Economy Middle East speaks to Ekow Nelson, Vice President and Head of Global Customer Unit for e& and Pakistan at Ericsson Middle East and Africa, on Ericsson’s participation at Mobile World Congress 2024.
Nelson highlights Ericsson’s innovative technologies and solutions, including 5G networks and their integration into the mobility sector. He also highlights Ericsson’s partnership with Toyota and the innovation it has enabled for the company. He also sheds light on the most notable trends in technology, which include cloud computing, generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), and mobility services.
What are the key highlights of Ericsson’s presence at Mobile World Congress 2024, particularly in terms of innovative technologies and solutions showcased?
It’s been two or three years since we had COVID. That’s when we had started rolling out 5G, sometime around 2020. Today, we’re almost halfway through the journey. So for me, this is quite pivotal.
Today, most questions from customers revolve around the financial aspect of 5G. How can we make money? Where’s the return on investment? So, our focus here really is around monetization and how we can leverage the investments.
The promise of 5G is to open new areas of opportunity and revenues for our customers and for the industry. Part of that is building an innovative connectivity platform that allows new use cases to be developed across both the enterprise and the consumer segments.
We are also looking at how we are going to exploit 5G for the consumers with the advent of new devices, such as XR and VR, and what opportunities these will open up.
I just had a conversation with Toyota. We have a partnership with them that will enable them to provide more guaranteed connectivity between the vehicle and themselves. It will help them as a manufacturer to provide software updates and entertainment services. Apart from that, they will be able to do regular monitoring to ensure the vehicle is performing up to the mark.
Then we’ve got Enterprise Wireless. This is for enterprise customers who want to use a more reliable 5G network as opposed to WiMAX or Wi-Fi.
It’s all about investing in a network, getting it out into the market, and helping people drive productivity out of it. It’s about helping them deliver new experiences to customers. This is an important theme for us.
The second theme is around the programmability of the network. We are looking to open up our network to make it a lot more programmable and a lot more flexible. This will allow more of a mix-and-match of the different technologies.
Obviously, at Ericsson, we want to be able to do an end-to-end. but then we want to provide our customers the flexibility to be able to buy the hardware from their preferred supplier and the software from another supplier.
The third area we are looking at is 6G. What is the promise of 6G? What can it do for us as an industry? The standardization for 6G starts this year. We expect that, by 2030, 6G should be ready to take us to the next level.
In a way, we’re looking at consolidating what we’ve done in 5G, both in the consumer and the enterprise spaces.
On Toyota, is the connectivity a B2B solution, or is it a B2C?
Well, it’s quite a B2B2C. It’s linked very much to the application programming interface (API) because of what Toyota is doing.
Think of a moving vehicle that needs to constantly connect with the company and share information. You need a good quality of service for that. Just like you are watching a high-quality video over the internet on the move. You need a reliable service provider. It’s similar here. So what Toyota is doing is it’s invoking an API in the telecom provider’s network almost in real-time as the car is moving.
What the network operators need to do is to open up their networks to expose those APIs. Then through, preferably our global network platform, which is part of the Vonage acquisition that we made, build the necessary connections.
We acquired a company called Vonage around July last year. They provide various legacy services, including contact center as a service, and old VoIP connectivity, which has been there for a while. Then, they have the CPaaS platform. It provides things like one-time passwords. That’s actually quite a big business that’s been around for a while.
A global network platform is basically taking the capabilities of 5G and exposing them as programmable APIs for developers to develop applications on top of the network. We’ve got about 2 million developer ecosystem with Vonage.
I come from a programming background. As a developer, you just want a simple interface to include in your code, to invoke it. You want it to be standard. As a developer, I don’t want a different API from Ericsson and a different API from Huawei. Therefore, part of what we’re trying to do is to standardize simple APIs for things like quality of service, location, device status, one-time passwords, which banks and others use for authentication. When the bank asks you to enter your one-time password, some of them want to know the device status.
For example, in Egypt, banks are very interested in knowing where you are. If you’ve traveled out of the country and you are making a transaction, they’ll want to know which country you’re in because that will help them make decisions about whether there is fraud. What happens if they know you’re not out of the country, but then the transaction is coming from a different country?
Therefore, we’re building a platform and the hope is that we’ll have a set of APIs that will allow developers to develop applications on top of the 5G network. This will drive a lot of traffic and bandwidth for operators. It will also allow developers to do what they do, innovate, and build interesting applications because we are not application developers.
The operators are not application developers. They’re opening it up as an interface for others to build applications.
That’s what Toyota is going to do. It is going to link into that global platform. Think about it this way. You have multiple operators around the world. All of them are linked into a global network platform. Remember, the Toyota customer is not a subscriber as far as the car is concerned. I may have bought a car from Toyota. Someone else may have bought a car from them as well. But they could be on the network of telecom service provider du. I could be on Etisalat.
However, Toyota needs to provide the same service to both of us. So the global network platform is what links the two. We will connect du and Etisalat, and then Toyota will connect to us. So Toyota can provide the same service regardless of whether I’m on du or Etisalat.
What are some notable insights or trends observed by Ericsson during MWC 2024, and how might they influence the company’s future strategies and product development?
There are three main trends that we see. In fact, Toyota was saying that they are no longer a car manufacturer but a mobility service provider.
Today, car companies are calling themselves mobility service providers. What they want to do is to provide you with a service while you are on the move. Therefore, mobility services are one of the big trends that have been around. Mobility via 5G is an important trend, particularly due to the characteristics of 5G, such as high speed and low latency. So, that is a big trend that we will continue to work on and evolve into 6G.
The second trend is around cloud services. Everything is moving on to the cloud now.
We are developing cloud-native infrastructure and cloud-native applications. The hyperscale players are still going to be in the game. All the workload is going to be running on some form of cloud, whether it’s private or public.
Then the third one is AI. I think about the ability to combine these three things. With AI and with all the insights, we will be able to process everything that is generated both by the cloud and the 5G services to offer differentiated services. Not just from a retrieval perspective, but much more generative.
One of the key things that we’re moving into is GenAI. The current computing model for the last 100 years has been based on retrieval. If you look at your phone, what do you do? You provide a command and it retrieves some information for you.
When you watch Netflix, it goes and retrieves a movie for you. It’s a retrieval model of computing that we’ve had for the last few years. You can also take the example of a Systems Applications and Products (SAP) system or a financial system. It’s all about retrieving information and then using that information.
The next phase is really going to be generative. It will be about generating information based on insights. Those insights will come from the network or the cloud. That’s why we’re working very closely with the likes of Qualcomm, Intel and NVIDIA. Hence, we will be able to build that ecosystem to exploit the raw data and enable more generative models as we move forward.
For me, I think, this is really where the game is: mobility, cloud, and AI.
With Toyota, do you have an agreement that it’s only limited to them for a certain amount of years? Can you share this tech with Chevrolet or Mercedes Benz next?
I don’t think we will do anything exclusive. As Ericsson, we will be the first to market. Therefore, they are the first to market. I don’t think that even Toyota wants to restrict this. If Chevrolet wants to do it, great. They will be able to differentiate themselves by the services that they are able to provide on top of the technology.
About Ekow Nelson
Ekow Nelson is the vice president and head of global customer unit e& and Pakistan at Ericsson Middle East and Africa.
As an experienced telecom and IT executive, Ekow Nelson holds a proven track record in strategy, sales, and the delivery of digital technologies and complex transformation solutions in over 40 countries.
Currently responsible for Ericsson’s business with Etisalat Group and chairman of Ericsson Pakistan, he joined Ericsson in 2012 and has since held leadership positions in the UAE, Sweden, India, and UK. Ekow Nelson was head of consulting for Europe and Latin America and before that, head of digital services in India.
Prior to Ericsson, Ekow Nelson held senior sales and global industry roles at IBM Corporation and at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) Consulting, where he led the establishment of the European mobile business practice. Before that, he spent a decade pioneering innovations in electronic communications and the internet and led sales across Europe and the Asia Pacific.
Ekow Nelson holds degrees in Computer Science and Business Management and is the author of several publications in telecoms and media.
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