NETWORKING THE FUTURE

Nokia Thailand chief Sébastien Laurent embraces the challenge of preparing for the 5G era.

Sébastien Laurent has never been a fan of cold weather. After growing up in the

north of France in Normandy, enduring long winters in Canada as an undergraduate, and further studies in Paris, the chance to launch his telecommunications career in Southeast Asia warmed his heart.

“That’s the story of my life. I was living in a cold place but my family was far away and I was on the phone with them forever because of the d istan ceatt h et im e, ” t h e m a n ag in gd irector of Nokia Thailand says as he recalls his days as an engineering student at Laval University in Quebec.

“It was super cold but it is a wonderful country and after that, I got the opportunity to go to Indonesia for my first job and the temperature difference was about a 60-degree gap,” he adds with laughter.

The opportunity arose by way of a training programme being offered by the French telecom company Alcatel.

“They told me, ‘We need someone to go across the world to do the work and we would like for you to go to Indonesia,’ and I was like ‘Okay, that could be interesting,’” he says of the decision that would change his life.

“I had little idea of what I was getting into but when I was a kid, my grandfather gave me a wooden box and in this wooden box, every time I was given a coin, I would put the coin in this box and my family always asked, ‘What are you going to do with these?’” he tells Asia Focus.

“I told them, when I grow older, I will go to Asia, to China. I always had this curiosity about the Far East, so when this opportunity came, I did not hesitate for one second.”

The culture shock was a “positive shock” for him but he only got to spent one year in Indonesia before Alcatel decided to send him to another exotic place — this time it was Turkey in 1998.

Alcatel, which later acquired the US telecom firm Lucent to create a major multinational contender, provided a variety of experiences that have served him well. He started out as a trainee in telecommunication and held positions including radio network engineering leader, technical project manager, network design director and eventually vice-president. It short, he gained a pretty good grasp about how just about everything gets done in his field.

“At the start of my career I was doing pretty basic stuff such as radio missions on the ground and setting up networks. At that time it was the first network for GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications), and it was making people realise the new opportunity,” he recalls.

“I was tasked with the job to provide the coverage, which gave me the opportunity to travel everywhere which was a really wonderful time for me. At home, I still have a box with stones that I collected along the way in every single Indonesian island that I have been to.” By 2000, he was back in France and was promoted to vice-president of the company’s pre-sales wireless division for all of Europe, but the desire to fill his grandfather’s box with Asian coins was calling him again. This time, it was to Malaysia in 2006.

“I still have the box in Bangkok with me now,” Mr Laurent says. “It started with one franc, then aeu r o,a n d m yg r a n d f at h e r ga v e m e co llectors’ coins as well including the oldest one I have which is a Roman Empire coin. Now, there are the ones that I buy for my kids.”

TO NOKIA WITH 5G

In Malaysia, Mr Laurent served as vice-president of software applications and sales for Alcatel-Lucent for four years. By 2010, he was on the move once again, this time to Australia as senior officer for the Pacific Islands. And after six years in senior positions, he was promoted to president of Alcatel-Lucent’s Southeast Asia region. Then came the big change when Nokia acquired the French company in November 2016 in a deal worth €15.6 billion.

“That was three years ago and Nokia asked me to become the MD for Thailand. A year later, I was also put in charge of Cambodia,” he says.

The days of Nokia as the biggest global name in mobile handsets are history, as the company failed to adapt to the smartphone revolution. But shareholders are being rewarded for sticking with the company as it switched its focus to equipment and network provision for more consistent profits and shareholder returns.

When Nokia acquired Alcatel-Lucent, many analysts predicted rising margins as the merger would allow the combined entity to shed overlapping operations and products. In 2018, the Finnish company ended the year with the second consecutive quarter of year-on-year sales growth across all five of its network business groups.

Net sales in the fourth quarter of 2018 were €6.9 billion, up from €6.7 billion a year earlier. It also witnessed an improvement of profitability in both Networks and Nokia Technologies last year. This year, the company is concentrating on a “fast and meaningful shift to 5G” since its rollouts of the network “will be staggered” over the course of 2019, it said in its financial statement in January.

“Over the longer term, we expect a virtuous cycle of investment, where operators update their networks across multiple domains — from optical to macro radio, fixed wireless access to cloud core, small cells to IP routing, network agnostic software and more,” the statement said.

Following this, Nokia expects “a second wave” where industrial customers will invest in private wireless technology including LTE (Long-Term Evolution) and 5G-ready networks, and Asia Pacific is where it expects most of the demand to come from.

“Telecommunication is at the heart of everything we do, and everything we touch,” says Mr Laurent. “That’s the beauty of it, and when I or the team get up in the morning, we know why we are in this business, and this is just the beginning because we are just at the beginning of 5G.”

Nokia was the first network provider to get a “real” 5G network up and running in Thailand, Mr Laurent says. That was just last November, but it is still in a small scale demonstration. Regionally, while Asean countries are using 700MHz bandwidth spectrum for now, the rest of the world is using 2.5, 2.6 and 3.5 GHz. This means there is still a lot of room for improvement in terms of speed in the region.

THE EVOLUTION

The present-day technology, Nokia maintains, cannot support future traffic in 2020 which will require 19% higher capacity for applications such as virtual and augmented reality in fields such as event management, education, tourism, entertainment and in the car.

It expects the arrival of 5G to expand consumer market opportunities by three times while meeting the massive needs of the Industry 4.0 era for data gathering, measurement and analysis of millions of connected devices.

“There are a lot of wonderful things about to happen that will, in my view, transform the world and the way people interact much more than what we have enjoyed so far through smartphones and data connectivity,” says Mr Laurent.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to developing a 5G network, as the technology is one thing but the way it is developed and used can be “extremely diversified”.

“Right now, the most advanced market in the world is in Asia,” he says. “The US is doing a lot but in terms of volume of activity, a lot is in Asia Pacific including China, Japan, South Korea and Australia who are leading the technology adoption.”

In South Korea, the focus has been on mobile phone service, with all of the operators including SK Telecom and KT Corporation working with Nokia on development.

In Australia, the approach is completely different. Instead of using fibre, the system uses a wireless network operating on the 5G New Radio standard to deliver 5G commercial services via Nokia’s FastMile 5G indoor gateway in a live network. Launched by Optus and Nokia in February, it was the first of its kind in the country.

“Fibre is complicated because you need to make holes in your walls and go through your ceiling which takes time and cost money so the next step is to go wireless,” Mr Laurent explains.

Another area that will change “significantly” is the enterprise segment, in Mr Laurent’s view, as businesses today are using telecommunication for connectivity only when it can be used to collect data as well.

“What we observe from the evolution of technology to 4G and 5G is that 5G is now more relatable to technical capability and flexibility,” he says. “5G will enable new business models where operators are able to enable an enterprise with better efficiency and better productivity, and that is where some of the big changes are happening.”

For example, 5G connectivity may allow businesses to connect to everything including the container, the crane, the car, and the video cameras. But then, what you can do with this connectivity is bring back a lot of data that can be analysed from a software perspective.

“You can derive trends and to do what everybody calls data analytics which is simply understanding the trends of an environment, and then you can gain better control of it, to better interact with it and be able to optimise it,” he elaborates.

Even in Thailand, the way 5G is used in, say the rice-growing regions of the Northeast will be different from how it’s used in popular tourist destinations in the South. Therefore, each area would have its own business model and its own rationale for what 5G can be used for.

“What I find super interesting in Thailand at the moment is that we are starting to see the formation of some public-private partnerships, creating joint ventures to make use of the technology to deliver services,” Mr Laurent says enthusiastically.

“In Phuket it is going to be about tourism and Khon Kaen is going to be about agriculture, while in another area such as the EEC (Eastern Economic Corridor), it will be more about logistics and transport.”

The only limitations to 5G application, Mr Laurent says, is human imagination. He likens it to the Apple app store — no one was sure when it opened in 2008 how far it would go, but it has come very far indeed.

“5G is a wonderful enabler that is very flexible and it will increase productivity with very strong security. But since everything is connected, you need to be sure that there are no challenges in security,” he remarks.

Mr Laurent says that 5G should be used to serve not only operators but also subscribers of the network and the next step is for it to serve and connect machines and industries, “that is the shift”, he says.

“Today, we do not see that happening so far with 5G which has the capability to connect many objects with high speed and low latency that could make the possibilities of these applications more diverse,” he adds. “This is the transformation where every industry will pick its own path including telemedicine, logistics and the gaming industry, which is another big one that is closer to the consumer market, along with government.”

With a step-by-step approach, Mr Laurent expects the 5G rollout in major cities in Thailand starting with Bangkok within five years, because there is a strong desire from the government to push for technology that can help increase gross domestic product.

So far, more than 40 countries have allocated 5G spectrum but progress has been slow in Thailand on retrieving spectrum from existing users to allow for 5G connectivity to happen nationwide.

When he’s not working on rolling out 5G with companies in Thailand and Cambodia, Mr Laurent loves to sail off the beach in Jomtien. It’s a great way to unwind and exercise, but it also provides lessons that can be applied in business and life.

“You have to anticipate the storm, you have to check and prepare a lot of things, so being vigilant and having anticipation are the two big things I have learned from sailing competitively,” he says.

“And of course, you cannot go it alone and that is what I enjoy the most from sailing, which is the anticipation and the communication with your partners.”

[In Thailand] we are starting to see the formation of some public-private partnerships, creating joint ventures to make use of the technology to deliver services. In Phuket it is going to be about tourism and Khon Kaen is going to be about agriculture, while in another area such as the EEC it will be more about logistics and transport

Telecommunication is at the heart of everything we do, and everything we touch. That’s the beauty of it, and when I or the team get up in the morning, we know why we are in this business