In this episode of The 5G Factor, our series that focuses on all things 5G, the IoT, and the 5G ecosystem as a whole, we look at the top cloud and telco takeaways from conversations and sessions at Mobile World Congress 2024. The major takeaways consist of Red Hat and Tech Mahindra boosting their hybrid cloud collaboration, Red Hat and NTT working with Fujitsu and NVIDIA to ready IOWN environments for real-time edge AI data analytics, Indonesia’s Telkomsel selecting Google Cloud to integrate GenAI for augmenting its operations and product offerings, VMware focusing on assuring the DISH Wireless Open RAN build in the US, and TELUS using HPE servers to complete its Open RAN mission in Canada.
Our analytical review focused on:
Red Hat and Tech Mahindra Uplift Hybrid Cloud Capabilities. Red Hat and Tech Mahindra announced a collaboration aimed at making it easier for telecommunication service providers to accelerate and manage 5G adoption and deployments across the hybrid cloud. Tech Mahindra’s Multi-mode Companion Cloud with Red Hat OpenShift running on AWS can support multiple network use cases, spanning RAN, edge computing, transport and 5G core, to extend capabilities across hybrid cloud environments with integrated automation and orchestration capabilities. We delve into why Red Hat OpenShift provides the infrastructure and application layer key to supporting operations at scale across any cloud environment, with Tech Mahindra’s netOps.ai offering a unified view to manage infrastructure and automate applications with low touch provisioning. Plus, we look at how Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes enables full cloud lifecycle management to automate Day 0 and Day 1 configurations and orchestrate workloads across Red Hat OpenShift clusters on-premises and on AWS.
Red Hat and NTT Show IOWN Ready for Real-time Edge AI Data Analysis. As part of the Innovative Optical and Wireless Network (or IOWN) initiative, Red Hat and NTT in collaboration with NVIDIA and Fujitsu, have jointly developed a solution targeted at enhancing and extending the potential for real-time AI data analysis at the edge. Using technologies developed by the IOWN Global Forum and built on the foundation of Red Hat OpenShift this solution has received an IOWN Global Forum’s Proof of Concept (PoC) recognition for its real world viability and use cases. The PoC evaluated a real-time AI analysis platform4 with Yokosuka City as the sensor installation base and Musashino City as the remote data center, both connected through the IOWN All-Photonics Network. We assess why this is a breakthrough for AI edge applications since even when many cameras were accommodated, the latency required to aggregate sensor data for AI analysis was reduced by 60% compared to conventional AI inference workloads.
Telkomsel Selects Google Cloud to Boost Operations and Products with GenAI. Telkomsel announced a strategic collaboration with Google Cloud to integrate enterprise-grade generative AI (gen AI) into its operations and core product offerings for consumers and businesses. This latest collaboration builds on Telkomsel’s ongoing use of Google’s AI-powered advertising tools, such as Performance Max, with the aim of transforming its employee and customer interactions, augmenting overall user satisfaction, and improving business outcomes. Moreover, Nokia is running AVA Data Suite on Google Cloud to facilitate AI/ML development. We examine why such moves are further validating the overall Google Cloud for Telecommunications proposition.
VMware Looks to Assure DISH Wireless Open RAN Build. At MWC24, VMware, recently acquired by Broadcom Inc, unveiled that DISH Wireless has deployed VMware Telco Cloud Service Assurance across the Boost Wireless Network in a pilot production environment to deliver real-time network monitoring, assurance and automation, with the goal of providing a better 5G network and subscriber experience. We assess why the VMware Telco Cloud Service Assurance remote data collector service allows DISH Wireless the Network Operations Center (NOC) team to collect and analyze data from 20,000-plus cell sites. From our view, this is a critically important development for DISH Wireless to efficiently assure and scale its breakthrough Open RAN 5G network that is getting closer to offering more than 240 million Americans access to the latest in 5G connectivity technology and innovation.
TELUS Enlists HPE Servers to Complete Open RAN Mission. During MWC24, HPE announced it is working with TELUS, which is building Canada’s first 5G Open RAN, by providing infrastructure across 3,000 sites. Once completed, the new TELUS Open RAN 5G network can provide instantaneously responsive connectivity which can enhance the customer experience with faster connectivity and mobile access. We examine why HPE ProLiant DL110 Gen11 servers, designed specifically for telco workloads, are ready to provide an open and flexible, virtualized foundation to deliver next-generation cellular connectivity to urban and rural Canadians. The servers provide Open RAN infrastructure to assist TELUS with the interoperability it needs by providing the foundation for DU implementations, which are responsible for preparing data for transmission across the 5G network.
Watch The 5G Factor show here:
Listen to the audio here:
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
Transcript:
Ron Westfall: Hello and welcome, everyone, to The 5G Factor. I’m Ron Westfall, Research Director here at The Futurum Group, and I’m joined here today by my distinguished colleague, Tom Hollingsworth, the networking nerd and Event Lead at Tech Field Day here at The Futurum Group. And we will be focusing on the major 5G ecosystem developments that have caught our eye. Specifically today, we will be reviewing some of the remaining key takeaways from the Mobile World Congress 2024 event, coupled with effectively previewing Mobile World Commerce 2025, in effect, a forward-looking scoop by about 49 to 50 weeks. So definitely let’s buckle up and jump right in. So Tom, welcome to your debut here on The 5G Factor and many thanks for joining. And what have you been doing this past month? What has been coming to the top of your mind?
Tom Hollingsworth: Thank you, Ron. It’s a pleasure to meet you here on The 5G Factor and also be a guest. I’ve been really busy working a lot of networking company, mobility companies. You know, we have a lot of events that we do here at Tech Field Day, but more importantly, we’re always looking at where the direction is going in the technology so we’re trying to capture things as they’re coming along. And that’s why shows like Mobile World Congress are so important is that gives us that ability to see where the companies want to take the technology and we can meet them kind of where they want to be and discuss the value of it with folks like your audience.
Ron Westfall: Well, perfect. In fact, that actually reminds me, that reminds us that there is an upcoming Mobility Tech Field Day in mid-May, May 15th, May 16th. And I know even in mid-May, the takeaways from this show will still be pretty much in play and fresh. So I’m definitely looking forward to our upcoming Tech Field Day, May 15th and 16th. So stay tuned, folks, for that as well. More to come.
And with that, let’s jump right in. I’m going to kick it off by looking at Red Hat. In fact, at the show, Red Hat and Tech Mahindra announced a collaboration that is aimed at making it easier for telecommunication service providers to accelerate and manage 5G adoption, as well as deployments across the hybrid cloud.Now Tech Mahindra’s Multi-mode Companion Cloud, with Red Hat OpenShift naturally, running on AWS can support multiple network use cases spanning RAN, edge computing, transport and 5G Core to extend capabilities across hybrid cloud environments, as well as with integrated automation and orchestration capabilities. Clearly they all tie together, they’re all very important.
And as foreground, I find that Tech Mahindra’s Multi-mode Companion Cloud offering can help server providers offload on-premises workloads to hybrid cloud environments. And we’ve been hearing a lot about that. This is something that’s really the reality today. That basically all of these major players are looking for, at the end of the day, a hybrid cloud implementation, balancing the best of both worlds with keeping some data workloads on premise, but others on cloud and we get some more in that in a minute.
Now, Red Hat OpenShift, as we know, provides the infrastructure application layer that is key to supporting operations at scale across any cloud environment, let alone hybrid, with Tech Mahindra’s netOps.ai offering, a unified view to manage infrastructure and automate applications with low touch provisioning. So right away we are talking about AI, in effect, and naturally that was a dominant theme at the show and, of course, what we’ll be talking about will definitely be addressing that.
Now, in addition, Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes, another hot topic word, and it’s enabling full cloud lifecycle management to automate day zero and day one configurations and orchestrate workloads across Red Hat OpenShift clusters on premises, as well as on AWS. And that is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of Red Hat’s partnership acumen in this area.
Now as part of what we know is the innovative optical and wireless network or IOWN initiative, Red Hat and NTT, in collaboration with NVIDIA as well as Fujitsu, have jointly developed a solution targeted at enhancing and extending the potential for real time AI data and analysis at the edge. And this is using technologies that are developed by the IOWN Global Forum and built on the foundation of Red Hat OpenShift. And this solution has received, in fact, an IOWN Global Forums proof of concept recognition for its real world viability and use cases.
And specifically the POC evaluated a real time AI analysis platform with Yokosuka City as a sensor installation base and Musashino City as the remote data center both connected through the IOWN all-photonics network. And as a result, even when a large number of cameras were accommodated, latency required to aggregate sensor data for AI analytics was reduced by 60% when compared to conventional AI inference workloads. So already, the race is on who is going to be the best at optimizing AI workloads, certainly AI inference workloads.
And also speaking of Japan, KDDI Corporation, a Japanese telecommunications operator, has chosen Red Hat to provide an open standard platform for its mobile network services, including their 5G Core and more. Now, from my view, a 5G Core is essential for enabling network slicing and additional ultra low latency services as well as applications. As such, KDDI’s new platform will be optimized for these services with the added ability to provide high bandwidth and increased reliability. And so with that kickoff, Tom, hopefully I’ve left plenty of bandwidth for you to share your thoughts and takeaways on what has Red Hat been doing that jumps out with their recent partnership moves.
Tom Hollingsworth: Well, it sounds like I have plenty of bandwidth as long as I’m running Red Hat OpenShift because that seems to be what everybody wants to be running now. But I think there’s two key takeaways from what Red Hat is trying to build. The first one that you touched on was the fact that they are kind of settling into this hybrid cloud workload mentality where you can run OpenShift on-prem, but you can also run it in AWS. And to me that eliminates one of the key kind of distractions from running things on-prem. When the cloud was starting to take off, what did everybody want to hear? “Well, you know, I don’t have any limitations anymore. If I run out of servers on-prem, I’m kind of stuck.” But in the cloud, servers are effectively infinite if your credit card is infinite as well.
What OpenShift is letting you do is say, “Okay, well, I can run some of this stuff on-prem, the things that I’m really a little bit wary about uploading to the cloud, or maybe I don’t want to pay that huge bill right now.” But if something happens, maybe it’s the end of quarter reporting period or something like that and I need to burst and have more elastic capabilities, OpenShift will just say, “All right. Well, we’ll just move everything over here, we’ll run the workloads, close the systems down and return the results.” And that is great, but only if you have a unified model dashboard to be able to do that because the last thing I want to do is traditional swivel chair management where like, “I’m on-prem over here, but now I have to go cloud over here,” and nobody wants that.
So by doing that with the unified dashboard, I think that that’s a huge value and it really sells what OpenShift is capable of because the best IT in the world is the one you never see, right? The applications just run and that’s great. The other thing is talking about these use cases with KDDI because I think that what you’re seeing is the… To me the real value of having a 5G Core is this kind of building it on more of a commodity where we can do the analytics, where we can detect things that are going on.
And I really love the example that you cited about doing the Yokosuka City camera stuff because that was one thing that I’ve always been curious about when you deal with these edge deployment kind of scenarios. Those cameras have a lot of data that they need to upload to do stuff, right? Why would I not process that information at the edge, pull the statistics, pull the information that’s valuable to me and only transmit what’s necessary? That reduces the amount of bandwidth that I’m using so that means that there’s more available for subscribers. It also reduces my transmission costs, which even if you’re a city, that you still want to keep costs low because money and bandwidth are not unlimited as much as we might like to admit it. So I think Red Hat has done some really good things here showing the value of what running on a stable platform like OpenShift is, but also being able to create these use cases where hybrid at the edge still matters while cloud is available to kind of be a backup, for lack of a better term.
Ron Westfall: Excellent points, Tom, and I fully agree. And I liked your points about on premises. In addition to capacity as well as cost issues, as we’ve seen quite simply, sometimes there are legal requirements, sovereignty requirements that say that data has to stay on premises and that’s the reality. And that’s why it’s really a hybrid cloud world with a great deal of the data still on premises, but increasingly more flexibility being offered by, again, the public cloud and other private cloud capabilities. So this is something that will definitely keep, I think, fueling more innovation and ideas as to how to take advantage of edge capabilities.
And with that, now let’s turn to Google Cloud and at the show I had a most insightful conversation with Jean-Philippe Goyet, who heads up product management and we addressed the main issue of why Google Cloud when it comes to the telco space. Now, specifically Indonesia’s Telkomsel announced a strategic collaboration with Google Cloud to integrate enterprise-grade gen AI into its operations and core product offerings for both consumers and businesses. And this latest collaboration builds on Telkomsel’s ongoing use of Google’s AI-powered advertising tools, such as Performance Max, with the aim of transforming its employee and customer interactions that can augment overall user satisfaction as well as, quite simply, improve business outcomes.
Also, for example, as we saw, Nokia has launched AVA Data Suite to run on Google Cloud to facilitate AI-ML development. And I think it’s important to also mention that machine learning, ML, is also integral to the overall vision here. It’s certainly basically joined at the hip with AI. And certainly at the show, AI was the dominant theme, to the point where some people are pretty much saying that maybe Mobile World Congress should rebrand itself as AI World Congress. However, we know that’s going to be pertinent to virtually every tech show through the rest of the year. So stay tuned.
But now coming back to Nokia AVA Data Suite, it’s providing CSPs and data scientists standardized pre-correlated data products packaged across 4G, 5G and the fixed domains. So this is, I think, important because, yes, 5G in itself is critical, but also there is backward compatibility for 4G that’s going to be around for quite a while in areas such as private networks and naturally the fixed domains. But optimally, many of these major carriers need to have all of these technologies, access connectivity technologies working in harmony. And the upshot here is that this can help the development of AI solutions for enhanced network performance, as well as sustainability and improving subscriber experience.
Now from my view, where this alliance is really standing out is that Nokia AVA Data Suite, which is derived from Nokia’s vast experience in building hundreds of network and subscriber use cases, is integrating with Google Cloud’s BigQuery and Vertex AI to create these AI-ML use cases that can ultimately drive more innovation and diversification of revenue streams. And with that, Tom, what are your thoughts on Google Cloud and what they’re doing with its telco proposition?
Tom Hollingsworth: Well, I love that they’re integrating Nokia’s AVA Data Suite because when you look at what Nokia has been doing for years, they have really high-quality data about all of these use cases. And that’s one of those things that, as you’re starting to develop analytics tools that leverage gen AI, you have to have good quality data. Not everybody is like OpenAI. They can’t just go download the whole internet and boil it and figure out what’s good. You need to know that what’s there works and what is there is solid, reliable data so that you reduce hallucinations and you get results back faster.
Every company that I’ve talked to in the last couple of months that is building some kind of a generative AI assistant, some kind of copilot system for what they’re doing, that’s my number one question. How are you getting this data? What are you training on? Where’s the value coming from? Because if you’re giving me a whole bunch of data that I don’t care about, then you don’t really build an assistant. It’s more like a junior admin who keeps getting in my way. Whereas if you train on good quality data, like that kind you get from Nokia, I can trust that the answers are coming back correctly and that’s hugely valuable to me. And going back to the original, the first part of the story where you’re talking about the Google Cloud gen AI things into that core offering for consumers and businesses, I know a lot of people out there are probably kind of rolling their eyes when they hear about, “Oh great, we’re putting another chatbot out there and I can’t believe we’re having to deal with this.”
But I have a question for all of you people who are doing that. How many of you have actually worked on a help desk before? Because I have, and I can tell you that for every really hard, like busted capacitor motherboard replacement that I had to deal with whenever I was working for a large computer manufacturer that the boxes looked like spotted cows, I spent a lot of time resetting AOL passwords, helping people log into their computers and getting rid of things in the startup menu that were slowing things down. So if I could have offloaded even half of that and really spent my time digging into the hard problems, the things that couldn’t be fixed by a script, that would free me up to do other things, but it would also reduce the call volume coming into the call center.
And if you’ve ever seen a call center, they’re just rows upon rows of cubicles of people who are basically just sitting around waiting for the phone to ring. And those people are an opportunity cost for every company. So I love this idea. Gen AI is going to fix a lot of the easily fixable problems. And yeah, I’m sure some of you are like, “But that’s going to take away jobs.” Most people don’t want jobs resetting passwords all day long. It’s about as mind-numbing as working on the world’s worst factory floor. So like I’m glad that Google is kind of reaching out with these ideas and just doing things that are super valuable.
Ron Westfall: Yeah, and I think those are excellent points. And I think it also brings to the forefront as good as the data input, garbage in, garbage out, no difference here. And I think what has been missing with some of the messaging, as people are jumping on the gen AI bandwagon, is the data management piece. So I think it’s just very important that here is Google Cloud when it comes specifically to the telcos, is partnering up with Nokia to address that very issue from the get-go and thus avoid some headaches down the line with data drift or, again, avoiding boiling the ocean and so forth. So I think these are all positive signs for Google Cloud in its efforts to raise its profile with the telcos specifically because the competition is intense as we know.
And that is something that I think will be a good segue into the next topic and that is Broadcom’s VMware. It also made announcements at the show and, as we know, VMware was recently acquired by Broadcom and it’s come to completion the acquisition officially. And what I think was interesting is at the show they unveiled that Dish Wireless has started deploying VMware Telco Cloud Service Assurance across the Boost Wireless network in a pilot production to deliver real time network monitoring, assurance and automation with the goal of providing a better 5G network and subscriber experience naturally. Now, for example, the VMware Telco Cloud Service Assurance remote data collector service allows Dish Wireless and its network operation center or NOC, the team there, to collect and analyze data from 20,000-plus cell sites so that’s going to be plenty of data. And upon problem detection, the NOC team receives an alert from VMware Telco Cloud Service Assurance, allowing them to take corrective action, assessing the assurance of the network as a whole.
And to date, the NOC team has deployed domain managers for multi-site monitoring across RAN sites over different regions. Now I see this as an important development since Dish Wireless is building out and deploying what can be viewed as a breakthrough Open RAN 5G network that is closer to offering more than 240 million Americans access to the latest in connectivity technology, that is the first purpose-built open source RAN network on a nationwide basis here in the US. Plus, now there’s more, VMware and Singtel are partnering to enable enterprises to manage their connectivity and cloud infrastructure through Singtel Paragon.
And I think that’s important because it’s an all-in-one orchestration platform for both 5G and Edge Cloud. And through this partnership, I anticipate that enterprises using apps and services based on the VMware Edge Cloud Orchestrator to be able to tap into Singtel 5G without having to redesign their apps. And as we all know, developers fully appreciate that. And with that, Tom, what are your views about VMware’s ongoing development efforts and partnerships? What did you find that just jumps right out?
Tom Hollingsworth: To me, this is the heart of why Open RAN is such a magical thing, is because it’s not just about upgrading to 5G and creating this operational efficiencies. It’s about creating a common set of hardware because we all know the first trick to getting something like Open RAN working is to know what you’re deploying it on so that it’s consistent. And if you don’t think that’s important, I’d like you to go call the people at Meta, back when they were Facebook and they were trying to figure out how to monitor all of their switch infrastructure. And the secret was to figure out how to run Linux on it because they’d already solved that problem by monitoring their Linux servers.
So that was the whole purpose behind doing the Wedge and 6-pack and using FBOSS as an operating system was so that they could get a Linux Kernel running on the switch that they can install their Linux Kernel monitoring systems in there to be able to give them information. And that to me feels like what is going on here with this ORAN deployment is Boost Wireless is something that everybody knows about because they see it everywhere. It’s one of the largest prepaid mobile companies out there. And now they have an infrastructure that they can monitor just like any other servers out there. I mean, what was it you said in the opening, talked about the fact that there’s 20,000 cell sites?
Ron Westfall: Yes, exactly.
Tom Hollingsworth: Do you want to manage 20,000 cell sites? I don’t even want to manage 20,000 ports, let alone sites. But that’s key because now they can get immediate up, down, set notifications, they can see when things are not working right and they can do something about it. You know, I still remember the old days of, yeah, we got to send a truck out to that CO and see if we can figure out if the squirrels got into the 66 block again. No, this is a whole new world where there’s a lot better capability of monitoring these things so that the people that are doing the work have things to do and can get to the right spot quickly to take care of it. And you can’t underestimate that enough. But that doesn’t work on old technology. You’ve got to have modern things like 5G Core. You’ve got to have modern things like Open RAN. And so I’m excited to see how that’s going to get deployed.
Ron Westfall: Yeah. And I think that kind of also serves a precursor for what to expect later in the year, let alone Mobile World Congress 2025. And I love the Linux analogy. I think what VMware is bringing to Dish will ultimately prove a difference-maker because, as we know, Dish is getting plenty of heat for falling behind schedule with its 5G Open RAN build. But as we know, it was challenging from the get-go. And if that is really going to take off successfully, it is going to be pivotal that the VMware capabilities come through to enable that scaling, that lesson learned by Facebook-slash-Meta. And I think that is definitely a great example of why this can be done. There’s precedent here, lessons learned, and I think that’s something that we can definitely view as a major takeaway, not at this last show, but also something to look forward to down the path.
And with that, now let’s turn to really the final theme that we’re going to look at or the final partnership, really. And that is also at the show, HPE announced that it’s working with Telus, which we understand actually as Canada’s first 5G Open RAN network. And that is they’re providing infrastructure across 3000 sites, not as daunting as 20,000 sites, but still very important to be able to scale that intelligently and along with all the other requirements that are built in, for example, energy efficiency and so forth. Now once completed, the new Telus Open RAN 5G network can provide instantaneously responsive connectivity. I like that term. Kind of marketing, but nevertheless it gets the idea across that why is this different? Why not say non-standalone 5G, which is a combination of 4G and 5G?
Well, this is the reason why. Because that can enhance not only the customer experience, but also, quite simply, speed up connectivity and also improve latency. So things like, say on the industry side like manufacturing floors, can actually integrate private 5G directly, not only with a private network, but also through neutral network capabilities, tap into the public 5G network to basically get the best of both worlds, as well as leveraging Wi-Fi where it makes the most sense. Now getting back to this announcement specifically, HPE ProLiant DL110 Gen11 servers, say that five times real quick, are designed specifically for telco workloads and it’s slated to provide an open and flexible virtualized foundation to deliver next-gen cellular connectivity to, again, urban and rural Canadians.
And the servers can provide Open RAN infrastructure to assist Telus with the interoperability it needs by providing that foundation for a distributed unit or DU, which is responsible for preparing data for transmission across the 5G network. And leading into the show, I think Telus had a tremendous marketing push and this partnership with HPE kind of exemplified why Telus is really upping its game, why it’s really now at the kind of the innovative forefront when it comes to 5G networks in North America, let alone Canada. And actually, Tom, what are your views about what’s going on here with HPE, as well as Telus itself?
Tom Hollingsworth: I can still remember time when I went to Las Vegas for a big trade show and my phone wouldn’t work in the hotel. In fact, it didn’t start working until I walked into where the Wi-Fi was in the conference and then, all of a sudden, I could make phone calls again even though there was no such thing as wifi calling. And it’s because all of the data transmission that was going on when you put 25,000 geeks in one central location. Now imagine that, only they’re all Canadians and they’re at a hockey arena because that’s what this is a lot of this is about is being able to deal with these kind of bursty situations and instantaneously responsive. Yes, that’s great buzzword marketing stuff, but if it does work, like if they see a spike in a certain area and can be able to reallocate resources and offload stuff, that helps. And you get customers that are super happy about that. That’s really what they’re about. Because let’s be fair, a lot of mobile networks are a lot like airlines. They all kind of suck equally.
You just have to pick one that sucks the least right now. And I feel like that’s the way a lot of people do things. But as these networks become more and more valuable to the companies that are leveraging them, whether it’s AT&T or Orange or Verizon or Telus or whoever, they have to put that up there, which means they have to invest in it. And getting a partnership with a company like HPE who, let’s be fair, has been building servers since forever. Like I was listening to a podcast recently and they were talking about the original Hewlett and Packard working out of their garage in Palo Alto. Like they have the chops, they know how to do this. So being able to design these servers, specifically for telecom infrastructure, is super valuable because that means that you get support from a well-known manufacturer. You have people who are very smart when it comes to this design stuff. So they are going to design a system that can live in a base station and not get gummed up with like mosquitoes and other kinds of gunk or whatever is going to be living down there.
But more importantly, you don’t have to go it alone. Because that’s one thing that we’ve seen a lot from previous generations of the technology. If you kind of have to build it yourself, you’re stuck. Because if it runs, but you’re the only like five people in the company know how to work on it, like you’re stuck supporting that until you can get rid of it. But by using industry standard technologies, by working with companies like HPE, I think what Telus is saying is, is that our investment in the future will be future-proof so that when the time comes for us to do upgrades to like five and a half G or 6G or whatever the next evolution of this is, it’s just a simple server swap, if we even need to change the hardware at all, because a lot of it’s coming into the software side of the market. So these servers have plenty of horsepower to run whatever you’re going to throw at them.
Ron Westfall: You know, it’s a great analogy, Tom, when it comes to why pick this mobile carrier. And what I think is also notable here, as we know, is that HPE can certainly address Telus’s requirements on the server side, but stay tuned. As we know, there are shelling out $14 billion to acquire Juniper Networks. Now I think that is definitely good news when it comes to the overall network architecture in terms of optimizing, say the transport components, the RIC capabilities and so forth. So stay tuned. I know we’ll be revisiting what HPE is doing in the market, let alone Telus, and I think that definitely provides a capstone for our conversation. And thank you so much, Tom, for joining today’s show. I’m definitely looking forward to having more conversations like this on The 5G Factor as well as Tech Field Day, the mobility one, certainly. So thank you again.
Tom Hollingsworth: No problem. Thank you for having me on, Ron. It was a great conversation and I loved hearing your perspective on things.
Ron Westfall: Wonderful. Thumbs up. And with that, everybody, thank you for joining our webcast, podcast. We always appreciate folks taking time out to do so and naturally don’t forget to bookmark us. And with that, everybody have a great 5G Day. Thank you.
Other insights from The Futurum Group:
5G Factor: Key MWC24 Takeaways – Semis and Devices
5G Factor: MWC24 Preview – P5G and API Alliances Flourishing
5G Factor: Key MWC24 Takeaways – Open RAN
Author Information
Ron is an experienced, customer-focused research expert and analyst, with over 20 years of experience in the digital and IT transformation markets, working with businesses to drive consistent revenue and sales growth.
He is a recognized authority at tracking the evolution of and identifying the key disruptive trends within the service enablement ecosystem, including a wide range of topics across software and services, infrastructure, 5G communications, Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), analytics, security, cloud computing, revenue management, and regulatory issues.
Prior to his work with The Futurum Group, Ron worked with GlobalData Technology creating syndicated and custom research across a wide variety of technical fields. His work with Current Analysis focused on the broadband and service provider infrastructure markets.
Ron holds a Master of Arts in Public Policy from University of Nevada — Las Vegas and a Bachelor of Arts in political science/government from William and Mary.
