hi I'm Tony pulas at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona today I have a very esteemed panel of people that are going to help me understand the adoption of oan or open ran and its benefits gentlemen welcome let me introduce you first Sandy charma who is the vice president and Global head of portfolio 5G and Oran networks at Tech Mahindra thank you for being here next we have we Yang who is the general manager ecosystem development organization Network and Ed solutions group at Intel Corporation you must be very important with such a long title rang I'm
sure and last but certainly not least we have hit Singh who is the CEO of the send digital Solutions limited gentlemen thanks for being here and thanks for putting up with my very long introduction but let's get right onto the subject so sand deep let me start with you if I can we're seeing strong momentum and progress with carrier adoption of open R and it's taken a while to get there I know but what are the key takeaways and what are the next steps to continue enabling service providers to get this ecosystem running overall yeah
right you're right Tony Oran is now shaping up well really well and you know that Oran is actually providing an ecosystem to The Operators or to the carriers who deploy a flexible solution the way they want to be it's an available change that will changing that will change is changing the transforming the ran industry as a whole we as a techman they involved in almost all thear large scale deployments in open R including small scale trial as well and the pocs of the new age Solutions around it at the same time when we evolved ourselves
as a system integrator in this domain we realize there set of pillars or learnings that can be leveraged or that can be replicated for a successful or journey and few of them includes uh importance of interoperability you need to make sure the system different systems components interrupt at the same time you need to look at uh the lab EOS system play so that you can create a pre-integrated pre-production sort of in stack ready for the operators at the same time importance of automation as well because you are bringing layers of you know Ai and cloudification
virtualization making it work for customers you need to put a lot of automation around it and finally uh the importance of security since you are moving towards SZ virtualization open interface you need to make this networks more and more secure having additional lay of security from the IT world and TCO world together that's how I summarize it wow that was a good summary though wayang I'm coming to you now how do you see the progression of Oran and how is Intel helping accelerate or adoption because a lot of people are wondering where Intel fits in
this all right all right of course yeah are hey so um we see tremendous progress year by year this is very encouraging right um just last year saw um different announcement happening AT&T with ericon um a Talis with Samsung and so on right we can the few more to mention but Intel being the Forefront of vran for over a decade and we've been in networking business for more than two decade as well and thanks to all the key learning coming out from Network function virtualization this not industrial knowledge accumulation help us to win the trust
from the partners that all the partners is leaning in trusting the technology that evolved from Network function viralization into the V and V by far is the most open Rand vand by far is the most complex decouplings that a require to go and address so what Intel is doing right inel is doing a couple things right first we're providing a fundamental based vran platform that could help the partners to protect the investment therefore they started right at the beginning with the opportunity to add on more capability that build into the platform itself is just progressively
activate let's point that way in the in the lament terms um we also working with the uh ecosystem Partners to make sure that they consume the additional capability that we keep on adding on to make it perfect right um we have VM Bruce that come with the fourth generation xon SC processor that we Ann now last year um able to deliver to the TCU expectation and now this year we demonstrate how things can go one step further by using a ven's AI development kits to activate the AI features and AI adoption will need to go
by faces so this is not a simple task but thanks to all the partner trust right we've been able to continuously help our partner to develop the solution tion on track at the same time helping the Telco to protect the TCO that desire TCO a I'm very interested firstly to find out a little bit more about your company Ascend digital Solutions let me know about that first Tony Ascend digital Solutions a company which is based in Ghana we are actually looking at uh doing large scale digital Transformations so over the last few years we have
taken up lot of digital infrastructure and right from the backbone or infrastructure fiber the data centers the wireless infrastructure and we're transforming the entire Paradigm to bring more and more digital connectivity to reduce digital divide and increase Financial inclusion so our mission is to actually create ubiquitous seamless uh networks to provide Universal excess Broadband well this question is I'm for you then the rate of new technology development and innovation has significantly increased over the last few years can you shed some light on how open ran plays a crucial role in driving digital connectivity for places
like say Africa and even India and Asia where how is it happening how's it rolling out so I think tech technology and the markets are usually separate okay so I won't say like technology brings the right level of transformation and the country's agenda for digital okay but what technology does it actually accelerate the space of that particular digital transformation but when we look at open run and the traditional run we are going through the whole process of launching an open run open R network uh first in Africa there are a lot of Trials going on
but we're really looking at something that comes out comes out this year the challenges that we are seeing in the traditional ran vendors and the open ran vendors the open Rand ecosystem is still small you know and it is also fragmented into how the different components are built up so what is happening is that if if I am a module a I put lot of my R&D money in module a and if I get an order I'm not able to leverage the scale because scale does not exist okay so when you actually pack up all
the modules the price of open Raven is higher okay but the question comes in for us when you look into the technology to bring the level of innovation that is needed to drive that level of connectivity to the edge to bring that open Innovation ecosystem that actually creates that hypers scale structure that's where open R differentiate itself with the traditional R other key thing that we're looking at is the speed of bringing speed and acceleration of the digital transformation okay now if you take a traditional run ecosystem and look into the different processes uh to
actually go in terms of zero touch provisioning full automation okay configuration of the infrastructure we said that we look at open run that they have done that you know there is a lot of possibility to to bring the infrastructure faster in time and deliver on demand scalability that is needed as part of the cloud and virtualized infrastructure so that one of one key component of having a technology which is cloud native and bringing that level of automation gives us an advantage or let's say open Rand operators an advantage to go faster as compared to the
traditional run very well explained for somebody like me I sometimes grasp with all the layers that are involved with open Rand roll outs and I think that was very well put but I'm going to come back to you in a moment about new networks new networks are also getting more complex right uh what role do you see AI taking in furthering Network transformation uh we have to talk about AI because that's the subject that's been hitting us here constantly but what role do you see a AI taking in furthering Network transformation journey by addressing things
like Automation manageability and of course that awful word sustainability it's coming up all every day now yeah honestly speaking the values that Oran is bringing in in terms of virtualization and having a common data Lake across the different layers of network functions brings a lot of you know applicability of AI now you need not to worry about someone else looking into multiple domains you can have your AI engines running you can take observability end to end across right from Hardware infrastructure layer to the network functions functions layer and bringing a meaning observability out of it
so that Network can take a meaningful decisions at the same time there are two versions of AIS like traditional Ai and the J and you can use J for more operational efficiencies as well taking all the you know customer complaints and all faster resolution all those things can be better handled and most important thing the sustainability part of it sustainability is is not new it was there in the traditional Network there was a need for that and it will remain as as long as we are operating on natural resources but if you look at the
AI part of it AI once helps you in dating taking a meaningful decisions out of the how the networks is operating where the power consumption happening on a high level where you can optimize it AI brings a lot of flexibility having a software virtualization done with open r with open interfaces you can bring different models and Achieve efficiencies out of it in terms of lower power consumption or optimize power consumption across the network I can see wayang going oh oh it's also important for us he wants to let us know go ahead yeah just power
top there absolutely right U AI is um a topic that every single meeting in this trip towards the end of meeting will ask what's your AI strategy um well if I put AI into o context right very specifically or vrand context right it it will be a progressive a um um uh um uh Improvement let's put that way so let's go by um three layer right I talk about the Intel VR platform early on within the platform itself it do come along with the AI capability that waiting to unlock it's the same TCO Intel Flex
Rand software reference software is the glue that so far by far in the marketplace most of the ecosystem partner will refer to so it's a glue to help the ecosystem to integrate between the upper layer with the platform itself and within the flex Rand software now we are bringing the vran AI development kits on top of bid and that helps to unlock the capability I'll I'll throw three three example out the energy saving right helping to able to analyze the real time say power usage and collect all those metrics and able to analyze the metrix
and provide the best recommendation to put the CPU call into either stage and wake it up um AT&T Showcase in the boo that a um with 16 just 161 16% of the power saving it translate to 4.2 million of the Saving right just B basic things calculation right energy that's one um second part of it the uh beam management right um by implementing AI it could help to manage the bean bean forming Bean Management in more effective way and can be user defined as well and then lot the third the third one that we showcase
is the uh Resources management through the slicing but the key Point here is the platform and the software will provide the capability we would like to help together with within the ecosystem help the Telco with the data set that coming through the Telco is the most important thing the data set will decide how accurate and how effective it is to help the Telco to gain gain the benefit out from it so therefore we we are providing the pre-trained model based on Flex R software and the V kits V AI kits with the data that coming
in data set coming Telco to help to pre-train the model the more model we pre-train the better it is and it benefit all the ecosystem partner to use it you don't need to repeat again you just take whatever we have right it help the ecosystem partner to grow H how was I going to affect your operations I think for AI what we're looking at largely from a sustainable perspective our goal is 0 bit0 watt so what it means is that if there is no traffic on the on the on the network I don't want to
don't want to power it up because see the challenge what we are seeing in Oran is there is a lot of decoupling of interfaces and opportunity to bring cost Hardware okay but it is also increasing the what we have seen so far the power consumption in the data centers because the amount of cus that you need to deliver the similar line of capacity and the amount of interface that you need from the fiber to the back hole is huge so it has so from a perspective of power consumption okay it is a bit higher okay
but I think overall from an AI perspective what we really want as as as Max said is we need to have the models which are trained because we want something which is plugin we want something that something comes up and says guys here it is and we will have a 30% power saving we don't have to wait for 6 months one year to have the strain models you might have a localization in facts like you know how much of you know the the sites are running on the electricity how much of SES are running on
the solar and how the how the local operation is working but those trade models if they come pre pre pre-trained then we actually save a lot of time to gate that efficiency gain that efficiency makes a lot of sense in summary I'm going to ask you one question and I want all of you to give me a nice concise answer on this one from an oan perspective how do you envisage the network evolving in the future how you do that in in a short time I don't know but have a go so Network going to
be more and more autonomous day by day as you evolve further AI will play more important role and the systems will be native AI driven we need not to create additional layer of AI and how B fast we can do how better we can do is as we evolve in the industry we all will see it but that's how I see it is happening with the Rick Evolution happening with the xfs and RFS coming in evolution ultimately to 6G AI is going to drive how things should happen yes so you someone was going to say
6G and it had to be you well done s well what do you think um well um few things right um we we were going to see more Innovation coming up right within a the AG Computing and 5G converge together become a a bigger markets right partner will come in and collaborate um we will see the interfaces will get defined better and better right uh interoperability we getting like better and better as well um the partnership among the ecosystem will be better as well because all those key learning will get share across the ecosystem you
encourage we all encourage right the more ecosystem to come and participate in this grow this business grow itself is very healthy right and of course um AI will come in in the Progressive Way right and any key learning will help the others Network networks function as well um to to Simply put the uh or going to be um pretty positive in the future the way I look at it yeah so we make progress and um the only see the only things that we see is upside right now yeah yeah that's good to hear arred what's
your opinion of the future network we want Oran to be embraced with a larger ecosystem likes of ericon noas really really need to actually embrace it because so far they've been resisting the whole thing you know it has been driven by New Age operator likes of Rakuten mobile which have done an excellent work on bringing Oran live okay but these other big vendors needs to embrace so that the cost of ownership and the TCO gets lower okay from an innovation perspective it's the best technology any Telecom operators will have and if you see from what
one in one has done with about 500 of edge data centers and stuff they're opening the interfaces and bringing the content closer to the user so today if I have to stream like a you know very high quality video I don't need to cash from the dollar Center I can do a local stuff you know I can break out there the user plane doesn't need to go back into my code okay so that's the advantage of bringing as as Max said and sanep is saying is that the Innovation power of open run is humongous to
transform any Telecom operations well when it will bring the benefits of a local content and distribution mobile Edge Computing to the users gentlemen thank you so much I now think that oan has a big future you've convinced me thanks very much very much for for your help sand deep weang and harrid thanks for being with me today thanks you thanks Ronnie
