Telcos gearing up for the 5G race

The tech breakthrough that will change the way we live, work and play is finally arriving – 2020 is the year when 5G is expected to go mainstream. 5G provides high-speed internet connection 10 to 20 times faster than the 4G network, and with less delay.

With this breakthrough innovation, businesses will be able to increase their production and efficiency while reducing costs. For consumers, this means a more reliable and smoother connection for streaming high-quality internet content.

So, how have telcos prepared for 5G and what roles will the operators play in delivering this latest technology?

Bridge Alliance spoke to attendees at the 4^th Annual Bridge Alliance CXO Forum about this topic. This video interview features David Pigot of Bridge Alliance, Gary Kwang of Skylab, David Soldani of Huawei and Ian Koh of Ericsson.

David Pigot, Director of Enterprise and IoT, Bridge Alliance
At the moment, our role is very much around sharing the best practices of some of our operators and the early adopters such as SKT. Our role will evolve as it has done in 4G – looking at potential solution providers and partners to roll out regional products and services, which will help the operators adopt these technologies in a much faster fashion and get to market quicker

Gary Kwang, Group CEO, Skylab
We specialize in cloud orchestration, software defined networks, and multi access cloud technology. And these are key components of 5G. And, of course, these technologies will help to provide application and enablement platform service for telco operators to engage with millions of their clients, and better improve the return of investment from the infrastructure.

David Soldani, ICT Expert, CTO Office, Huawei
I think this is a great opportunity to look at the Cloud X services. And the Cloud X means, in practice thanks to 5G, so it is extremely fast wireless interface, reduce latency, extremely reliable, you can shift the capability of the mobiles to the cloud, so, this makes the terminals extremely cheap and have a new offering, like gaming as a service. So, it will be cloud gaming or we can visualize your desktop – you can have a cloud desktop or cloud PC and at the same time, cloud VR and AR.

Ian Koh, VP, Key Account Manager and Head of Sales, Ericsson
In the early phase, it’s really about making sure the industries and your customers really understand the potential of what 5G can do. And at the same time, if you look at how we are working with some of these manufacturers across the globe, is creating that ecosystem so that 5G becomes an in-built thing in the future. How is 5G being used by the enterprise customers in the real world? We have examples here from the Audi factory where we have worked with Audi to automate their factory environment. We’ve also started to automate our own factory environment so that we can have AGVs running inside the factory.