart cities and even people.

And this is where perhaps one of the most interesting advantages of OpenRAN comes into play – the potential for it to improve network and data security, especially around 5G and IoT. It’s been a topic of discussion at the recent FCC ‘Forum on Open Radio Access Networks’ and the Prague 5G Security Conference.

It makes sense because the exponential rise in IoT connections (expected to rise to almost 25 billion globally by 2025, according to GSMA Intelligence) will naturally mean more potential threat vectors. And this is where the distributed and virtualised network design of OpenRAN can be advantageous. By implementing a mesh defence strategy, the security load can be divided up and the results aggregated, enabling discovery and provisioning by customer, service or application. Operators can then get a higher-level view and apply strategic decisions that filter right down to the most granular levels. This bespoke and segmented approach can also bolster national sovereignty, by enabling specific network paths to be routed and protected with additional security applications and monitoring.

What’s crucial in this scenario is the ability to monitor all traffic, including encrypted traffic (in a non-intrusive way) which enables SOC/NOC teams to derive threat intelligence or monitor Quality of Service (QoS) across their network. In the event of a large-scale attack, such as Distributed Denial of Service or credential stuffing attacks, the disaggregated and virtualised nature of OpenRAN can enable an operator to shut down a small part of the network and neutralise the attack while minimising network disruption. To accomplish this, operators need an uncompromised view of the network, devices and traffic.

Because OpenRAN seamlessly enables the ability to segregate the network for a variety of different consumer, enterprise and societal services, it can help to integrate data security into every aspect of the network by design, not just at the edge and core. At the same time, local data protection laws can be maintained.

Of course, delivering on the promise of innovation and an open marketplace requires trust. The combination of using open, robust standards and having security implemented by a trusted partner can ensure growth while protecting users and data. This can only be achieved by allowing operators to have as much visibility as possible, end-to-end across their whole network and the control to manage what goes in/out of it. This transparency is something that the large vendors don’t provide.

OpenRAN will enable mobile operators to take back control, reducing infrastructure costs by freeing them from a dependence on those large technology suppliers and their proprietary hardware. It also champions flexibility and interoperability, allowing operators to use the best technology solutions available from a range of smaller suppliers to deliver fast, reliable and secure mobile networking.

Block pay as you go phones to beat county lines drug dealers, police chief urges

 

A police chief today called on telecoms giants to shut down county lines drug dealers’ unregistered pay-as-you-go phones, capable of sending 500 texts to customers in seconds.

Detective Superintendent Gareth Williams says the £1 billion-a-year trade relies on unregistered handsets bought in cash with no questions asked. The mobiles are used to broadcast deals to large groups of buyers.

He has spoken to MPs about a new law similar to the one that significantly reduced metal theft when it became illegal to trade scrap for cash in 2013.

Mr Williams, who leads British Transport Police’s national crackdown on county lines gangs, told the Standard: “I doubt there’s something equally as simplistic as mobile companies helping us with this. Not many people send 500 texts in one go. So why have sims and phones got that capability?

“Mobile companies could stop people buying phones without giving personal details and not let them pay in cash.

“There are privacy arguments, I accept that, but the fact that people can go in a shop and buy 20 phones for £150 is highly unhelpful for us.

“We’ve caught youngsters with £65,000 in illicit cash. You can imagine what those sitting at higher tiers in the organisation are churning.”

County lines is the movement of drugs by gangs from cities into smaller towns, often exploiting children or vulnerable adults. Dealers from London, Birmingham and Liverpool often courier supplies to Brighton, Norwich, Cambridge and north and mid Wales.

Transport police have dozens of officers carrying out operations at train stations and on rail and Tube routes across England, Wales and Scotland.

County line operations have led to spikes in youth violence as gangs use knives and firearms to protect trade. Of 725 arrests, the youngest was just 13.

Mobile UK, the industry body for UK’s mobile operators, said: “While compulsory ID appears a simple solution, maintaining an up-to-date register would be hard to enforce, would not be fool-proof and could have severe unintended consequences for those who really need access to a mobile phone.”