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At the 2024 MWC held in Barcelona, Liu Kang, President of ICT Marketing & Solution Sales at Huawei, shared his insights into the new opportunities that 5G & BEYOND will bring, and how we can make the most of them

Liu Kang notes how each change in technology innovation has changed our economic development for the better. During the industrial revolution, it took about 100 years for the steam engine to deliver 30% additional growth to the world’s economy. This same economic growth pattern has taken just 20 years to reach in the digital economy era. With 5G, 5.5G and AI this is expected to take just 5 years!

The upgrade from 5G to 5.5G is estimated to increase network capabilities tenfold, with download speeds that will reach 10 Gbps and uplink speeds of 1Gbps, being able to support over 100 billion IoT (internet of things) connections. This sort of network upgrade will allow for a vast range of industry applications, such as The industry’s private line business will extend to private line + ICT services, industrial internet applications will expand from supporting production to core production, and IoT applications will grow from low-speed to encompassing low, medium, and high-speed full-scene services. These developments will create new business opportunities within the industry, says Liu Kang.

Furthermore, upgrading from 5G to 5.5G will allow the 50% of 5G operators who have already released FWA services, to upgrade to FWA Square, which will encompass the following scenarios:

FWA Pro. – aimed at high-end homes, enables the Gbps speed and end-to-end deterministic experience assurance.
FWA Lite. – aimed at oriented to low-end and mid-range requirements, further explores the user space, migrates existing 4G users
FWA Biz – aimed at enterprise use cases, which will utilise low-latency & high-reliability to benefit SMEs.

Liu Kang continues that with speeds of 50 Mbps guaranteed, 5G private lines have been widely used for fast and low-cost deployment. But with 5.5G, these speeds are set to increase to 300 Mbps (guaranteed) and 20ms latency with over 99.999% reliability, which could bring an incredible amount of possibilities for the industry, including significant advancements in telemedicine.

In industry, 5G is used already in many areas, such as mining, where more than 20 operators provide 5G services for more than 400 mines. With 5.5G, these situations can be upgraded with 5.5G smart mine solutions, streamlining the industry, making it safer, and increasing efficiency and profits.

Finally, Liu Kang notes that in 2023, there were 350 million connected vehicles on the road worldwide, with 45% of new vehicles sold reaching s L2+ intelligent level. Here, the smart collaboration of vehicles is paramount for driver safety, “necessitating a highly reliable network with a low latency of 20ms@99%. 5.5G can satisfy this network requirement, E2E technology has been verified in Shanghai, projected to improve traffic efficiency by 30% and reduce people’s commute time by 20%,” says Liu Kang.

In his closing remarks, Liu Kang noted that the development of industry is dependent on the collaboration of business with technology, “Only in this way can a virtuous circle of input and output be formed.”

 

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Weighed down by a $26 billion debt pile, Dish Network says it will likely pass on the chance to buy more spectrum from T-Mobile

Back in 2020, the controversial $24 billion merger of US mobile giants T-Mobile and Sprint was finally completed, reducing the number of major national operators in the market from four to three.

As part of regulatory remedies applied to the deal, Dish was permitted to purchase all of T-Mobile’s 800 MHz licences for roughly $3.69 billion by June 30, 2023. This was intended to both help Dish establish itself as a national mobile network operator in the US, as well as reducing the massive potential spectrum advantage held by the newly combined T-Mobile.

However, by summer last year, it was clear that Dish was in no position to make the purchase at such a price. After lengthy negotiations, the subsequent dispute between Dish and T-Mobile was ultimately resolved with Dish agreeing to pay a deposit of $100 million in exchange for an extension of the purchase deadline to April 1, 2024.

But now, with that deadline just a month away, Dish says it will be highly unlikely that the company will be able to make the scheduled purchase.

“We no longer believe it is probable that we will exercise the option,” said Dish via parent company EchoStar late last week.

Dish has been struggling to raise additional financing for a number of months now, having invested billions in their new Open RAN-based 5G network, all the while being stung by surging interest rates. The company saw both its mobile and pay-TV subscribers decline last year, leaving investors with little confidence in the business.

The company was reacquired by its once-parent business, satellite company Echostar, earlier this year, in a move seen by many as an attempt to shore up the operator’s finances.

With the spectrum purchase by Dish seemingly out of the question, T-Mobile will now be forced to offload the spectrum via an auction process, provided it raises at least the promised $3.6 billion.

Connected America is just one week away! Join the telecoms ecosystem in discussion around all the hottest topics live in Dallas, Texas. Get your tickets today!

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Pressure on the public sector to embrace AI must be “constant and relentless”, he said Deputy PM Oliver Dowden

The UK government has announced that it will test AI systems to increase efficiency and productivity within the civil service. 

Roles that the AI systems could assume include administrative work, analysing responses to government consultations, and drafting preliminary responses to parliamentary inquiries. 

The number of civil servants has skyrocketed in recent years, increasing by over 100,000 since 2016, reaching 519,780 last year. During the same period, the number of employees earning a six-figure salary has also doubled. 

Therefore, Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has ordered public services to cut spending to pay for tax cuts, and is expected to signal reductions in income tax or national insurance in next week’s Spring Budget. 

As such, AI is seen as a key technology in making the bureaucracy of government more efficient and reducing staffing costs. 

“It really is the only way, I think, if we want to get on a sustainable path to headcount reduction,” said Dowden speaking to the Telegraph. 

“Remember how much the size of the Civil Service has grown as a result of the pandemic and, and EU exit preparedness. We need to really embrace this stuff to drive the numbers down,” he continued. 

Dowden also cited a recently published report from think tank IPPR which concluded the government could save around £24 billion by increasing AI adoption, which Dowden confirmed is “the sort of target we should be aiming for”. 

Similar AI trials were also announced with the NHS, covering many fields such as diagnostics and prescription tailoring, which if given the go-ahead, will save hundreds of millions of pounds.  

The Deputy PM stressed that pressure on the public sector to adopt AI must be “constant and relentless”, adding “we can’t have the private sector adopting it at pace, and then us being laggards”. 

To aid in this AI transition, the ‘i.AI’ – the team of scientists, engineers, and experts commissioned last year by the government to work with various public sector departments in the adoption of AI – will be doubled in number, reaching 70 personnel.  

Keep up to date with the latest telecoms news by subscribing to the Total Telecom daily newsletter 

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News 

At MWC this year, we sat down with Igor LePrince, Chief Executive Officer of Boldyn Networks, to discuss their European operations and recent M&A activity 

Today, Boldyn Networks has announced the completion of its acquisition of Cellnex’s private networks business.  

The acquisition, which was originally announced in November last year, will primarily consist of Cellnex’s Finnish subsidiary Edzcom, which designs, builds, and operates private 4G and 5G networks in numerous markets across Europe.  

This is quite the turnaround for Cellnex, which itself had only acquired Edzcom in 2020.  

Speaking to Total Telecom at this year’s MWC, Boldyn CEO Igor LePrince said that the acquisition was a demonstration of the company’s increasing focus on the growing private network market. 

“Private networks have been one the pillars of our strategy for the last two to three years…. and acquiring probably the biggest private networks company in Europe is very exciting for us,” said LePrince. 

Explaining the acquisition further, Le Prince explained that the deal serves three key purposes for Boldyn: 

Acquiring a team of around 40 people who have are experts in deploying and running private networks for the past seven years,
Acquiring the credentials of Cellnex in the verticals in which they operate, such as the oil and gas, mining, manufacturing, and energy sectors, which Boldyn can then make use of in other parts of the world,
and taking over an existing portfolio of over 50 private networks across Europe.

Beyond the company’s M&A activity, LePrince explained how Boldyn has been investing hugely in Italy in preparation for the Pope’s jubilee in 2025, deploying small cells, implementing Wi-Fi coverage on the metro line, and around the main piazza in Rome.  

LePrince emphasised that this has been no easy task, describing the deployment around the city as “difficult” because of the poor quality of existing infrastructure and extensive bureaucracy related to new deployments. 

The project is one of the biggest concessions that the company are sharing with a municipality as part of a joint public–private investment. 

He draws a comparison to its partnership with the city of Sunderland, where Boldyn are deploying new use cases for smart city technology and digital infrastructure, hoping to elevate it to become the UK’s most advanced smart city. There are three networks to make these use cases a reality: a free Wi-Fi network running through the city, a narrowband IoT network, and a 5G network. 

LePrince emphasises that this is something that must be pushed on enterprises and cities to understand. Municipalities need to understand that they cannot afford to wait for operators to invest. They need to contribute to this process themselves if they really want the benefits a highly connected smart city can offer”  

When questioned on “why Sunderland?”, Le Prince explained that Sunderland Council and Boldyn shared a vision of the city’s digitalisation as a differentiator to attract investment .  

“The city and Boldyn had the same vision. The city was big enough to be able to play with everything, but small enough (with a population of around 200,000 people) to execute the project.”  

A perfect combination of scale and ambition like this is hard to find, said LePrince, and is greatly helped by the presence of a proactive council.  

Nonetheless, LePrince says there is a major opportunity for the company’s expansion of the neutral host model. Given , the capital expenditure pressure on operators today, LePrince says that there is “no way” that that cities can continue to sustainably deploy connectivity without adopting some form of neutral host approach.  

Catch Boldyn Networks’ partner Sunderland City Council at this year’s Connected North – 22-23 April in Manchester – get your tickets now!

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