Telco Leaders Chime in on 2019’s Hot Topics

Amidst the mid-year bustle of events and 5G announcements, we spoke to key telco leaders at Mobile World Congress Barcelona 2019 (MWC 2019) to hear their views about key topics that are top of mind in the industry.  This video interview features Marc Halbfinger of PCCW Global, Daichi Nozaki of SoftBank Group, Lazaro Fernandez of FreeMove and Ong Geok Chwee of Bridge Alliance.

Marc Halbfinger (PCCW Global): Well, you just have to walk around this MWC and there’s many hot topics. There’s discussion around on even the complexities around trade politics, and that would be a hot topic, I gather. 5G and the manner of its deployment. The reduction of cost, keeping power down. Building out edge cloud capabilities that are layered into the 5G fabric. IoT will continue to grow into its own as requirements grow in all of those spaces. 

Innovation, together with competition, along with the ability that exists today to write code instead of build hardware is really driving so many different issues and I think that we are seeing a increasingly innovative world that has so many different opportunities and oddly, it’s still just the very beginning.

Ong Geok Chwee (Bridge Alliance): If you look at MWC here, every where you go, you hear 5G, AI, machine learning. All these are coming out; robotics and automations. And like what I mentioned, these are really components. What is exciting is how do we make them work seamlessly together to deliver the outcome that we are looking forward to.

Daichi Nozaki (SoftBank): The issue for the IoT and 5G both, is that, massive data. And although you can get all the massive data immediately with low latency and simultaneously many data points by 5G and also IoT devices. But unless you have some solution to utilise all those data, this is just a massive data – that’s it, period.

So we believe that how we can apply AI on top of those data – that is actually key for 5G and IoT so 5G, AI, IoT would not really exist separately. Combining 5G, IoT, AI is one solution.

Lazaro Fernandez (FreeMove): Well, there are 2 letters that come to our mind all the time if you are working in our environment – it’s 5G. I think this is a very hot topic. It’s really the first time that we see that a network itself is a network for business.

I think there’s a hot topic, everybody knows about it. It’s about the security. It’s about having zero tolerance to fraud. It’s about having zero tolerance to hacking.