MWC 2022: 5G software, service assurance and sustainability

A return to face-to-face meetings proved a great relief for the 50,000 or so attendees of the GSMA’s Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona.

Almost everyone I spoke to was enthusiastic about the return to semi-normal business activity and the reduced headcount eased the logistics of being at the Fira.

There was, however, a noticeable lack of delegates from APAC and particularly China whose Covid-19 isolation rules meant attendance would have involved a month’s worth of quarantine in various hotels. Nonetheless, many of the usual booths were there and gaps were filled with much needed seating areas and networking spaces. The big question for us, of course, was what has changed in telecoms IT? I will go into more detail in upcoming blogs and podcasts, but here are five initial observations from my week of meetings:

The Middle East is a hotspot for BSS/OSS investment

Communications service providers (CSPs) such as Etisilat, Mobily, Ooredoo, Orange and Zain are spending heavily on business and operational support systems (BSS/OSS) and network solutions with the aim of scaling and monetizing 5G deployments.

Several vendors showed me deals (under NDA) that will help drive automation in service operations for a new breed of 5G-centric consumer and business services. Many of these are focused on BSS and will help operators address the rating, charging, billing and partner settlements requirements of new service lines like those found in IoT, or digital service models that are significantly more complex and more nuanced than the legacy revenue management function.

Vendors with a broad cloud-native offering such as Netcracker seem to be doing very well in the region and are beefing up delivery and services headcount there to meet demand. And Ericsson signed a hardware, software and services deal with Zain KSA live at the event for a new charging platform.

Several next-generation network deals were also discussed in the region. For example, Huawei will be providing Etisalat UAE with a 5G edge cloud platform to support new service models in the operator’s B2B segment. More on the edge cloud story to come. .

Network suppliers’ MPN plans include CSPs

There has been a suspicion in the industry that the likes of Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung and Amazon Web Services (AWS) want to eat the CSPs’ lunch when it comes to the growing market for mobile private networks (MPNs). I put this to many vendors and there was a unanimous sense that it would be crazy not to have a straight to enterprise channel for these services.

Nonetheless, they say their primary focus for MPNs is to strengthen their relationships with telcos by helping them to succeed in MPN opportunities, especially once we move beyond the larger deployments like airports and into the numerous smaller sites, like small factories or retail environments. It was also suggested that the threat of competition hascreated a greater sense of urgency among CSPs.

Service assurance is hot

One striking feature of the BSS/OSS landscape on display in Barcelona was the huge focus on service assurance. There are tens of vendors that are concentrating on advancing network assurance from a performance monitoring, fault and event management perspective, as well as managing data from smart probes.

There are even some advancements happening in deep packet inspection using AI. And of course, vendors are continuing to capitalize on advances in data science to collate and create actionable insights from data coming up from existing network assurance feeds. and to use that data in real time to pass off to functions in the service fulfilment or service orchestration process. Or indeed to trigger its own OSS workflows as a reaction to what’s going on in the network.

As assurance becomes a much more active element, CSPs are realizing its potential for improving customer experience and fault resolution. I predict quite a lot more spending in this area in the coming two or three years.

Environmental topics are high on the list for CSPs

Sustainability was an important topic for C-level execs in many of the keynotes. Irrespective of their motives this can only be a good thing, especially if they are pumping investment into green technologies and rethinking the way telcos operate in the drive to carbon neutral. We’re not seeing a great deal of this mirrored in IT vendors’ portfolios yet, but companies like Nokia were showing dynamic power management of 5G RAN at their booths.

Given where we are with 5G, now is the time to start implementing greener infrastructure and to future-proof networks by making sure software allows for future optimization strategies. Currently, CSPs need to look at the physical kit. Rakuten, for example, alluded to its new Open RAN equipment needing a lot less cooling than previously CSPs will also have to start work on the planning and optimization software. Again, Rakuten has an interesting story developing here with AT&T software.

The metaverse is still confusing

I wondered if the metaverse would be this year’s carnival balloon, bobbing above a sea of confused faces. Well, it was, and it wasn’t. There were quite a few mentions in the keynotes and I heard MTN claim it is the first CSP to purchase 150 square meters of metaverse to start building its virtual real estate empire. The real question is what does it mean for telco networks and whether commercial opportunities will open up inside the metaverse if it comes to fruition.

From a network point of view, the exponential growth of data consumption has been easy to see for the last decade, especially in mobile. The metaverse looks like a good candidate for the next big use case driving that trend higher than the current age-of-video. I have long been skeptical about the mass adoption of AR/VR in a mobile context as there was no compelling killer app. But that could be set to change with the metaverse: early estimates suggest data throughput requirements over 5G could be between 100 and 1,000 times that of streaming Netflix.

From a commercial point of view, are we about to see a mirror of our two classical telco business segments, consumer and enterprise, opening up in a virtual world? If so, what opportunities are there for telcos if this all exists inside a holographic universe? And how can we bridge the gap with solutions like charging, rating, billing and so on. The jury is still out, but TM Forum has a research plan for a deep into the metaverse later this year.