With an audience of over 100K at this year’s Mobile World Congress (MWC) the event showcased a range of technological innovations, pushing the barriers for power efficient telecom networks.
Driving consumer-tech, network-tech and innovations, artificial intelligence won the day for discussion of the hour (or week or year), with multimodal interaction capabilities becoming a critical issue. Technology leaders addressed key industry trends with the vision of integrating significant technologies into operational processes. Some of these trends include the following:
AI Everywhere
MWC was filled with “AI everywhere”. When you sift through the AI-MWC buzz, it becomes clear that it’s not hype but rather reality. AI will create unique opportunities for the telecom industry.
“AI is everywhere but realize that it is only just starting…As we integrate AI into our networks, we talk about 5G, but AI will be the pillar of 5G,” said Christel Heydemann, CEO of Orange, who continued, “AI will probably be the real test case of real 5G applications using all the capacity and capabilities that 5G already has…” and “it will continue to have massive influence on every aspect of our lives.”
AI is even impacting Radio Access Networks (RAN) with the development of AI-powered RAN. T-Mobile’s Chief Technology Officer John Saw said in a statement, “By exploring AI-driven architectures and leveraging multi-purpose cloud infrastructure, we’re evaluating how accelerated compute for Layer 1 (L1) and the seamless integration of AI and RAN … will enhance network performance and efficiency.”
Agentic AI
AI leaders shone the light of where AI is heading in the very near future. Agentic AI, or artificial intelligent agents, will especially impact telcos. Bret Taylor, Chairman of the Board of OpenAI noted that there are not many technologies that even while they’re immature and imperfect, “you can clearly see the impact it will have on customer service and software engineering.”
And we are already seeing this effect, for example, Telenor announced its co-designed proof of concept for an Agentic AI system that “learns to optimize capacity and corresponding power consumption of the Radio Access Network (RAN).” While ServiceNow announced the introduction of AI agents for the telecom industry with Nvidia AI Enterprise Software designed to enhance productivity across the service lifecycle. As Rohit Batra, GM & VP of ServiceNow said “AI continues to be the key driver of business transformation in telecom.”
As AI agents become better skilled at performing specific tasks and can become more focused on telco related tasks, the entire telco industry will see a shift towards increased automation using agentic AI, with broader innovation embedded into the ecosystem.
5G SA and beyond on the cloud
It has taken some time but the move to 5G standalone and the lookout to 5G advanced deployed on cloud technologies was heavily discussed. Telefonica in Germany announced that they are expanding their current 5G core onto Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud services. They became the first, fully cloud-native 5G core network deployed on AWS currently serving a million subscribers. e& UAE is also advancing its future cloud-native converged packet core networks across its 4G and 5G (both stand alone and non-stand-alone) networks.
Orange announced an initiative to validate cloud-native, software-defined Radio Access Network (cloud RAN) solutions for the future of 5G and beyond. Its joint-collaboration “explores the potential of cloud RAN integrated over a hybrid cloud architecture,” which also highlights its move to network automation with software disaggregation.
Investing in advanced technologies
The rapidly changing telecom digital landscape was clearly unmistakable. President and CEO Telenor Group, Benedicte Schilbred Fasmer, spoke about how new technology becomes a key differentiator, which “translates into a business impact.” It is about “delivering true value to our customers, which always begins with the focus on their needs.”
Bringing new business value allows operators to expand into powerful techcos, joining together cross element sources such as storage, cloud and computing resources. Telcos, moving towards an AI future, will be central to ensuring everything and everywhere stay connected.
How RADCOM can help?
The move to 5G standalone (SA), 5G advanced (5G-A), and the AI trajectory, also means that new demands will be placed on the telecom network. Anticipating these demands, RADCOM showcased its answer to this AI quandary – ensuring operators can offer quality services while keeping costs down with its own deep learning, generative AI-powered solutions.
RADCOM, a leader in advanced, intelligent assurance solutions, offers AI-driven analytics and generative AI (GenAI) to enhance customer experiences. At MWC, RADCOM showcased its flagship solution – RACDCOM ACE that is designed to support 5G networks and beyond. The solution is open, vendor-neutral and cloud-agnostic, offering observability from the RAN to the core. The platform captures real-time data to reduce operational costs and empowers exceptional quality and service with valuable performance, and AI-based subscriber intelligence analytics.
Additionally, RADCOM launched its solution with ServiceNow, leveraging AIOps to offer advanced automated complaint resolution. Integrating the RADCOM RAN Analytics Solution, it provides operators with ticket validation and prioritization for the following advantages:
- Creates better experience and drives value for customers
- Analyzes issues on a granular level
- Ensures proactive investigation of degradations
- Enables fast resolution of issues before they amplify to other regions and customers
RADCOM also revealed its development of next-generation, high-capacity user plane data capture. RADCOM’s next-generation analytics solution is designed to provide real-time, customer-level quality of experience (QoE) insights by capturing and processing high-volume user plane data across the entire network at the edge.
Powered by Nvidia’s BlueField-3 DPU, the solution aims to empower telecom operators with greater subscriber and service visibility. This includes optimizing network computing resources and reducing operational costs, such as, for network probes that can be challenging to scale and manage. Additionally, it is planned to pave the way for cutting-edge generative AI applications, enabling use cases such as customer intent analysis to enhance experiences in 5G and beyond.
Conclusion
MWC highlighted the impact AI will continue to have on 5G and the telecom industry. Capitalizing on these new opportunities, operators can create real value for their customers as Benedicte Schilbred Fasmer, President and CEO Telenor Group said, “Always start with the customers… we must work with our customers to drive both business and society impact.”
This will demand support from real-time, innovative intelligence assurance solutions that offer granular and smart insights into operational efficiencies, guaranteeing delivery of exceptional service quality, providing enhanced customer experiences and keeping costs down.
To learn more about our RADCOM ACE, see https://radcom.com/products2022/products-radcom-ace/
