Chairman of the Board, 1GLOBAL (formerly Truphone)
#bits19 I Dr. Hannes Ametsreiter (Vodafone): Shaping the speed of innovation. Together.
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Transcript (9 segments)
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Host0:00
So please put your hands together for the wonderful Hannes Ametsreiter.
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Hannes Ametsreiter0:14
Good afternoon everybody. Listening to all the speeches so far, it's fantastic to hear the visions about the future. I'd like to share some humble perspective we are having as Vodafone. Let's discuss where we are with networks and connectivity, but the most important thing is what services we are thinking about. Networks might sound boring, but they are the pace and matter for digitization. It's super important to understand what is to come: LTE, cable, fiber, narrowband IoT, and 5G. 5G will be the future of mobile communication. Starting first means using test spectrum, making a lot of mistakes, but also learning a lot. We started and it's worth being a pioneer. 5G will connect things – your smartphone will get faster, latency down to 1-5 milliseconds. That's a big change. Connecting cars can save lives: nine people die every day in Germany. We are testing it already. Europe leads in industry. We are building on our strengths for Industry 4.0. There's a production plant in Germany that is the first in the world totally wired up without wires on 5G – totally digitized, super flexible. You don't see any fixed panda. With 5G, you know exactly if you turn a screw rightly. We combine 5G with mobile edge compute and network slicing for production – a new quality level. In sports, we combined live data with a soccer game using goggles. You see player speed, penalty probabilities. That's a new opportunity. We also started a cooperation with UNO on city mobility, connecting heaters with SIM cards. Smart city activities: using sensors to find parking lots saves 41 hours per year per person. Many areas: precision farming, logistics, healthcare, production, retail, aviation. We want to be a helpful platform with 600 million customers, looking for ideas and partners. Let's cooperate.
I just discussed and talked around the platform we are offering. Of course we love to get new ideas and cooperate with companies. Lava, I would like to start with you. Using connectivity, what does it mean for your business? You are so good in doing what you are doing, but what exactly is it?
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Lava10:39
Sure, first of all, thank you very much for having me. So we are Quarks. We analyze equipment data and process data of very large construction machinery. Thereby we can make processes more efficient, look for potential downtime, and intervene or give recommendations based on IoT data. We act before something very bad has resulted to your job site and put your entire operations down.
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Hannes Ametsreiter11:09
So what would be the example? Twins? Okay, understood. Data is a platform, is important. You're using data and sensors, you get information. It's super important to not have any downtime on the construction site. And what exactly are you doing with predictive maintenance and with what machines?
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Lava11:31
I think it's not only the downtime of the construction equipment we have to look at, but also the downtime of our data information traveling to our servers. That's where our partnership comes into play. We have to generate IoT data on a consistent basis to offer predictive services – no downtime in my cloud infrastructure. We look at sensor data of large excavators and give recommendations on pressure adjustments or how to use the machine differently to avoid costly downtime.
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Hannes Ametsreiter12:11
Okay, great. It's good to see that connectivity is important. Many also ask: could you provide connectivity in tunnels? We will try. The platform will change a lot in producing, servicing, and doing business. IO X, what are you doing and how are you using connectivity? In what way are you cooperating with Vodafone?
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Robert Danish12:36
Yeah, I'm standing for internet revolution. We see a huge blue ocean of IoT solutions, but we have many building blocks to create those solutions. Prototyping has helped us a lot – we have done 120 projects over three years. One example: a scale measuring the weight of gas bottles to know when they need replacing. We opened a new location in Anova and used a simple machine with a weight sensor and SIM card. Now we always know when the bottle is empty and never run out. Narrowband IoT can be used for measuring temperature, humidity in decentralized infrastructure – a small technique with a huge impact.
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Hannes Ametsreiter14:29
Right. So many ideas, startups, and platforms. It's great to see this happening in Germany, but it should also have global scale. I think you really earned it. Thank you and please stay up here. One more thing: it's about our future and our planet. I don't feel good when we always plan for 2050 – that's too many years. We want to start now. We will reduce our CO2 emissions by 92% by 2025 and make our network 100% green by then. That's our plan.