Setting telecom trends

— Sanjay Malik

The last 10 years were a whirlwind of transformation and change in our lives, a major part of which was due to the technological advancement in the telecom industry. With all that we have learned and gained, we are opening the doors to an entirely new world, where times will fly at the speed of 5G. year would see a transition to 5G, greater dialogue about AI, network optimisation, IoT, cloud computing, cyber security, premium content delivery and cross industry alliances.

transport, health to manufacturing, education and more— and global value chains across the physical, digital and biological domains.

Wireless connectivity will be one of the essential building blocks of Industry 4.0 and 5G offers the quality, reliability and security which enterprise/industry leaders were always looking for to move away from present complex and unreliable connectivity solutions. Nokia has been at the fore-front of the innovation on Industry 4.0 and have partnered with over 120 verticals across different segment to bring the benefit of wireless connectivity towards Industry 4.0 realization. We have also been actively working with our service providers and operators to leverage our expertise in bringing the Industry 4.0 for Indian enterprise segments.

The next major trend that will impact is the explosion of connected devices. The upswing of these devices will lead to an astronomical growth in data volumes. With the arrival of 2020, we are likely to see AI, bringing radical changes in many aspects such as the convergence of Blockchain, IoT and AI, real time customer interactions, virtual healthcare and more. The ratio between machine type communications to human type communications will soon reach 30:1, which will allow operators to extend their subscriber base from six billion people to 50 billion.

Globally, Nokia and Microsoft have come together for a strategic collaboration to accelerate transformation and innovation across industries with cloud, AI and IoT. With TIM Brazil, Nokia is pairing to bring the IoT service to their enterprise customers in Brazil.

The IoT market in India is poised to reach USD 15 billion by 2020, accounting for 5% of the global market. Various use cases in consumer and enterprise IoT are already developing across three segments—efficiency and automation, social development, and consumer and entertainment. And India will have use-cases emerge in areas that will have socio-economic benefits such as smart crop management, remote education, public safety and disaster management, transport, manufacturing etc. all three telcos are focusing on NB-IoT deployment. Nokia will be collaborating with Airtel on 5G and IoT applications.

Cloud computing is another key topic which has risen with the popularity of broadband. Cloud computing appears in the form of an “information power plant” which is overturning the traditional business mode of software, hardware and media. Users are now moving from “buying products” to “buying services”. The revenue in India will represent only 1.2% of the global public cloud services in 2019 but it ranks amongst the nine countries whose growth rate will be higher than the global average growth rate (16%).

To complement the cloud computing approach, computing power should also be implemented closer to the origination of traffic, at the edge of the network. Known as edge cloud, this approach offers many advantages by better supporting high bandwidth and low latency applications. Nokia has introduced an industry-first Edge Cloud data center solution for the 5G era, supporting industry automation and consumer applications. In India, Nokia has bagged a deal from Bharti Airtel to deploy Nuage Networks VSP solution in 15 circles in the northern and southern part of the country to automate its data center networks. The Nokia vision for the 5G era is described by its Future X network architecture. This reference architecture for a distributed network is the foundation for the edge cloud.

As custodians of the networks, carriers play a significant role in fighting the new threats that are emerging. Customers will begin to expect and demandmore proactive protection from the entire internet value chain and carriers will be expected to support these expectations with a range of technical and operational innovations.

The desire for greater security may be a boon for carriers, if they embrace the need and take necessary steps. Driven by the digitization of the country’s business environment and the Digital India mission, among others, the cybersecurity market is expected to rise from USD 1.97 billion in 2019 to USD 3.05 billion by 2022—a CAGR of 15.6%--almost 1.5 times the global rate.

ai and immersive reality

AI is a key driver for innovation in the global digital reality market, which includes immersive technologies such as virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR). The AI market revenue is expected to reach USD 55.01 billion by 2021. Nokia has unveiled its new AI-powered analytics software with machine learning and intelligent automation to improve accuracy of predicting customer satisfaction.

AI empowered smart agriculture can help India to reach USD 27 billion mark by 2020. The global AR and VR in the healthcare market is estimated to register a 30.2% CAGR during the forecast period (2019-2025) and the global virtual shopping market size is expected to reach USD 17.09 billion by 2025, registering a CAGR of 25.6% from 2019 to 2025. These forecasts show an immense growth in the need and importance of AI in all sectors.

With growing traffic and ease of communication, operators face a global crisis of maintaining the quality of service and delivering network optimization is of prime importance. AI technologies help telcos to achieve efficient service optimization against an ever-increasing demand for data services across heterogeneous networks. Nokia and CMCC have delivered world’s first AI-powered cloud VR experience over O-RAN architecture on CMCC live 5G network. Also, commercial AI/ML SW from Nokia is available from 2021 onwards. In India, the enterprise AI market is estimated to be USD 100 million, growing at 200-250% CAGR. For the operators, many opportunities lie in applications, services and underlying infrastructure.

Premium content, cross-industry alliances

Historically telecoms have been the backend service provider, the underlying vessel for delivery but with changing trends they are now coming to the front rows, managing and providing exclusive content. We could soon expect that Telcos would own the companies that are producing entertaining content, for example, popular TV shows, live sports games, etc.

Keeping up with these trends, CSPs are stimulated to transform themselves into a platform of opportunities harnessing the five digital forces—mobility and pervasive computing, big data and analytics, social media, cloud computing, artificial intelligence and robotics to realign their business processes, products, and services. The transformation will not just be in a few sectors, but it will be a wave of fundamental change flowing from household to industries to cities and will encapsulate the entire ecosystem. How much impact this wave will bring is immeasurable and how soon will it make pastures green is to be seen.

With growing traffic and ease of communication, operators face a global crisis of maintaining the quality of service and delivering network optimization. AI technologies help telcos achieve efficient service optimization.