Hello everyone, and a warm welcome to Ericsson's Imagine Live broadcast from the show floor in Barcelona. My name is Cecilia Atterwall, and I'm here together with Ericsson CEO and President Börje Ekholm.
Thanks, Cecilia. It's great to be here.
It is once again leading the way into the show for Mobile World Congress, for sure. So I'm really excited to be here again to talk about where we're heading as an industry. So I would really like to hear your perspective on this—how you see this, your vision for the industry, and how we can really drive a shift.
I think we're at a really exciting era. We're just entering, I would say, an accelerated digitalization leveraging the cloud, AI, as well as connectivity in a new way. And I think that really provides a lot of opportunities. And as I look at it, all these technologies really form the digital stack, and one really key layer in that digital stack is connectivity. And we are here, of course, with the connectivity, but we're looking at the broader ecosystem now. And I think that's critical how we move forward as an industry. And if we can look at the connectivity, we see the demand here for high-performance programmable networks leading the way into the future. And that would allow this industry to move from providing mobile broadband into being a platform to digitalize society, enterprises, as well as more applications for the consumer.
That's really exciting. And the foundation for it all that you talk about with those high-performing programmable networks, can you explain a little bit more how you see that and what they would enable?
I tie onto one thing you said: it's really a foundation. High-performing networks are critical. What do we mean by high-performing? It's superior coverage, it's superior speed, low latency, very cost-efficient and energy-efficient at the same time. They are the foundation. They were needed to compete in the consumer broadband, but they're going to be even more important as we move forward into AI applications.
Programmability, that's actually even more important, I would argue. So what is it? Well, think about it: in the past, we've had one network for consumer applications, we had another one for mission-critical, we had one for enterprises—well, every application had their own network. In the future, it will be the same network. That means we need to manage the networks much more flexibly, much easier, and that's where the programmability comes in.
So it's as foundational as high-performing in the future to enable all those new and differentiated experiences.
That's really exciting. We recently announced some updates to our portfolio as well, ranging from, again, enabling the energy efficiency and the high-performing radios both on Massive MIMO and remote radios, new antennas, indoor solutions. But it also enabled us to do other things: we're moving into open fronthaul with new RAN Connect products, but with all of this, we can also tailor the energy efficiency in different ways. The Ericsson Silicon enables that, again, with programmability actually, and also so that we can have enhanced automation in the network and enabling the API exposure in a whole other way.
And as you say, API exposure is really important as a new way to generate revenues, but I would say also you get new revenues from mission-critical, you're going to get new revenues from fixed wireless access, enterprise networks, all enabled by programmability.
Exactly. You're right that it has both enabled with one network the many applications, as you mentioned already. A good example of a customer leading the way is Telstra, really investing in their programmable network, Open RAN as well, and leading the way into transforming, modernizing their networks to cater for all these new services. And we recently had the opportunity to meet with Vicki Brady, CEO of Telstra, so let's listen to what she had to say.
Telstra in Australia has recently announced a great initiative towards creating high-performing programmable networks to provide increased value for its users. And this is an effort to also change and drive the industry forward, as in fact Telstra would be the front-runner in Asia-Pacific to drive this transformation through. With me here today, I have Vicki Brady, CEO of Telstra, to talk about the initiatives you're embarking on.
Thank you, and thanks for having me, Cecilia. It's great to be here.
Thank you. It's such a pleasure. So when you set out for this ambitious journey, could you tell us a little bit more about why and what you're driving with this ambition and this transformation for your network?
Absolutely. And I think I sit on the optimistic side, so I see at this point in time there's an amazing opportunity for our industry and of course as Telstra in Australia. But firstly, I look at any version of the future, technology will play an important part of that, and all of that technology has got to be connected. And so as we look forward at Telstra, one of the things we're never complacent about is making sure we're at the forefront and leading in terms of what we're bringing to Australians on our mobile network.
And so as we step back and look at that, we said, well, there's so much opportunity ahead, and we want to not just have the biggest network in the country, which we do, but we want to make sure we're meeting the needs of our customers not just today, but what we see coming. And we see their needs getting more sophisticated, and to deliver on that, we need to be right at the front. And so it is exciting. It was exciting to get to announce the extension of our partnership, and I've spent quite a bit of time talking internally and externally about what it's all about, which has been good fun.
So right at the heart of it for us, it is putting in those 5G Advanced capabilities, whether it's on the hardware front—so we're excited to put into our Radio Access Network the next generation of Open RAN-ready hardware alongside, you know, the full suite of 5G Advanced software—and then how AI and automation can really play a part on our network, because I only see customer needs getting more sophisticated, and our ability to really deliver customer by customer, that's exciting.
So you have been a front-runner many times over, and often together with us in Ericsson, so we're very proud about that and happy about that. And as you do this, as you said, it's not only about modernizing the infrastructure, but you're also adding AI capabilities into your network. And how do you see this will help you position yourself in the Australian market?
Yeah, and can I just say again, thank you. I mean, it's been a couple of decades that Telstra and Ericsson have partnered together, and it's been a pretty special partnership when you can be right at the forefront of bringing things to customers. And so as I think about it, yes, we've built a very big mobile network in the country. Just to put in perspective, I think it always helps, so we cover about 3 million square kilometers of the country; it's more than double our nearest competitor.
But as you said, AI and automation, it's not enough just to have a great network. Of course, we want to keep making sure our 5G network is performing, is the most resilient, is the most reliable network, and we see AI and automation as essential to that. So those capabilities, as we move towards self-healing, more autonomous networks, so that the one thing we hear—customers see connectivity as such a critical thing, any interruption to that is not meeting their expectations.
And then those use cases I spoke about, especially our business and enterprise customers, they're looking for more and more sophistication on the network, whether it be the ability to slice the network and do different things. And so the AI and automation for me is absolutely essential in how we keep building the most reliable, the most resilient 5G network, but also with the sophistication needed to meet our customer needs.
So let's think a little bit about those customer needs from the consumer and business side. How would this network that you're putting in place now, with being programmable, with its AI capabilities and automation, how do you see it providing new value for your users?
Absolutely. Well, I have to start first off, whether you're a consumer all the way through to an enterprise customer, obviously experience on the network matters. And at the very foundation, this investment will absolutely mean that the performance, the resilience, the reliability, it only keeps getting better on 5G. So for all of our customers, and I'm excited by later this year, they'll start to feel those benefits on the network as the investment rolls out. So that's the real foundation.
And then as you said, over and above that, it's then those capabilities. We've been doing work looking to 2030 on our strategy, and when you talk to business and enterprise customers, they want things different in the future. And I know we're already doing some early work on slicing together where we can actually deliver things to customers that in the past they might have needed to roll fiber to a construction site, for example, whereas we can do a slice of the 5G network to deliver that. And just as you get more and more into the capabilities that this investment provides, I think not only is it a great network—more and more the performance improves, the resilience, the reliability—but so does the sophistication.
That's right. We've always seen the importance of the performance of the network and the coverage and capacity, and as you said, the foundation for it all. But now as we add more capabilities, we can better tailor experiences and have the network deliver to those demands. And one of the things that we have been talking about from Ericsson's side also and driving together with yourselves is the possibility to expose different kinds of network capabilities beyond the speed and the capacity and the latency with other kinds of aspects of the network in the form of network APIs. And we're so happy to have Telstra being one of the leading partners for us in the joint venture with Aduna. Can you tell us a little bit more how you see the role, how you want to play in the ecosystem to drive this change in essence?
And it is this—this is, I think, one of the fundamental differences. I mean, we've been through as an industry lots of different inflection points in technology, but I think this point about opening up our networks via APIs, this is a fundamental change in how we've operated as a network. And so at Telstra, we've wanted to be, again, with the leaders in this helping to shape it. The GSMA's Open Gateway initiative, they've now got operators that represent 75% of the mobile services in the world, so this is a massive change: operators coming together with Ericsson, with other players in the ecosystem, rather than bunkering down in our local markets. So that's huge, and we are so pleased to be one of the early partners in the Aduna joint venture because that is truly creating a global platform.
And you think about as an industry, the technology players that are playing in this industry, they are global. So we need to come together as an industry, and having a way to do that through standardized APIs, having a platform like the Aduna platform to bring it to life—so you've got the standardization that GSMA has been driving, you've now got the platform with Aduna, and with the number of operators coming together in that, I think this is a game changer for our industry and it's a game changer for customers. So the ability to expose, to be able to connect via API so that they can build what they need into their businesses and systems, but importantly too as an industry for us to keep investing—I mean, we all deploy a lot of capex—to be able to deploy that on a sustainable basis to keep delivering, I think that this is, as I said, a game changer for our industry.
And it really is a lot about collaboration on so many different levels. Like you said, you talked about it with the standardization and the global aspect of getting the network aligned to allow for global services, but also in essence could mean opportunities for you in your home market as well, right? Really working with your ecosystem to deliver different kinds of services to the Australian market too.
Absolutely, and we're seeing that today. I look at fraud and scams as a good example. In Australia, Telstra and the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, we've worked very closely, and again that is through exposing through encrypted APIs information real-time that is having a really big impact to bring down scams, to reduce fraud for Australians. So yes, the technology is so exciting, we all get excited, but the impact—the human impact is also, and that impact on society we can have, is huge as well.
It is huge. And with the value of the technology, when it's exposed in the right way to give those great services, also in essence could mean different business models and different opportunities to monetize the investment that you're now doing as well into your network.
And I think that's spot on. We've been really good as an industry at delivering the technology, at providing more sophisticated services. We did it from 3G to 4G. Lots of people made a lot of money and created value over our networks. We didn't create or capture that value in the same way, and I think it's because we didn't change the commercial model, right? So as we look forward, as these more advanced capabilities come, again, that's why opening up the ecosystem, having the APIs to expose our network capability alongside changing the commercial models, I think that's the opportunity that's different this time for us as an industry.
And this is really the opportunity and time as well to take the action. So as we look forward to a couple of great days here at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, looking forward to try and drive this positive change for our industry together.
Wonderful to have you here. Thank you so much for joining us.
It was a pleasure to have you here. Thank you so much.
And with that, I'd like to thank Vicki Brady, CEO of Telstra, for joining us here and go back to the conversation with Börje.
As we talk about programmable networks, could you give us some examples of what a service that could be enabled could be?
Yeah, I actually like what Vicki said about sophisticated connectivity. I think that captures what this is all about. It's advanced in the back end, but we have to make it easy for the user. So let me take one example and illustrate. Take, for example, AR glasses. How would that work? Well, the first thing is you have to know the application, so in this case it's AR. Second thing is you need to know what are now the specific service levels you need. So in this case, you're going to need ultra-low latency, you're going to need a very high uplink and downlink, you're going to need capacity. That will be told to the network, that then will create a network slice that will happen dynamically, that will then be adjusted to the service levels required for this application. And the way to call that up is through a network API. So that means now the application developer that works on an application for AR glasses all of a sudden can call up the network API and actually use that in their application and thereby bringing that to market. So I think that's actually a very interesting, fairly simple case, but advanced in the back end, and that requires just what Vicki said: sophisticated connectivity.
It does. Thank you. Another field of our market that needs sophisticated connectivity is, of course, the enterprises as they look to take the opportunities from networks in different ways. Could you talk a little bit about our enterprise portfolio and how it helps?
That's also an exciting area. We see 5G connectivity moving into enterprises, and it's really the demand for reliability, security, and actually the wide ecosystem that exists for cellular positions us really, really well. And what we do, we leverage, of course, our cellular technology into enterprises. And take, for example, private 5G as an example. What we see here is—we announced just a few days ago, maybe it's a few weeks ago now, but the JLR (Jaguar Land Rover) collaboration, where they are fitting one of their plants with this connectivity, and it allows them for IoT devices, it allows AI use cases, automation, something you couldn't really see using the fixed connectivity in the past. You need the wireless connectivity.
There's a lot more flexibility with that one, too.
Yeah, no, it does give a lot more flexibility. So that's one of the enterprise use cases. But we think broader. We think new use cases in the sense of mission-critical, and there is one example on the show floor here of an application that uses network APIs, it uses network slicing just to enhance the experience for a first responder, in this case in a stadium. But it's very exciting use cases coming up.
Yeah, again, one network, many opportunities for the different services.
As we want to enable developers to come up with these new innovative services and really also enable the monetization for our customers, could you talk a little bit about how we drive that part of the change in our strategy?
Yeah, this is one area where I think we as an industry have done poorly in a way, and we as vendors have not supported the industry in a good way. We've been talking about the features of the 5G with the capabilities, but we haven't created the monetization. That's what we're in the process of doing now.
So by actually forming a JV together with some of the leading operators in the world, we're now creating the supply of network APIs. That's the first part that has to be in place. There is no demand until there is a supply; it's a chicken-and-egg problem, but we're trying to address that. So now there is a supply: it's through the JV called Aduna that we formed with some of the leading operators. We're not stopping there. We're inviting new partners to join, so KDDI just joined, but we also had an agreement with Endstream, the Canadian collaboration between the leading operators in Canada. So we're open there, we're creating that global platform.
Now the next step, and that's the exciting step: we're now creating the demand. So we're creating demand from application developers, enterprises, and here we're signing new channel partners, like we signed Sinch and Infobip, in addition to Google Cloud and Vonage that we already had. So with this, we're now building the ecosystem around network APIs that will allow basically the operators to sell global applications, and I think that's super exciting.
It is. And actually earlier, we had the opportunity to meet with Anthony Bartolo, the CEO of Aduna, to talk more about this shift in our industry.
Now we're going to dive into the world of network APIs and hear how Aduna is revolutionizing how businesses can really tap into the capabilities of the networks. Here with me today, I have Anthony Bartolo, CEO of Aduna, and a warm welcome to join us in this broadcast.
Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here.
So let's start with Aduna and the basics of it all. What is Aduna all about, and how are you driving the change?
Well, Aduna is effectively an ecosystem. What we're doing is we're bringing together the carrier-operator ecosystem with the network API ecosystem, and we're marrying that with the demand side, which happens to be partner, developer, platform players, and with the innovators, the builders, and the makers. So we're joining a big builder group in the carrier-operator ecosystem, and we're joining the makers and the innovators on top of that, reducing the coefficient of friction for business. It's been a real challenge in our industry to be able to develop things and make sure that they work everywhere around the world, not just in a particular location. And Aduna is setting out to reduce that coefficient of friction and expand innovation at hyperscale. And we're super excited by the proposition.
Sounds really like going to be connecting a lot of different players in the ecosystem.
That's exactly right, and they're all willing participants. The fabulous thing about what's happening with Aduna is it's quite entropic. Each of the groups know that there is a much bigger benefit by working together and coming together than staying in their own particular spaces around the world, and the world gets incredibly smaller when we do things like that. And from the innovators' perspective, they don't have to reinvent the wheel all the time; they can spend all their energy innovating on new things rather than cleaning up older things.
So this is really introduced as a big enabler for shift in our industry. There's a lot of talk in our own industry, but why should businesses care?
Well, businesses should care because, firstly, most businesses have an aspiration to become bigger, not smaller. And one way to get bigger is to operate in multiple countries around the world. And when you operate in multiple countries around the world, you then start to pick up the regulatory frameworks and the different jurisdictional requirements around the world. Are you best as an enterprise to go off and learn those things, or what if somebody simplified that and basically democratized network APIs and allowed you to consume the benefits of all those networks that are in those jurisdictions, but not have to work around the details around that—being able to take your application or take your use case and actually allow it to be able to work anywhere around the world? That reduces the coefficient of friction with their customers and provides a consistent user experience. So that's why they should care, because it improves how they interface not only with their own systems around the world, but with their customers around the world.
Right. And when we talk about those network capabilities that they could then tap into, of course we would think about aspects of the networks which has to do with shipping data, right? That's the basics of it all with the quality and the transmission. But there are also other aspects of the network capabilities and the intelligence of the network that I know you'll be looking to expose, right?
Well, that's the one thing that the network APIs expose. I think if you take a look at our partner community that we've already engendered inside the ecosystem which is Aduna, these partners have spent nearly or in excess of a trillion dollars' worth of network capabilities around the world in their networks. They are the mobile networks that we all have grown to love and enjoy. But there are also additional capabilities inside these networks that have been unseen by the consumer and the developer, and what network APIs do is expose those in a safe, efficient, secure way for them to be used in new applications down the track and new use cases. And they come out with the network API, and that's what Aduna exposes. It aggregates all the APIs from these operators and now presents them in a unified manner on a global basis to anyone who wants to develop on with these capabilities, and that's the beauty of it.
So you're really allowing the innovator to tap into the intelligence that's in those networks, and that intelligence is phenomenal. And I think I can only imagine the type of things that are going to be invented going forward when they tap into those. And some of those capabilities that I've been hearing about have a lot to do with security in different ways. Could you elaborate a little bit on some of the opportunities that you see in that area?
Absolutely. I think the fraud, the security space is going to be huge because, well, effectively, if you take a look at all these networks, they are a trusted or reputational ecosystem. It's a strong reputational ecosystem. We use our phones today, and what's exposed to those phones—they've got a lot of detail on those phones, they carry our biometrics, they're considered extremely secure. We're exposing some of those securities in new, unique ways, such as Number Verify—being able to verify numbers or prevent fraud by making sure that we can check things in a particular use case without the user even knowing that that security is being enhanced on their behalf to protect them. Those are things that happen on a day-in and day-out basis with a network API.
So instead of having to react on that SMS to verify your identity, it could all happen in the background.
So seamlessly in the background. And I think that opens up—the first users are going to be financial institutions.
Financial institutions always look for—
Absolutely. So fintech will really take this on board, because right now they've got the traditional what they call OTPs, one-time passwords, that we're all used to back and forth, but that is almost clearly an interrupt-driven type of activity. This would happen in the background with additional security, taking into account not only you being the user and who you are, but identifying your location: are you where the transaction is happening, for instance? So you get this additional level of security that has always been just out of reach, and I think with network APIs it's just a small taste of the things to come.
That's great. Really interesting to combine those insights like you mentioned there, right? Where is the phone, where is the user, is there something behind, and combining those data points providing intelligence into the service.
Absolutely. And for various reasons that has always been available in one place and maybe not available in the other, now to be consistently in a place where you can actually share this information or make use of the capabilities of this intelligent network that is already here is a fascinating opportunity that I think is only just beginning.
Great. So I've seen a lot of traction around Aduna already coming out with announcements of partnerships and customers that I'm not asking you to go into anything in particular as we all see it all coming through. But what can the visitors here at Mobile World Congress expect to see if they come visit you?
Well, we hope they come and visit us. We're at the Aduna booth in Hall number 2. And what you'll see is you'll see the cast of partners that have already joined this ecosystem. These partners represent a huge portion of the world already. We encourage new partners to join; that's a very easy process for them to do so, it doesn't require equity, but it does really foster innovation all around. But what they will see is you'll see who's there, you'll see—
use cases that are at the booth, you'll see the technology effectively in action. And then during the show, maybe you'll even see another announcement or two. We've been really busy over the last two weeks, and we've got the next few weeks going even busier, so we're super excited.
Anthony, you have exciting times ahead really working on that, you know, ambition to connect the ecosystem. Any final words you want to share with our viewers here today?
I just want to welcome anyone to come along the journey with us. I think it's a fantastic journey. Whether you're an operator who wants to join—it's not an equity requirement; you're welcome to join and expand that ecosystem. The developers, you're in for a treat when you see the capabilities that are going to open up in the next year or two. And I think the more and more people and organizations join that ecosystem, we'll be able to revolutionize applications and how they're written today. And I'm really excited about the potential.
Sounds great. I'm certainly looking to stay tuned to hear all about the announcements coming up as you drive this journey through. Thank you so much for joining us here today.
My pleasure. It's all about opening up the art of the possible. Thank you.
