Interview of Pardeep Kohli by Mobile World Live - UNWRAPPED: The 5G Evolution

Oh, thank you. Thanks for the opportunity. Nice seeing you again.

No, as you know, right, 5G is not only about connectivity, it's also about bringing more advanced services which then consumers can use to improve their experience. So obviously, the first thing is having good coverage. I think in most markets, people are reaching to that point where the 5G coverage and 4G coverage starts to become somewhat matching. Of course, there's still a lot of work to be done in rolling out 5G everywhere. But wherever you have good coverage, the next set of services is all about how do you improve it so that you can have your own slices, your own user experience, and have capabilities which are currently not possible with the existing devices and handsets. So that's where the next phase of 5G would be: how do you bring automation in bringing out connectivity which is slice by slice, and each user can have its own experience, and that experience can be utilizing a regular phone or you will have going forward a lot of those AR/VR type of experiences where people can actually have their own slice. And when you're setting up a conference call that way, we are doing it, each of us can have our own slice. And in a way, that's no different than today in a wired network, people can have dedicated VPNs or dedicated links, and that gives a good quality of service. So that's how I see it. It's not only just connectivity, it is smart connectivity which is designed for the experience which users want to have at that particular point on the devices they're going to use. So combining flexibility plus automation is the next thing for 5G to do.

That's, say, you know, as we all noticed, right, both Ericsson and Nokia now have come out and said that they will support the open RAN. Their radios will be able to work with other people's baseband and vice versa. So this is a good development for the industry. As you know, Mavenir has been a champion in this cause. We have been promoting it for quite some time. But now with the big existing vendors adopting it, it actually makes things easier because now it's not a question of whether an operator will do it, it's only a matter of when they will do it and what format they will do it. So it definitely accelerates the investment in this space as well, because as a small vendor coming in, if you don't see the market happening fast enough, the investors also lose interest. So we definitely see that there will be more interest in the investment, not only by the vendors but also by the operators. There was a lot of talk from the operator side as well. I have seen news from Vodafone, Telefónica, and Deutsche Telekom talking about accelerating or increasing the portion of open RAN market share in their networks. That's definitely demand and supply. If there's more demand, there's more supply, and existing vendors also supporting that actually makes that the future. And that's the way it should have been. Every other network interface in the telecom network is open. The open fronthaul was the only one which was closed. And with these announcements from different vendors, that's a promising move.

Yeah, they talked about earlier, right? The 5G enables you to have your own experience, which means that I should be able to say, okay, I'm having a birthday party for my kid in the backyard. For these two hours, I want a dedicated slice in my backyard where users can play and have games, and that experience is there only for two hours and after that goes away. So having that capability wirelessly so that you can actually enable these types of experiences and monetize it means that the network has to be flexible, the billing systems have to be flexible, and I should be able to create my own slice by simply clicking a few clicks, and I should be able to get a bill which is for that event and not just tied to my regular monthly bill. So these are the type of things I think are feasible. Technology is there, we just need to allow the automation and flexibility to make that happen.