The telecommunications industry is facing big transformation, especially with the rise of gen AI (artificial intelligence)—and perhaps there is no greater place where this has been on display recently than MWC Barcelona, which took place March 3-6 in Barcelona. Taking a closer look at MWC, we are seeing a few big trends emerging that are remarkably interesting for the coming year.
Once a year, roughly 100,000 thought leaders come together to talk about the top trends in technology and telecommunications. From digital agriculture to transportation to manufacturing, one big trend is that many industries are impacted by telecommunications and the rise of AI.
An IDC whitepaper suggests telecom and media companies are seeing nearly four times the ROI (return on investment) on every dollar invested in AI. Future growth trajectory of gen AI is steep too. In fact, the number of telecom providers anticipated using gen AI on customers’ experiences is expected to rise from 62% today to 90% by 2027.
Many of the tech companies that had big announcements at MWC are set to change the shape of the industry for years to come. For example, Microsoft announced the telco industry data model in Microsoft Fabric, which is designed to unify all data including network performance metrics and customer interactions in a single environment. The value here for telecom providers is they will be able to ingest, model, and analyze all this data through native Fabric integration, expanded data model, and developer and visualization tools.
Many telecom providers are taking advantage of cloud and AI in new ways as well. For example, New Zealand’s telecom provider, Spark, is migrating a portion of its workloads to Microsoft Azure and rolling out Microsoft 365 Copilot deployments. Meanwhile, Microsoft and Telefónica are extending their strategic collaboration to co-develop digital solutions using Open Gateway, a GSMA-led initiative that transforms communication networks into programmable platforms via Telefónica’s AI platform, Kernel.
Data is key here. Many of the conversations at MWC centered around data—and technology is the driving force that is giving industries the data when and where they need it.
In a private press briefing prior to MWC, Ryuji Wakikawa, vice president and head of research institute of advanced technology at SoftBank Corp., said there is a mix of legacy radio technology plus some innovative new things in the next 10 to 20 years. AI won’t necessarily eliminate anything—but it can contribute to this market and this industry.
Softbank had several big announcements last week. One of the biggest is that SoftBank is conducting research on AI for RAN (radio access network), conducting verification tests on three use cases for improving wireless performance including:
- Uplink channel interpolation
- Sounding reference signals prediction
- AI-driven MAC scheduling
These tests successfully demonstrated the effectiveness of AI in enhancing RAN performance. The results of this AI for RAN verification demonstrate that capacity expansion can be achieved without deploying new base stations, indicating that AI for RAN has the potential to reduce the need for investment in base station infrastructure.
In a separate announcement, SoftBank shared its collaboration with Fujitsu Limited. Together, the companies completed the implementation of CU (central unit) functions on the NVIDIA Grace CPU Superchip platform as part of its efforts toward accelerating the commercialization of AITRAS, a converged AI-RAN solution.
The company also announced it developed a feature that isolates the network to the edge AI server on AITRAS, a converged solution of AI-RAN, enabling secure access.
To enable all this, SoftBank and Red Hat have jointly developed a solution that monitors energy usage and optimizes power consumption for vRAN (virtualized Radio Access Networks) and AI applications operating in AI-RAN data centers. SoftBank and Nokia have also integrated a new function into the orchestrator (“AITRAS Orchestrator”) of AITRAS.
The bottomline is the telecommunications industry is facing big transformation, especially with the rise of AI. Industries will continue to evolve, as new innovation is underway. What are you seeing in your own industry?
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