Mobile Magazine - May 2022

CEOs UNN: Digitally enhancing telecoms in Brunei

MAY 2022 | mobilemagazine.com

VODAFONE:

Will OpenRAN unlock the future of UK 5G?

WORLD’S FIRST CONNECTED FOREST NOTTINGHAMSHIRE COUNTY COUNCIL Nature & networks collide to showcase powerful capabilities of 5G mobile connectivity

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FOREWORD

5G-Force

A recent scan of the Mobile Magazine website showed the last three stories posted had a common factor – 5G. Here are the headlines: • • •

Vodafone: Network slicing and its role in 5G GSMA sets out 5G roadmap for Asia Pacific How can 5G Ultra Wideband transform other industries?

This potentially tells the reader a couple of things.

Firstly, that we have too many stories about 5G, or secondly, that 5G is top of the mobile agenda. Looking at those stories, I like to think it’s the latter.

From the UK to APAC and the US, the biggest operators and associations (GSMA accounts for around 1,200 organisations), 5G opens up a whole new world of opportunities. Unlike that web content mentioned above, this is not news.

However, as we tentatively look beyond 5G even while huge swathes of the planet are not even remotely close to achieving that standard, there is a welcome sense of hope, possibility and greater human connection. In troubled times, that is to be cherished.

MOBILE MAGAZINE IS PUBLISHED BY

SCOTT BIRCH scott.birch@bizclikmedia.com

© 2022 | ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

mobile-magazine.com

5

CONTENTS

Our Regular Upfront Section: 12 Big Picture 14 The Brief 16 Timeline: Five steps to creatIng a more inclusive telecom sector 18 Trailblazer: Carl Pei 22 Five Minutes With: Navanit Narayan

66

Telecoms

Will 5G give us the first cloud-based smartphone?

28

Nottinghamshire County Council

Cultivating the world's first 5G Connected Forest

76

Unified National Networks Network digitalisation accelerates industrial transformation

150

Technology

Will OpenRAN unlock the future of UK 5G?

108 5G

CSPs need to fight for their share of private 5G networks

158 Huawei

Huawei & BMW join hands to reach automated mobility

118

Sinclair Broadcast Group From local news to developing world, Sinclair’s technology serves the under-served

172 IoT

Cybersecurity at the heart of the next-gen telco

208

MultiChoice

At the digital frontier of customer experience

182

NTT Data Corp Open network innovation in the 5G era

222

Cloud & 5G

LIVE event preview

228

Ooredoo Algeria

The mobile operator’s journey to success

196 Top 10

Smartphone CEOs

245 KPN

Digital transformation and ethos of developer culture

The Global Cloud & 5G Conference

2022 23rd - 24th June

STREAMED & IN PERSON TOBACCO DOCK LONDON

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Watch our 2021 Showreel

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Brought to you by BizClik Media Group TECH LIVE LONDON, the hybrid event held between 23rd-24th June is broadcast live to the world and incorporates four zone areas of Technology & AI LIVE, Cloud & 5G LIVE, Cyber LIVE plus March8 LIVE in to one event.

With a comprehensive content programme featuring senior industry leaders and expert analysts, this is an opportunity to put yourself and your brand in front of key industry decision makers.

Get tickets

From keynote addresses to lively roundtables, fireside discussions to topical presentations, Q&A sessions to 1-2-1 networking, the 2-day hybrid show is an essential deep dive into issues impacting the future of each industry today.

Global giants and innovative startups will all find the perfect platform with direct access to an engaged and active audience. You can’t afford to miss this opportunity.

See you on:

23 - 24 June 2022

Sponsor opportunities

BIG PICTURE 5G Applications Grow US

Running on Verizon’s 5G network, John Deere’s new autonomous tractor runs entirely from an app in the farmer’s smartphone.

Image credit: John Deere

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May 2022

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THE BRIEF “ If we've learned one thing from the last 2 years, it’s that cybersecurity trends can change in the blink of an eye” BECHARA KADDOUM,

Head of Cybersecurity Services EMEA & APAC, Telefonica READ MORE

“ By pushing the computing power to the cloud, smartphones can grow smaller and consume less power” RAJ SHAH

North America Industry Lead, TMT, Publicis Sapient READ MORE

“ 5G will create huge amounts of value, but the question is who will capture that value?”

JAQUES ASSARAF

Corporate VP Telecom, Media & Entertainment, Capgemini READ MORE

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May 2022

5G: FAKE IT ‘TIL YOU CAN MAKE IT WORK Hot take: the more boring, insubstantial, and essentially meaningless to the consumer the thing you’re selling is, the better the advertising needs to be. Looking at current commercial networks, it’s not hard to see why 5G adverts are so nice.

Someone’s enjoying his last issue as editor, but go on.

It’s just that telecom companies and smartphone manufacturers have been pitching 5G in some truly wild, lavishly expensive ways over the last two years.

You mean like Galactic Lazer Stallion, the fake 80s hair metal band Samsung created to sing songs

about mobile gaming with low-latency 5G? That may be the rowdiest 5G promotion of all time, but I think it was T-Mobile’s Superbowl spot with Miley Cyrus and Dolly Parton that nailed the tone just right.

The whole thing has a very Live Aid charity appeal vibe to it, as a multibillion dollar company pays two very famous people to tell you to buy a 5G subscription and “do it for the phones”.

So, they’ve passed out of the fake it ‘til you make it phase…

And into outright desperation to convince their customers that the 5G juice is worth the squeeze.

At least subconsciously.

EDITOR’S CHOICE



OTOROLA M Once thought to have slipped out of the mobile phone race forever, Motorola is back — registering the third highest sales of any smartphone OEM in the US market last year, doubling its 2020 sales. Hello, Moto!



OTHING N OnePlus founder Carl Pei’s new smartphone startup, Nothing, is generating a whole heap of buzz and recently announced plans to launch its first smartphone (aimed squarely at Apple’s corner of the market, not at OnePlus’) this summer.

FOUR WAYS REMOTE MONITORING (IOT) CAN TRANSFORM COFFEE SHOPS

Sam Roberts, Sector Director at mpro5., discusses the potential of IoT in hospitality and catering environments – specifically, coffee shops.

BRIGHT DATA RESEARCH SHOWS DATA IS VITAL TO THE METAVERSE

Over half of technology leaders believe that data will be vital for sustaining the Metaverse.

VODAFONE: NETWORK SLICING AND ITS ROLE IN 5G

Following Vodafone and Ericsson’s creation of the UK’s first on-demand 5G network slice, we take a look at the concept in more detail.



BY THE NUMBERS Going to Work in the Metaverse – postings on popular job site, Adzuna, soar for ‘metaverse’ jobs as the phenomenon explodes.

697

‘Metaverse’ jobs (October 2021)

3,339

‘Metaverse’ jobs (February 2022)



PPLE A The third generation iPhone SE has had a mixed reception from reviewers – but it’s the crisis in Ukraine that’s reportedly caused enough instability to prompt Apple to cut production of the budget device this quarter by “two-tothree million units”.

IGERIA’S TELECOM N NETWORK Thanks to a swapping state lockdown of telecom infrastructure, Nigerian telecom operators recently threatened major service blackouts as the latest stage of tense negotiations between their industry and the state.

U P MAY 2022

D O W N

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TIMELINE

FIVE ST This month, we reached out to Karen Smit, Head of Accessibility at Vodacom South Africa, and asked her to tell us about the five most pressing steps that need to be taken to foster a more inclusive telecom sector.

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May 2022

1

Recognise disabled persons as a viable consumer segment More than 15% – or about 1.3 billion – of people in the world have a disability.

Disabled persons want to be recognised as consumers and not as charity cases, as they access and pay for technology and services like everyone else. Together with friends and family, disabled persons have a combined spending power of $13tn, proving why this section of society shouldn’t be overlooked.

2

Embrace systemic inclusion When technology companies include disabled consumers as part of their company’s diversity and inclusion strategy, it benefits both the company and disabled persons. Don’t treat accessibility as a one-off project; embed inclusion into your company’s systems, structures, processes and roadmaps, with business units sharing the responsibility to promote the inclusion of disabled persons.

TEPS TO 3

Personal leadership CEOs who visibly care about everyone in society can play a huge role in encouraging inclusion. Research shows that most CEOs do not want to share their own, lived disability experiences or the experiences of family or friends. Silence on the topic will discourage inclusion, but when CEOs have authentic conversations about disability inclusion, their personal commitment has the ability to inspire their leadership teams to do the same.

4

Purpose-led Purpose-led organisations embracing inclusion have a clearer and deeper understanding of disabled customers’ needs as they design solutions that take the challenges of the disabled community into account.

Such an approach aims to provide technology and services that are of real value and benefit communities, not developing products just to make a profit without understanding their impact on consumers.

5

Disability Employment It should be recognised that disabled persons are both employees and consumers.

Disability employment serves as a powerful catalyst to expand inclusion of consumers. Although most companies indicate their support for inclusion, only 4% focus on ensuring that their technology and services cater for the needs of consumers with disabilities. Greater disability employment can change that. mobile-magazine.com

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TRAILBLAZER

Bringing Bac the F U T U N A M E : Carl Pei J O B T I T L E : Founder & CEO C O M P A N Y : Nothing

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May 2022

ck RE

W

e’ve all experienced the gap between the future we were promised and the one we’re living in now,” says Carl Pei, dressed in black streetwear, in front of a black background lit only by the glow of his new company’s name: NOTHING. It came as something of a surprise when the founder of the successful Chinese smartphone manufacturer OnePlus left his company in October of 2020. Pei founded the company back in 2013 with fellow tech entrepreneur Pete Lau and, over the next seven years, grew the company into one of the world’s most recognisable smartphone brands.

Until his recent keynote, the name of Pei’s company — which he founded almost immediately after leaving OnePlus — also pretty much summed up everything we knew about what it was and did. Now, we know a little more than nothing; not much more, but a bit.

We know what Pei thinks of the current smartphone market: “Today’s product systems are dull, closed, and isolated from the people who use them, but there’s still time to fix it — to find our way back to the future we envisioned.”

We know that Pei’s mysterious tech startup — which launched a set of earbuds last year to largely positive reviews — is also set to launch its first smartphone this summer, and we know that, if it’s half as good as Pei says it’s going to be, Nothing is going to change everything we think we know about the modern smartphone.

Carl Pei was born in Beijing in 1989, but his family soon moved to the United States before eventually settling in Stockholm, Sweden, where Pei was raised. While attending the Stockholm mobile-magazine.com

19

TRAILBLAZER

School of Economics, Pei abandoned his bachelor’s degree to work full time in the smartphone industry — landing a job at BBK Electronics subsidiary Oppo in late 2011 as its international markets manager, where he worked directly under Pete Lau. Two years later, the duo founded OnePlus and launched their first device, the OnePlus One, which sold close to a million units in 2014 — smashing their projected sales figures of 50,000. OnePlus went from strength to strength over the next three years, quickly developing a reputation as a manufacturer of “flagship killers” — premium-feeling phones at affordable price points.

If Pei had remained at OnePlus, turning out generation after generation of well-received phones, he’d still be a remarkable figure in the landscape of the modern smartphone sector.

However, it appears Pei has taken OnePlus’ motto (“Never Settle”) too close to heart.

For someone whose rise in the smartphone industry has been so fast and precipitous, Pei also seems to hate tech as much as he loves it. “This world utterly absorbed me. It felt like everything was possible,” says Pei, reflecting on the dawn of consumer tech and the widely accessible, social internet in the 2010s. “But today, all that excitement and all that possibility around tech — it’s gone,” he shrugs. “What have we got instead? Scepticism, apathy; tech companies are not on the consumer’s side any more. And no one’s innovating.”

Bold, contentious words, but it’s not impossible to see where he’s coming from.

We live in a world where upgrade cycles are getting shorter as each subsequent generation of phone looks less distinct from the one that game before it. Pei wants his new project to change the future of the industry by recapturing the magic of a bygone age.

“If not us, then who?”

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May 2022

“THIS WORL UTTERLY ABSORBED ME. IT FELT LIKE EVERYTHIN WAS POSSIBLE”

LD

D

NG

”

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FIVE MINUTES WITH...

NAVANIT NARAYAN This month, we sat down with Navanit Narayan, CEO of the Lyca Group, one of Europe’s largest Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNO), to get his take on the direction this dynamic, growing slice of the industry will take in 2022.

Q. Navanit, what are the major factors you see shaping the evolution of the MVNO space right now?

» “End-to-end digitalisation. MVNOs are

paying special attention to being digitallyled, a focus that became a priority during the pandemic not only in the telecoms

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May 2022

space, but for any business with customer excellence at its heart”.

“As the provider, we have a responsibility to enhance and simplify our existing customer journeys and enduser touchpoints to be able to make meaningful moves in improving the customer experience whilst keeping costs low. Luckily, MVNOs are uniquely placed to adapt and pivot their service offerings at speed to cater to new demands”.

“Our ability to be agile to meet customer needs will be our strength during this year, which is set to be another one of ongoing disruption and uncertainty. MVNOs will continue leading the charge on a new wave of innovative mobile services, as well as driving IoT opportunities in the MVNO space.

Q. MVNOs often end up getting access to next-gen networks up to a year after their host carriers, and sometimes get palmed off with slower speeds and throttled capacity. Is it different this time round with 5G? If so, why do you think that is?

we’re due significant growth because of 5G’s low-latency offering”.

opportunities that will arise out of 5G will be in enterprise, as opposed to the consumer vertical. Thus, consumer MVNOs aren’t positioned as a ‘threat’ for MNOs to actively create a barrier to 5G entry.

The same is to be said of IoT, which Enterprise MVNOs have a big role to play in - an area in which

for choice for digital providers, MVNOs must work harder to propel digital adoption even further.

Alongside continuing to capitalise on our valuedriven proposition, MVNOs should be using digitalisation to streamline the customer experience, mining the existing processes in place and

» “It’s important to note that the main

Q. How can MVNOs digitally transform to provide a compelling value proposition to customers that doesn't solely rely on lower prices?

» “As customers continue to be spoilt

“MVNOS MUST WORK HARDER TO PROPEL DIGITAL ADOPTION EVEN FURTHER”

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23

FIVE MINUTES WITH...

creating a customer journey that is simple and intuitive. We must look to re-invest long-term savings from our digitalisation initiatives into customer excellence.”

Q. What can MVNOs do to help bridge the digital divide in both mature and emerging markets?

» “As customers continue to be spoilt for

choice for digital providers, MVNOs must work harder to propel digital adoption even further. Alongside continuing to capitalise on our value-driven proposition, MVNOs should be using digitalisation to streamline 24

May 2022

the customer experience, mining the existing processes in place and creating a customer journey that is simple and intuitive. We must look to re-invest longterm savings from our digitalisation in it.

“One of our fundamental values here at Lyca Mobile is to strive towards providing accessible connectivity for everyone.

MVNOs can help bridge the digital divide in both mature and emerging markets. One way we’re doing it? By becoming an MNO”.

“Lyca Mobile operates as an MNO in Uganda, as the country’s third national operator. Since entering the market in

2020, we have established countrywide infrastructure, meaning Ugandans across the country now have the chance to connect with friends and family through our low-cost voice and data services.

And we won’t stop here, we’ll be looking at other regions as and when the opportunity arises”.

Q. Could you tell me about Lyca's recent work with Afghan refugees?

» “If the past year has collectively taught us anything, it is that togetherness and connection is invaluable, and closing the

digital divide in our society needs to be a priority. Lyca Mobile was founded on the belief that people shouldn’t have to pay the earth to stay in touch with their loved ones – no matter where they are”.

“So, at the start of the Afghan refugee crisis, we knew we wanted to help. We reached out to local councils in the UK, as well as charities like the Red Cross in Denmark, to donate over 1000 SIM cards pre-loaded with credit to families who need them. Response to the scheme has been positive and we’re continuing to work with our partners to provide support.” mobile-magazine.com

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May 2022

NOTTINGHAMSHIRE COUNTY COUNCIL

CULTIVATING THE WORLD'S FIRST 5G CONNECTED FOREST WRITTEN BY: JESS GIBSON

PRODUCED BY: STUART IRVING

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NOTTINGHAMSHIRE COUNTY COUNCIL

Nottinghamshire County Council’s Ceren Clulow walks us through a digital dreamworld, where technology and nature connect in unexpected, transformative ways idden amid a copse showing the early signs of spring – newly-sprouting leaves, green shoots and a morning chorus of birds – is a scene so tranquil and seemingly untouched, you wouldn’t imagine that it could be the site of one of the most innovative, far-reaching digital projects in the UK showcasing the true extent of 5G capabilities.

But there’s one woman who could see the scope of potential being overlooked in natural spaces such as Sherwood Forest and Rufford Abbey Country Park in Nottinghamshire.

“In one of my visits to Sherwood Forest, I realised that it has so much potential but

doesn't have any connectivity to do anything – for social media sharing, to connect people, to enhance the visitor experience,” explains Ceren Clulow, Digital Connectivity Manager, Nottinghamshire County Council (NCC), and Ericsson’s ‘5G Trailblazer’.

Imagining a world where nature and technology could be inextricably linked together, Clulow set about turning her ambitious vision into reality. She embarked upon a state-of-the-art digital connectivity project in and around the world famous Sherwood Forest area, located in the north of Nottinghamshire, in early 2020.

Clulow beams with pride as she elaborates on her fascinating journey: “I was looking for some funding opportunities and came across one from the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport [DCMS]. In the briefing event I attended, I said, ‘I have an ambition.

After doing some research, I’ve found that there is not a forest in the world that has 5G connectivity. Do you think this is possible? Do you think we can test if 5G works in a forest?’. So, I got the push from DCMS to go for it – ‘Let's try, don't stop’.”

And that’s how the 5G Connected Forest was born – the first of its kind.

“ I said, ‘I have an ambition. After doing some research, I’ve found that there is not a forest in the world that has 5G connectivity.

Do you think this is possible? Do you think we can test if 5G works in a forest?’”

CEREN CLULOW

DIGITAL CONNECTIVITY MANAGER, NOTTINGHAMSHIRE COUNTY COUNCIL

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May 2022

Example of an image caption mobile-magazine.com

31

NOTTINGHAMSHIRE COUNTY COUNCIL

Leading Nottinghamshire to a technologically-integrated, sustainable future Aiming to transform and uplift natural spaces within the locality, the project was based around the concept of a 5G-connected forest at its very core. It would include various strands, such as leisure, rural conservation, careers and skills, and health and social care, to make it a well-rounded project beneficial for future generations.

“The Council has property, planning, commissioning, highways, travel, transport, infrastructure and economic growth and development under the Place Department.

We’ve always thought of digital as an enabler in bringing innovations to these different areas,” says Clulow.

ONE NETWORK ANY CLOUD ALL

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May 2022

SOFTWARE

“ One of my strengths is that I never give up – so I didn't. I found some partners and we shared an ambition”

CEREN CLULOW TITLE: DIGITAL CONNECTIVITY MANAGER COMPANY: NOTTHINGHAMSHIRE COUNTY COUNCIL INDUSTRY: PUBLIC SECTOR LOCATION: NOTTINGHAM, UK

CEREN CLULOW

DIGITAL CONNECTIVITY MANAGER, NOTTINGHAMSHIRE COUNTY COUNCIL

EXECUTIVE BIO

Determined to get the project underway, Clulow established links with influential businesses, 5G network providers, tech companies, and academic institutes primarily within the Midlands, to draw out the best of both nature and technology for the purposes of conservation, education, health, and social mobility.

The process of getting the project off the ground was much more difficult than first expected, however, as Clulow explains: “I contacted major national operators, getting fully closed doors in my face and ‘no, we can't do it, it's too difficult’ – some parts of this forest are really protected, so you can't even walk in them. And, of course, with hundreds of thousands of years of forest, people think it’s the last place you can bring in innovation, which is why everybody was saying, ‘no, it's impossible’.

“One of my strengths is that I never give up – so I didn't. I found some partners and we shared an ambition. We thought about the kinds of use cases, identifying visitor experience and environmental management, both of which are really key at the moment. Then I applied for the funding, where I must have convinced DCMS, and secured £10m from them to bring the first 5G signal into a forest setting.”

Ceren has been working for the Council almost 15 years.

Over the last few years as Digital Connectivity Manager, Ceren has been responsible for driving the use of digital technologies to improve business productivity and economic growth across Nottinghamshire. During this time, she has single-handedly secured several million pounds of funding via numerous bidding processes to extend the digital connectivity in Nottinghamshire. Ceren is committed to seeing Nottinghamshire at the heart of the digital industry and at the centre of the regional, national, and international tourism map.

The initial idea was formulated with Sherwood Forest in mind, a location associated with the legend of Robin Hood.

Today, it's a 450-acre natural reserve managed by the RSPB, a third-party shared organisation that NCC works with to preserve and maintain the sustainability of the forest. Within the forest’s expanse, there are hundreds of trees over 500 years old, as well as the rather famous Major Oak that’s estimated to be between 800-1100 years old – all of which is, as you’d expect, heavily protected.

“We were thinking of how we need to protect this forest and show new generations how to do so, while also learning the history,” says Clulow. “So we worked with the RSPB when undertaking trials, asking what we’re allowed to do and where we’re allowed to fly the drones, because we’re not trying to damage nature – we’re trying to work around and with it, while also supporting and protecting it to make it even better.”

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May 2022

NOTTINGHAMSHIRE COUNTY COUNCIL Pupils from King’s Church of England Primary Academy, Newark

“ We were thinking of how we need to protect this forest and show new generations how to do so, while also learning the history. So we worked with the RSPB when undertaking trials” CEREN CLULOW

DIGITAL CONNECTIVITY MANAGER, NOTTINGHAMSHIRE COUNTY COUNCIL

Combining and layering the project’s various strands In addition to identifying Sherwood Forest as a 5G trial testbed for technology including AI and robotics, IoT, drones, and augmented reality (AR) Rufford Abbey Country Park – which is just a handful of miles away from the forest – also became a key focus, albeit one with a heavier lean towards device connectivity for leisure and events (more on that later).

Before drilling down into the specifics of what could be done at each site, though, the first step had to revolve around cultivating a 5G network from which other forms of technology could run. This is where Netmore, delivering and operating highly secure networks to mobile-magazine.com

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NOTTINGHAMSHIRE COUNTY COUNCIL

NCC: Cultivating the world's first 5G Connected Forest

“ As a local authority, you need to know your area really well.

You need to know your businesses.

You need to know your community really well” CEREN CLULOW

DIGITAL CONNECTIVITY MANAGER, NOTTINGHAMSHIRE COUNTY COUNCIL

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May 2022

enable connectivity for IoT devices and open up the opportunities of 5G, got involved, along with Mavenir, which provided the necessary equipment for the project.

“Another one of my strengths is partnership and relationship management – meeting with people, networking and also sharing my ambition,” says Clulow matter-of-factly about her uncanny ability to put anyone and everyone around her at ease. “Pitching the target and trying to find a solution, I met with Netmore’s Stefan Stanislawski at a conference in London.

During a coffee break, we were just chatting – and I must have been pitching it really well because he was really interested and came up with some solutions. We just started a brainstorming session. And then we became partners.

“As a local authority, you need to know your area really well. You need to know your businesses. You need to know your community really well. What are their needs, what they want, what they don't like, the number of businesses, who are their local communities, schools, academic

partners? This is what we do in the Growth, Infrastructure and Development team at the authority. We work really close with our business and communities.”

This then started Clulow off on identifying small- and medium-sized businesses, enterprises and educational institutes in the Nottinghamshire and Midlands’ region that could become solid partners in the 5G project – which is how the likes of Gooii, ISPB, Parkwood Leisure, Birmingham City University (BCU) and Nottingham Trent University (NTU) got involved. mobile-magazine.com

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NOTTINGHAMSHIRE COUNTY COUNCIL

“Gooii and ISPB are local smalland medium-sized enterprises from Nottinghamshire and they became our partners. We knew that we had some really innovative academic institutions in the region, too, in Birmingham City University and Nottingham Trent University – they just understood the role they could play,” Clulow says, creating a picture of the partner ecosystem underpinning the project. “Parkwood Leisure, which manages Rufford Abbey Country Park, was involved from the very start, in early discussions.

They're one of our largest businesses, managing the Abbey and grounds for Nottinghamshire County Council.”

Although she successfully managed to pull together a skilled team and identify key elements to focus on, the road ahead wasn’t a smooth one – but for reasons no-one could have anticipated.

“Two weeks after this project launched, we went through a pandemic that impacted the world. Not everyone could stay on the project. All of the partners I mentioned, though, stayed on the project throughout, they delivered it. They continued working on the project plan because they really wanted to see that result,” Clulow says.

Despite the setback and obvious difficulties wrought by the pandemic, the team carried on working together to make their shared vision a reality – and the fruits of their labour are more than Story cont. evident today. on page 60 38

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efore we continue our footsteps on the path to rural 5G connectivity in Nottinghamshire, we're going to take an in-depth look at all the influential partners inspired by Ceren Clulow's vision, without whom the project simply would have fallen flat.

Each partner company had a significant impact on the overall direction of the project,

leading areas related to entertainment, education, conservation, careers, mental health and wellness, and robotics.

A project of such ambitious magnitude takes a proverbial army to set in motion; luckily, everyone involved was dedicated to the cause, even in spite of a global pandemic shutting everywhere down!

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UTILISING BCU ADVANCED NETWORKS AND AI TECH FOR CONSERVATION Birmingham City University’s Assoc Prof Taufiq Asyhari & Dr Moad Idrissi discuss the revolutionary technology transforming forest management for the future

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ituated slap-bang in the Midlands, Birmingham City University benefits from the easily accessible, central position of the third most populous city in the UK. It’s perhaps why Nottinghamshire County Council’s Ceren Clulow partnered up with BCU’s Associate Professor Taufiq Asyhari and Dr Moad Idrissi when looking at different use cases for her 5G Connected Forest project – envisioning ways that the technology being designed and developed could benefit Sherwood Forest and beyond.

Dr Asyhari, an Associate Professor of Networks and Communications, explains how he came to be involved in the project: “My journey into this project started in March 2020, when I was asked by the Head of School for Computing and Digital Technology to lead this big profile project. We reviewed the scope of the project and, as a university

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with primary tasks focused on environmental management, we decided to leverage our ground robots and aerial robots to conduct forest monitoring.”

“Since then, we have been engaging quite closely with our lead partner, Nottinghamshire County Council, in terms of getting these targets and deliverables done,” he adds. “From the beginning, we looked at how we could put technical specifications on the robots and drones to help us achieve our objective. Then we looked at the design of the robot and drone functionalities, incorporating state-of-the-art elements of digital technology, such as artificial intelligence and 5G connectivity, to see how we could harness their power in an area where it’s had limited use before – which is, in this case, environmental management.”

With these pieces of technology, the BCU team managed to meet objectives,

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“equipping the robots and drones with advanced functionalities” to enable the capturing of vital data about the forest setting both above and below the tree canopy.

For Dr Idrissi, who has a PhD in Aerial Robotics and is an ardent fan of anything related to electronics, robotics, and automation, the experience has been one to remember. “My particular role was to focus on the control aspect of the robot, which involves formulating and programming the system to achieve a degree of autonomy.

Another part of my role also involves robot navigation and monitoring, which are particularly about deploying the robot to move around the forest, analyse its health, and then come back to the station from which it was sent.”

“Robots are, again, devices that involve mechanical aspects, as well as electronics.

The fact is, by bringing these things together, along with LIDAR sensors and depth cameras, I have had the opportunity to develop such a smart system. And I'm very proud of what has been achieved so far,” he adds.

While the project itself has the propensity to hugely uplevel the type of environmental management and sustainability initiatives in place to benefit forests and woodlands, it was also an opportunity to work with some of the most advanced tech currently in existence.

“The beautiful thing about this project is that I have had the privilege to work on some of the state-of-the-art sensors, as well as working with one of the best drones on the market. Some of the latest cameras developed by Intel are particularly focused on creating technology that can enable the

user to capture images and get information from those images in order to do certain tasks. So with this kind of technology, we have managed to collect very, very important information, such as forest health indicators,” outlines Dr Idrissi enthusiastically, which Dr Asyhari echoes.

“For me, academia is one of the most ideal places to work because we have freedom to do our job. We have the capability to choose whichever research area we want to work on,” says Dr Asyhari. “One of the biggest things I can take from this project is that it allowed us not just to do something interesting technically, but also to do something that potentially can lead to real societal impact.”

Now, the future of this technology is all about expanding the use cases to explore it from a more commercialised point of view, so that it can benefit different areas of society.

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TAUFIQ ASYHARI TITLE: ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR

DR MOAD IDRISSI

INDUSTRY: EDUCATION & RESEARCH

TITLE: RESEARCH ASSOCIATE

LOCATION: BIRMINGHAM, UK

COMPANY: BIRMINGHAM CITY UNIVERSITY INDUSTRY: EDUCATION & RESEARCH

EXECUTIVE BIO

LOCATION: BIRMINGHAM, UK

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Dr Moad Idrissi is a Research Associate in the field of Smart Computing and Robotics. He is the primary robotic expert for the multimillion pound 5G Connected Forest.

In May 2021, his PhD in Aerial Robotics from Birmingham City University was successfully completed in addition to the MSc in Embedded Systems gained from The University of Birmingham.

Moad has published multiple papers in peer-reviewed IEEE conferences and Q1 rated Journals with contributions to securing international funding.

With over 5 years of teaching and research experience, his primary interests are now focused on vision-based autonomous robots using AI and HumanRobot interaction.

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Associate Professor Taufiq Asyhari currently leads the Future Information Networks (FINET) Research Cluster at Birmingham City University. As an award-winning researcher, he was trained as an information theorist with a PhD from Cambridge University and has served as the Academic Principal Investigator for the multi-million pound 5G Connected Forest funded by the UK DCMS. Taufiq has accumulated a wealth of research leadership experience in advanced networking, information processing and machine learning with applications in environmental management, renewable energy, digital healthcare, and smart city.

He has published more than 60 peerreviewed research articles in the leading international academic journals and conferences.

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COMPANY: BIRMINGHAM CITY UNIVERSITY

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PHIL HASTED TITLE: DIRECTOR COMPANY: GOOII LTD INDUSTRY: APP DEVELOPMENT & WEBSITE DESIGN LOCATION: NOTTINGHAMSHIRE, UK Phil Hasted is a Director at Gooii Ltd. and is responsible for designing and overseeing the development of the company’s interactive and mobile applications.

He’s an expert in all the steps required to produce high quality projects and is an emerging technologies enthusiast.

At Gooii’s heart is Phil’s push for the use of advanced technologies, often using these in new and innovative ways. Phil is also trying close the gap between cinema and augmented reality, via the use of mixed reality headsets and holograms. Other skills include the creation and writing of the stories and concepts that inform these innovative developments.

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e're a company who act as designers and developersfor-hire. We come up with great projects and great ideas, then we leverage the latest technologies such as the Microsoft HoloLens to develop the content.”

Phillip Hasted is every bit the unconventional business director. Stylewise, he’s akin to a rockstar turning up for a casual magazine interview – albeit one equipped with a bottle of water and some mind-blowingly expensive headsets over the usual suspects. But it’s exactly this unconventionality that sets the augmented and virtual reality development agency, Gooii Ltd, apart from others.

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“Myself and some of the other directors used to work together, and we had a vision to begin a far more ambitious and creative company than the one we used to work for, so we left to start Gooii,” Hasted says proudly.

To be truly innovative, especially in a society increasingly led by the evolution of technology, a certain amount of risk and outof-the-box thinking is needed. Luckily, Gooii is more than capable of this, its partnership with Nottinghamshire County Council being the perfect example.

“Ceren contacted us and asked us to be part of the project,” says Hasted. “Our aim is to deliver 5G connectivity to rural areas.

And, specifically from our perspective, we wanted to bring Robin Hood to life. So our

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GOOII LTD’S ROLE IN GROUNDBREAKING 5G CONNECTED FOREST One of Gooii’s Directors, Phillip Hasted, explains how the virtual and augmented reality development agency lent a hand to NCC to bring Robin Hood to life

big, ambitious idea was to bring Augmented Reality content to the forest, via the interactive holographic movie, ‘Robin Hood: An Arrow Through Time’.”

“Now, we're in the position of trialling everything. The 5G technology has been installed in the forest, we've developed the content, and now we're running the experience to see how it works with the network,” explains Hasted. “We're also trying it out with visitors so they can provide us with real world feedback, which we can then use to improve the holographic experience.”

So, with the trials almost over and launch just around the corner, what’s next for Gooii?

“The aim of Gooii as a company is to try and deliver innovative content that's using

the latest technologies,” says Hasted. “So we've got future collaborations after this project as well, where we’re going to be working with NTU. We're also planning on working with Netmore on more projects, too.

“As well as working with the council, we're all going to continue this ecosystem outside of these two projects and hopefully collaborate more going forward.”

Hasted concludes: “As a company, we're trying to deliver excellence wherever we can.

So we're all for our employees and working with our clients – we just really want to push the boundaries of what's possible and deliver the best projects we can, using technology to blur the lines between AR & VR, cinema, theatre and live events.”

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DEVELOPING 5G INFRASTRUCTURE FOR CONNECTIVITY Netmore’s Stefan Stanislawski and Andrew Fisher highlight the challenges, successes and use cases of 5G infrastructure

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hen leading multinetwork IoT operators Netmore first heard about Ceren Clulow and Nottinghamshire County Council’s plan to bring 5G connectivity to rural areas such as Sherwood Forest and Rufford Abbey

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Country Park, Non-Executive Director Stefan Stanislawski remembers thinking, “Good luck with that!”.

You see, enabling 5G connectivity – and, realistically, even 4G connectivity – in a forest setting had yet to be done, predominantly due to the slew of difficulties such a project would entail. Although Stanislawski was initially sceptical, he soon warmed to the idea, persuaded by Clulow’s infectious enthusiasm and can-do attitude, and began building his own team to get everything into action.

So, what exactly were some of the biggest difficulties that Netmore encountered?

According to Andrew Fisher, who became Head of Projects for the Swedish company not long after the pandemic kicked off, the biggest setback predominantly surrounded “obtaining the equipment”: “Because it’s new technology, there's a shortage of equipment, as well as because of the pandemic-related silicon

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shortage, which means you don't get the chips that you need. So you end up with delays.”

The project has also been beleaguered with companies “developing systems and devices that they say will do what it says on the tin, but in actuality, when you receive it, you struggle to make it work”. Fisher has worked closely with engineers because of this.

“I was working with Sergey, who's our chief architect and also who's very hands-on with all the equipment, making it work. I was trying to pick up what he was doing so that I could help pass information back to the directors,” he explains, before adding with a chuckle, “I've often considered myself to be the geek-tohuman interface.”

Getting the infrastructure to the trialling stage has required a huge amount of learning and adjusting along the way, but this has been beneficial for the project overall, helping it to be delivered successfully on

time. “If you fail quickly, you make progress quickly, and the guys have just been phenomenal with their attitude and making this work through all the stresses and strains of life that we've all been through.”

Now the infrastructure is in place, Fisher says: “We're in a situation where, commercially, we could probably do something straight after these trials.”

Stanislawski is excited about the possibilities open before the company, acknowledging further use cases for more visitor attractions at Rufford, as well as the ways in which IoT devices can aid water management at a minute level. In short, the possibilities are endless.

“It's not all about profit and business. It's about giving back to people as well, because they're going to enjoy the process of it,” says Fisher, highlighting the true purpose of the 5G Connected Forest.

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STEFAN STANISLAWSKI TITLE: NON EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR COMPANY: NETMORE IOT SOLUTIONS LTD INDUSTRY: IOT/TELECOM

EXECUTIVE BIO

LOCATION: LONDON, UK

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Stefan has had a long career in telecom finance and strategy across over 70 countries.

For some years I have followed the growth of Netmore in Sweden and its impressive range of activities in wireless and property focused communications. I first became aware of the company in 2006 when I became involved with the forerunner team building what was then a highly innovative new type of long-range mobile phone and data network which achieved national coverage in the difficult terrains of Sweden and Norway.

In 2019, I reconnected with Netmore in Sweden which now also had IoT & property

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(building focussed) networking as well as private mobile networks. The combination of these wireless technologies - particularly with LoRaWAN long battery life IoT - opens up many exciting possibilities. Inspired, we agreed to bring the innovative Nordic experience to the UK and adapt the business model as needed to UK customer needs.

Shortly after setting up Netmore in the UK, I came across Ceren Clulow of Notts CC and the 5G Connected Forest project.

Together we decided to invest in and build a groundbreaking private 5G network using radio spectrum newly liberalised by the UK telecom regulator, Ofcom. This was - and still is - all very new; new technology, new radio frequencies, the novel idea of private 5G which in turn needs new devices. Covid of course caused many, many problems but in the end, we delivered three different 5G networks in four locations thanks to much hard work by the team (and a little bit of luck!).

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ANDREW FISHER TITLE: HEAD OF PROJECT DELIVERY COMPANY: NETMORE INDUSTRY: IOT/TELECOM LOCATION: NOTTINGHAM, UK 25 years in Telco and ICT Project Delivery. Previously an optic specialist REME MOD Civilian. After my 12 years at MOD I decided to get a degree in Computing Systems. When you add Optics to Computers you get telecoms networks. I have been delivering associated projects as a project manager since 1998.

I have been described as a safe pair of hands and the geek to human interface.I love all types of technology, and have been involved in the delivery of many different types.

Key Roles I have enjoyed: 5G Connected Forest – Robin Hood.

E2E Delivery of a standalone 5G network “yes in a forest.”

Various VoIP Telephony projects – 59,000 users for Zurich Finanz, 16,000 users for Scottish Widows, 54,000 users for adidas (54 Countries).

Fibre networks as Scandinavian Transmission Network Manager, 18,000KM Pan European fibre network.

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PREPARING FUTURE GENERATIONS FOR A TECH-ENABLED WORLD ISPB’s Nick Mellors explains how the 5G Connected Forest inspired the UK’s first 5G careers programme to expand the horizons of the next generations

NICK MELLORS TITLE: DIRECTOR COMPANY: ISPB INDUSTRY: BUSINESS CONSULTANCY

EXECUTIVE BIO

LOCATION: NOTTINGHAM, UK

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Nick is the Director of ISPB and Innovation Nottinghamshire, a not-for-profit company created to promote innovation, business and career opportunities in Nottinghamshire, the East Midlands and across the UK. He is also the business, skills and collaboration lead for the county’s 5G Connected Forest and Digital Innovation Centre projects; with a remit to support local students and young people broaden their life and career horizons through an understanding of the opportunities available through 5G and its related technologies (such as AR/VR, robotics, autonomous vehicles, and the Internet of Things).

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ottingham is a big, bustling, trendy city. Despite this, though, the county it sits within contains areas with some of the poorest social mobility opportunities in the country. In other words, while it may not be as deprived as other areas in the country, up-and-coming generations in some parts of the county face major challenges accessing work and career opportunities.

To counteract this, founder of ISPB Nick Mellors performs an integral, endlessly valuable role across higher education institutions (as well as among other settings, such as the NHS, the private sector, and local and central government). As such, with over 30 years’ experience in public sector commercial services, Mellors is in a position to provide independent advice and widen the horizons of students who feel that their options are limited.

So, how did he become a part of the 5G Connected Forest project? “By accident is the simple answer,” Mellors grins.

“At ISPB, we also do business consultancy, and part of that is supporting bid writing for funding. I got a phone call from one of the partners of the project to say, ‘We've got this bid to write, would you be able to help us at all?’ and so I said, ‘Yeah, happy to pop over and take a look now’. By lunchtime I'd become a project partner. Ceren’s to blame for that – she's very persuasive,” he adds with a twinkle in his eye.

Mellors then goes on to explain how, just 10 days into the project, COVID19 hit and caused plans to be reshaped:

“Through a contact at a local school, I was asked to do a talk during lockdown that got such a good response, that other colleges got in touch with me and I realised we had a legitimate programme on our hands. So from talking to students, I realised that there was a great appetite in colleges and schools to understand what this thing called 5G would mean for us, how it could be used, and how it was going to affect every single business sector – and therefore every career – that people entering the world of work are going to be involved in.”

As a result of this, Mellors has worked with over a thousand students across Nottinghamshire, highlighting the different facets of the 5G project, including the other technology 5G is enabling, such as unmanned aerial drones, robotic AI dogs, IoT, and AR/VR headsets.

“Knowing that this stuff is happening on your doorstep is a really powerful message, especially in communities that are often overlooked. When we talk with students about them being the first people in the whole country to take part in this programme and how Nottinghamshire might well have more 5G testbeds than any other county in the country; you can really see their eyes light up,” Mellors concludes.

For a county entrenched in traditional mining and rural communities, where wide-ranging career opportunities can be scarce, the introduction of a programme designed to showcase the role of 5G and other tech within businesses and careers has the potential to be transformational for future generations.

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UTILISING 5G CONNECTIVITY FOR PHYSICAL & MENTAL WELLNESS Nottingham Trent University’s Prof Eiman Kanjo explains how 5G connectivity can help revitalise people’s mental and physical health in a post-pandemic world

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or someone with a wealth of brain power such as Nottingham Trent University’s Prof. Eiman Kanjo, linking pervasive societal problems with targeted, cuttingedge technology to devise solutions is more than just a passion; it’s a vocation. Hence why she has worked consistently for the past two years as an integral partner in Nottinghamshire County Council’s 5G Connected Forest project.

“I'm a professor of Pervasive Computing and Mobile Sensing at NTU, where I lead the Smart Sensing Lab and the basic computing group within the university’s computer sales department,” says Prof. Kanjo. “We build sensing systems where we collect and label data, and then analyse it, with the data coming from devices like wearables or edge devices or IoT devices. Then we try to come up with insights or interventions to support people to change their behaviour or to support a particular community or other sorts of applications.”

Whether mental wellbeing or crime prevention, the idea is that the data

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collected can be manipulated to form discrete interventional solutions to address commonalities. Prof. Kanjo’s years of experience working at prestigious universities on mobile and smartphone technology – as well as other technological and digital foci – makes her an ideal partner for NCC in developing forward-thinking tech with alternative aims and outcomes. As such, she had a crucial role to play in developing the 5G-enabled IoT and AI platform called TagWithMe (www.Tagwithme. com). Central to this is an app developed for Rufford Country Park called ‘Tag in The Park’. But what is this app and how does it work?

“Visitors will be presented with 16 different points of interest across the location, in the form of small images. When they get close to one of these points of interest, the related devices embedded around the park can detect their presence and it triggers one of three types of challenges. These are AI challenges, where visitors have to point their phone – with the camera on – towards part

PARTNERSHIPS IN FOCUS of the feature, which could be a sculpture for example,” Prof. Kanjo explains. “Then the phone, using AI technology, will recognise that sculpture and give them some information about it. One of the other IoT challenges is to find and tap a nearby tag. The third challenge is a quiz where users are presented with a question they have to answer, and they are shown three different options to choose from.

She continues: “When they complete that particular challenge, they get a point. The idea is that, when they reach a specific score, they will be rewarded with a coffee or a sweet treat and so on, which can be decided by the venue managers. These points can be carried out for other visits, for example, if this is built into a subscription based kind of system.”

Following the restrictions of the pandemic, which called for isolation, social distancing and multiple lockdowns, the app is a welcome reprieve for those who have missed in-person connections, fresh air, and beautiful scenery. Now, it is being considered for other applications in the locality, including mental health, physical activities and crime prevention use cases.

“We are looking at ways where we can put a system or test bid for different regions or councils, helping people to be aware of the issues or problems in their local areas, or be offered some kind of information as to who to reach and increasing social prescribing. So, in a way, it could be location proximity-based.

“We also work with end-user organisations who are helping us in terms of how we can customise this for crime prevention. We work with a number of police forces in Nottingham and London to see how this tech could be used to improve crime prevention in those areas.

“I could also imagine it in a school, where the whole lesson is given in an open space in the courtyard, or in the playground, where they have different areas around the playground and the children have to visit each one to learn about specific parts of a topic.

“Right now, though, we are preparing for a test bid with a mental health hospital in Nottingham, because it's very relevant to what they want to achieve in terms of engaging their patients, staff and medical students in the natural environment around them. In the little garden

they have near the hospital, we are embedding our devices to see if we can help in terms of storytelling and motivational messages.”

So, what exactly does Prof. Kanjo envision the future of this technology being?

“We are currently looking at improving the processing power and ability of these devices, and moving towards edge computing, which will enable us to connect these devices collaboratively. So, in a way, they can share intelligence to serve the communities and bridge the gap between the physical and remote.”

We can’t wait to see such a future take shape.

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EIMAN KANJO TITLE: PROFESSOR OF PERVASIVE SENSING COMPANY: NOTTINGHAM TRENT UNIVERSITY INDUSTRY: EDUCATION LOCATION: NOTTINGHAM, UK Eiman Kanjo is a Professor of Pervasive Sensing at Nottingham Trent Univeristy, where she heads the Smart Sensing lab www.SmartSensingLab.com and recently won the Vice-Chancellor’s Outstanding Researcher Team Award.

Eiman conducts research in Mobile Sensing, and she has written some of the earliest papers on the subject [(NoiseSpy, 2010), (GeoMobSens, 2008), and (MobSens, 2009)]. Eiman is also an expert in developing innovative technologies to transform well-being.

Previously Prof. Kanjo worked at the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge and at the Computer Science Department, University of Nottingham. She leads the NTU-Turing Data Science network funded by Alan Turing Institute.

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PARTNERSHIPS IN FOCUS JUSTIN PALFREY TITLE: ASSISTANT REGIONAL DIRECTOR, NORTH & MIDLANDS COMPANY: PARKWOOD LEISURE INDUSTRY: LEISURE LOCATION:NOTTINGHAM, UK Extensive experience and a passion in the delivery of leisure and sport opportunities for a number of years. I have responsibility for a number of leisure contracts and visitor attractions and this includes ensuring compliance with contract key performance Indicators, maintaining strong partnerships with clients and a strong customer focused approach. Along with this I have a comprehensive understanding of how personal/team contributions impact on the success of the business. Underpinned by: • An MBA from Loughborough University and a passion for sports with involvement in swimming for a number of years and accolades including: Former International Swimmer for Great Britain, Qualified Coach & English Channel solo swim.

• A holistic approach and exposure to a range of work/non work experiences has resulted in all rounded application for overachieving targets and developing quality systems/services during my leisure career.

KIRSTY EDWARDS TITLE: CONTRACT MANAGER COMPANY: RUFFORD ABBEY COUNTRY PARK INDUSTRY: LEISURE LOCATION: NOTTINGHAM, UK Currently responsible for overseeing the day to day commercial operations of the park, and the Mill Weddings and Events venue nestled within the grounds including driving forward the long term business strategy in line with Parkwood Leisure and our client NCC. I am an experienced commercial manager with a demonstrated history of working in the events and leisure industry. Skilled in events management, customer service, business management and development, marketing strategy and customer relationship management.

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RECONNECTING RUFFORD WITH ITS REMARKABLE 900-YEAR ROOTS Parkwood Leisure’s Justin Palfrey and Kirsty Edwards explain how the 5G Connected Forest project help reconnect Rufford Park with its historical roots

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ver since Parkwood Leisure took over the management of Rufford Abbey Country Park on behalf of Nottinghamshire County Council in 2017, improving the offerings of the site to enhance the overall visitor experience has been high up on the agenda. As such, both groups began discussions back in 2019 to discuss the range of possibilities.

Once the possibility of funding a project based around 5G connectivity opened up, Justin Palfrey – Parkwood Leisure Assistant Regional Director for North Midlands – and Contact Manager Kirsty Edwards became more involved in developing an aspect of the project specifically for Rufford Abbey Country Park and Rufford Mill, which isas well as the wedding and events venue situated within the grounds of Rufford Abbey.

“It was quite an exciting project to get involved in – a bit of an unknown, a new challenge for us, as it's very different to some of our core businesses,” states Justin. “We had the kickoff meeting and then sadly, we went into a lockdown. However, we've worked incredibly closely since then building a very strong partnership arrangement with Nottinghamshire County Council, as well as some other 5G Connected Forest regional partners.”

Despite frequent lockdowns and rule changes regarding social distancing, the park has bounced back strongly in terms of recovery from the past few years, with many more visitors coming to enjoy the abundant outdoor space, activities, events and fresh air it offers – which will only be further enhanced by the new Rufford Park app, Android: Rufford Abbey App Google / iOS: Rufford Abbey App

Apple, Abbey Tales interactive experience, and full 5G connectivity.

For Kirsty, who joined the team midway through 2021, the past year has been a busy one full of learning as she worked with other partners to install an interactive historical tour: “Abbey Tales is a really, really exciting project that we've been working on for a really long time, and I’m so proud to be able to launch it.

It's basically been about bringing Rufford Abbey to life through its almost-900-year history.

“In terms of driving it towards people that want to come here and experience the history, it's a really key concept. Visitors can come here and experience the history and immerse themselves in the sights, sounds and even the smells of the past,” Kirsty says.

With its potential for educational applications within primary learning, there’s certainly a lot that the Abbey Tales team can look forward to in future. The same can be said of the stunning park’s wedding packages, which could be substantially expanded and personalised with the capabilities provided by 5G connectivity.

“Another byproduct of 5G is that we've had the infrastructure improved around the park, so we're also able to stream weddings and consider other activities,” says Justin. “Now, we're trying to look at how we develop the wedding part of things, which is already very strong due to our current wedding packages, but it's about how we can further digitalise different elements, going forward.

“We're excited about the future here with the ability to offer alternative services/products at the park, in both the medium- and longterm,” he concludes.

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Sherwood Forest: woodland conservation tracing footsteps of Robin Hood Each individual project site had its own core objectives and, as such, its own technology, although both were, of course, given the infrastructure to allow for widespread 5G connectivity.

Three tenets were essential to the Sherwood Forest site and therefore dictated the technology that could be tested and utilised there: conservation and preservation; forest management; and educational entertainment based on local history. Overall, though, the idea was to increase the number of people visiting and benefitting from such a wonderful, natural, local space.

“The inspiration actually came from me not originally being from the UK – I’ve known of Sherwood Forest since I was a child, and I knew Robin Hood was from the county, so I brought my children to walk around. I really wanted to make a change, a difference, for the forest so in the future, I can say, ‘Do you know what? This was my project, I helped to do this’,” Clulow explains, outlining a desire to leave a legacy in a place she has not only made her home, but with which she feels a childhood affiliation.

“Also, climate change is really impacting at the moment and our forest is unfortunately declining – it's getting smaller and smaller, and we want to protect it for future generations. With my role now, it’s about how I can use that initiative to promote environmental sustainability; this is where the passion comes from, because I knew the forest before.”

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the project trials have demonstrated their effectiveness in monitoring the state of the forest. The robotic dogs are programmed to explore the forest floor using sensors to detect terrain and its overall health, as well as identify the volume of sunlight reaching through the trees. The drones, meanwhile, can fly above the canopy of trees and assess health – from identifying symptoms related to lack of nutrients and poor sunlight to dehydration and disease. With this real-time data, institutes such as the RSPB can act efficiently to preserve and care for the forest.

“It is circular. We want people to come here, to stay here longer, have a different experience than on the walk around. And, maybe in 20 years’ time, they can come

Pupils from King’s Church of England Primary Academy, Newark

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“ We want that world-class digital infrastructure to be used for different technologies on a larger scale” CEREN CLULOW

DIGITAL CONNECTIVITY MANAGER, NOTTINGHAMSHIRE COUNTY COUNCIL

with their own children and have the same experience or the same kind of forest rather than something that’s declining.”

The other element of the Sherwood site is the augmented reality visitor experience, provided by Gooii Ltd, which also wrote and produced what is possibly the world’s first interactive holographic movie, featuring the likes of Robin Hood. And where better to take in the legend of Robin Hood than the very place it’s set?

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Promotional video

Rufford Abbey Country Park: bringing history to life At the project’s second site, there was a more human-centred focus on the capabilities 5G connectivity could open up. From eyeopening careers advice and skills practice with ISPB for local students to working with NTU to develop the Rufford Abbey App. With wider connectivity possibilities due to the new 5G infrastructure, Parkwood Leisure has been able to work with other members of the partner ecosystem to develop and install Abbey Tales at Rufford, offering an interactive journey of discovery to visitors and welcoming them to be immersed in the Abbey’s almost 900-year history. This is on top of the additional capabilities 5G offers for wedding packages, particularly in the postpandemic world of Zoom. mobile-magazine.com

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NOTTINGHAMSHIRE COUNTY COUNCIL Each and every element is designed to work seamlessly with and around the others, aiding people in subtle but incredibly useful ways.

The unique app created in conjunction with NTU has a more social, emotional and physical wellness slant to it. In the wake of the pandemic, many people’s physical and emotional health suffered enormously, so the app is designed to encourage families and individuals to explore the grounds of Rufford Abbey in a bid to increase the amount of exercise and fresh air people experience.

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Looking ahead: the future of 5G, IoT, AI, AR and robotics Immersed in the natural beauty of Sherwood Forest and the ruins of Rufford Abbey – nestled within the grounds of Rufford Country Park – the project’s settings act as magical gateways into history, science and the natural world, supported by groundbreaking digital infrastructure and a dedicated team of professionals, a feat many saw as impossible.

With such an unprecedented success on her hands, Clulow is now considering a whole host of options for how she can continue to take this project further, expanding its remit and impacting local communities well into the future.

“We want world-class digital infrastructure to be used for different technologies on a larger scale so that younger generations stay in the county,” she says. “To be successful in this sector, local authorities need to be aware of their assets. The buildings are what we can utilise, and we need to know our not spots and hotspots.

“With that, I mean we need to know where there’s fixed and mobile broadband coverage in each street so that we can identify projects for areas that actually need support – being able to make good decisions comes from being informed.

“ We’ve secured funding from the local government association for a Digital Pathfinders project.”

CEREN CLULOW

DIGITAL CONNECTIVITY MANAGER, NOTTINGHAMSHIRE COUNTY COUNCIL

Clulow reveals that she has already dreamed up new directions that she can take the project in: “We’ve secured funding from the local government association for a Digital Pathfinders project. The idea is to fit a device in our waste recycling vehicles, which travel through each street, to help collect data for us about 4G and 5G coverage. Birmingham City University, our delivery partners, will be putting this information into a map and that will be published on our website.

“That map will not only help us to provide some information about the areas requiring support, but it will also help communities and businesses to access the most accurate information for the area. Unfortunately this kind of information is not shared by Ofcom or mobile network operators with the same accuracy. So we want to help residents if they're buying a house, if they are developing a business, if they're expanding

their business – we want to help them and provide the most accurate information for them to use,” she concludes, her mind clearly still buzzing with possible projects to work on.

It’s this imaginative problem solving underpinning the entire project – as well as the unwavering dedication from everyone involved – that really helped the full scope to materialise, in spite of the pandemic and every other obstacle.

Now, as the final tests and trials take place, ready for launch, the team can breathe a sigh of relief and enjoy the realisation of what was thought by many to be impossible: a 5G Connected Forest. And there’s no one more to thank for that than Ceren Clulow; a 5G trailblazer, indeed.

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Will 5G Give Us the Fir CLOUD-BASED Smartphone?

5G’s lower latencies and faster connections could mean radically rethinking what constitutes a smartphone

WRITTEN BY: HARRY MENEAR

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rst D

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“ C L O U D - B A S E D SMARTPHONES COULD OFFER CONSUMERS AN UNMATCHED USER EXPERIENCE AND MAY ONE DAY REPLACE THE PHYSICAL SMARTPHONE ALTOGETHER” DAMIAN HANSON

CO-FOUNDER & DIRECTOR OF CIRCLELOOP

W

ith the growing power of the cloud and ubiquitous 5G connectivity, the coming decade could see our devices truly step beyond the limitations of physical hardware.

Earlier this year, UK carrier Vodafone and Canonical — the company behind Ubuntu — unveiled a prototype for a new kind of smartphone. Combining virtual machines, cloud storage, and a low-latency 5G connection, the result is “a smartphone running entirely on the cloud while leaving basic functionality on the device a user holds”. By outsourcing the phone’s entire android operating system to a virtual machine in a nearby data centre, this cloudbased smartphone can effectively deliver infinitely scalable computing power through a handset with less on-board hardware than today’s most affordable devices and, supposedly “provides the user with an environment that shows no difference to what they are regularly used to having”. mobile-magazine.com

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“ B Y P U S H I N G T H E C O M P U T I N G POWER TO THE CLOUD, SMARTPHONES CAN GROW SMALLER AND CONSUME LESS POWER” RAJ SHAH

NORTH AMERICA INDUSTRY LEAD FOR TELECOM, MEDIA, AND TECHNOLOGY, PUBLICIS SAPIENT

Damian Hanson, Co-Founder & Director of CircleLoop, says: “Cloud-based smartphones could offer consumers an unmatched user experience and may one day replace the physical smartphone altogether as usage grows.

“Current issues with sustainability surrounding telecoms, such as manufacturing CO2 emissions and the use of non-recyclable materials, will also be solved thanks to a higher reliance on cloudbased smartphones. Supply chain issues will also be less problematic as demand for physical smartphone devices drops in favour of a simple login to a cloud-based telephone provider.”

The Long Road to Cloud Based Smartphones The idea of a smartphone that offloads the bulk of its processing and storage capabilities to the cloud ‒ pulling what the user needs as and when they need it ‒ has been slowly gaining traction for a number of years now.

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Back in 2013, two ex-Googlers, Tom Moss and Mike Chan, founded a company called Nextbit. The startup launched its debut smartphone, the Robin, on Kickstarter a few years later, with a vision to deliver “seamless cloud-first computing across multiple devices”.

The Robin came equipped with a paltry 32GB of onboard storage and a plan to use AI-based behavioural analysis to offload underused applications and data ‒ like videos, pictures, and even entire applications ‒ into an unlimited cloud storage space, outsourced in a way that optimised performance and reduced the demands placed on the device’s internal hardware.

The approach is similar to Google’s Chromebooks, which host applications in Google’s own cloud and online to reduce the need for large amounts of RAM and powerful chipsets. The project raised over US$1mn on Kickstarter and, like most Google spin-off projects ahead of their time, fell quickly off the face of the Earth.

Arno van Huyssteen Title: Global Service Provider Company: Canonical

What is a Cloud-Based Smartphone, Anway?

“Explaining what a cloud-based smartphone is requires us to think about how we got to the current state of modern smartphones in general.

“Today's smartphone is an engineering marvel, with multiple magnitudes more processing power than what it took to send a human to the moon, and yet, every year companies put billions of dollars into research and development to create yet more powerful and feature-rich smartphones. This drives application developers to creatively use the processing power to give consumers the next big service, game or experience and indirectly forces millions of customers to continue to upgrade perfectly good phones for the next incrementally more powerful version.

“A cloud-based smartphone rethinks the direct link between the physical capabilities of the device in your hand and the ability for developers to give you, the customers, more powerful and engaging content and services. This is done by moving and hosting the applications that reside inside our mobile phones and tablets today, within your mobile operators' data centre - more accurately,

on the bare metal cloud servers located as close as the cell tower to which your phone is connected. By doing this, the device in your hand would not be required to have a powerful processor, lots of storage space or even an advanced graphics processing chip.

The device's main responsibilities would now become connecting to your mobile network and visualising the content that is being interacted with on your private mobile phone digital-twin in the cloud.

“By disconnecting the need to have a powerful device from the services we need and love, one could go a step further and imagine that any screen could be used to allow you to interact with your services and content. From the mobile device in your hand to a smart mirror or table in a restaurant, to the VR headset you are wearing. The physical mobile devices that form part of our daily lives will essentially require a radio connection (5G/6G/Wifi), a battery and a touchscreen.

Once the next-generation game or services come out and the processing power in your personal smart(phone)-instance will just increase to accommodate the demand.”

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“ A C L O U D - B A S E D SMARTPHONE IS A NECESSARY STEP TO AN IMMERSIVE, ALWAYS-ON METAVERSE” RAJ SHAH

NORTH AMERICA INDUSTRY LEAD FOR TELECOM, MEDIA, AND TECHNOLOGY, PUBLICIS SAPIENT

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The idea of a cloud-based smartphone, however, persisted.

Back in 2020, Qin Fei, Head of Vivo’s Communication Research Institute, speculated in an article published in the Manila Standard that, with low enough latencies between the end device and an edge computing data centre, smartphones might effectively be freed from the constraints of having to carry around all their own hardware.

“Could the future be as simple as a single sheet of glass, which is how artists and science fiction envision the future smartphone?” he asked, wondering if the eventual form factor of a smartphone might be a “pure display device with all processing and intelligence in the cloud”.

Raj Shah, North America Industry Lead for Telecom, Media, and Technology at digital consultancy Publicis Sapient, thinks the future form factor of a smartphone might even stop resembling a single device.

“By pushing the computing power to the cloud, smartphones can grow smaller and consume less power, possibly fragmenting into components – one small piece in your pocket or purse for connection, an audio device in your ear, and a visual overlay for AR/VR,” he tells me, adding that making smartphones into a more integrated and unobtrusive technology, while simultaneously making them more powerful by orders of magnitude is “a critical step for the future of digital reality. A cloud-based smartphone is a necessary step to an immersive, always-on Metaverse that we believe is coming.”

Cloud Gaming: A Blueprint for Cloud-Based Smartphones?

The rapidly expanding cloud gaming sector is probably the best example we have for

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using low-latency connections to host heavy IT workloads that are streamed in near-real time to the user’s device.

The idea is that powerful computers run demanding games remotely, and stream them to a smartphone with such low latency that twitch-based games, where reaction times are paramount, can still be played effectively.

However, 5G infrastructure isn’t quite ready to deliver the kinds of cloud gaming experiences that can compete with local platforms, yet.

Sri Iyer, CEO and founder of Game Bench, notes that, “To meet the demands of enthusiasts, the input latency needs to be less than 133-milliseconds, quickening to 74

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less than 83-milliseconds for ultra-gamers, yet the best we can currently serve up is 170 to 180 milliseconds, which only caters to basic performance”.

Iyer insists, however: “We’re not too far away from an exhilarating future where 5G means high-end games can be played convincingly and seamlessly on mobile devices.” The question poses itself: if we’re entering an age where we can run AAA games on monstrously powerful gaming rigs in a data centre, and stream them in nearreal time to a smartphone, why can’t we also stream the phone’s OS, apps, and data in real time as well?

The computing power and the software certainly exists. The issue lies with connectivity.

“ Y O U C A N D R A W PARALLELS WITH CHROMEBOOKS HERE, WHICH CARRY JUST THE OS AND BASIC SERVICES, AND THEN EVERYTHING IS DRAWN FROM THE CLOUD” DAVID OWEN

MANAGING DIRECTOR OF COMMUNICATIONS AT INTERCITY

5G: Is it Fast Enough?

According to David Owen, Managing Director of Communications at Intercity, when it comes to assessing the viability of a cloudbased smartphone, “You can draw parallels with Chromebooks here, which carry just the OS and basic services and then everything is drawn from the cloud. These struggled to take off in a significant way because connectivity in the UK is still patchy and the risk of not being able to work due to this is too great”.

Shah agrees that, while “the computing power is certainly available, the latency and coverage needed to be a truly reliable device – even with 5G C-Band rollout – aren’t quite there yet”. The need for superfast connectivity also creates some dissonance when held

up against one of the biggest selling points of a cloud-based smartphone: fewer, less powerful components. This makes them an ideal candidate for the budget market.

Budget phones tend to sell best in markets where the quality and reliability of networks is a few years behind more affluent countries.

Nevertheless, the gulf between what’s possible and what’s needed for the dawn of a cloud-based smartphone age is, Owen continues, smaller than it might appear.

“We already consume cloud-based services on our phones for work, email, Power BI, calendar, Teams, Zoom – none of these would work without connectivity, so I can see why cloud-based phones might be attractive,” he says. mobile-magazine.com

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Network digitalisa accelerates indus transformation 76

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ation strial

UNIFIED NATIONAL NETWORKS (UNN)

WRITTEN BY: CATHERINE GRAY PRODUCED BY: JAMES BERRY mobile-magazine.com

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UNN’S CFO, BERND FLACK, AND HEAD OF CONTROLLING, KELLY NGO, OUTLINE HOW THE COMPANY SUPPORTS WAWASAN 2035 THROUGH EDUCATION, INNOVATION, AND MODERNISATION

E

stablished in 2018 to support Brunei’s development, Unified National Networks (UNN) looks to develop and boost the country as it follows its WAWASAN 2035 programme for a better future.

Wholly owned by His Majesty's Government of Brunei Darussalam, UNN is recognised as a government-linked company under Darussalam Assets (DA).

Supporting an active part of business development, the finance department provides valuable information for decisionmaking, sales, operations, and reporting.

Bernd Flack, UNN’s Chief Financial Officer, explains how he supports the company’s goals: “We’re here as we want to enable the young company to deal in the regulated market they operate in, find a place in the ecosystem that relates to the Brunei region and learn how to face international competition.”

Outlining the significance of the company as it looks to support Brunei, Flack says: “UNN was formed to help support a bigger initiative conducted by the Brunei government in 2004, where they looked to set up a programme to renew and enable the country for the future. The government looked to invest in the education of its population to define its economic strategy for a dynamic and sustainable economy and make sure that the country will have the right infrastructure

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Empowering Bruneians to imagine, create and experience what’s next.

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How imagine promoted digitalisation in Brunei during Covid-19 Suzannawati binti Suharju, Chief Executive Officer at imagine, is at the forefront of digitalising Brunei Darussalam and making it a ‘smart nation’ Established in January 2020, imagine was formed due to a change in Brunei’s telecommunications landscape, inheriting its services from imagine’s predecessor, Telekom Brunei Berhad. Imagine’s establishment came in the wake of the pandemic, posing its own sets of challenges for a newly established organisation.

Imagine works closely with Brunei’s telecommunications network, led by the Unified National Networks (UNN), an organisation 100% wholly-owned

by His Majesty’s Government of Brunei Darussalam.

Suzannawati binti Suharju, imagine Chief Executive Officer, is on a mission to make Brunei a ‘smart nation’ and make it one of the most connected places on earth through affordable and accessible services.

“We work very closely with the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Transport and Infocommunications . Our collective goal is to modernise the network and improve the customer experience. The uptake of broadband in the country has increased tremendously. One of the things that we

are actively working on is to make sure that broadband and mobile services are affordable, sustainable and accessible to all. As we have branched out into the mobile space, it is now about simplifying everyday and making it easier,” she says.

CSR pillars and driving cultural change Imagine provides free data and SIM cards to underprivileged students, and has been approaching private sector companies and the public to call for data donations through the A-Dollar-A-Cheer donation platform, via SMS and the imagine website.

They were awarded the Asean Outstanding and Social Welfare Development Award for their community work with children.

At the same time, the entire telecommunications industry was in discussions with MoE (Ministry of Education) and MoRA (Ministry of Religious Affairs) to bring in over 15,000 laptops and 1,000 dongles to supply to teachers and underprivileged students in support of e-Learning during the pandemic.

Suzanna states: “Our aspiration is to be a smart nation and there are countless small micro enterprises that can benefit from using our platform.”

Learn more

UNIFIED NATIONAL NETWORKS (UNN)

for growth. This programme - WAWASAN 2035 - has the incorporation of UNN as one amongst other key steps to develop its telecommunication and digital infrastructure.”

As a telecommunications company, UNN supports Brunei with its programme by enabling people in the region to navigate challenges around telecommunication services, data processing, information technology and connectivity.

“Before UNN was established, there were several telecommunications companies in operation, competing based on infrastructure.

Brunei itself is a small place, so having a lot of competition meant none of the companies could invest significantly in decent infrastructure,” explains Flack.

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“From this, the idea was born to set up a company that delivers infrastructure services, non-discriminatory to all the participants in the market. This means the telecommunications companies can acquire our services for the same price so there is no competition created from UNN itself,” he continues.

One key company that transitioned in the telecommunications space is Datastream Digital (DST). Formerly a full-service mobile network operator and a full mobile service provider, DST is now an asset-light, customer-focused, digital-first operator.

“DST continues to build on its digital platform and will continue to build its ecosystem to provide digital services, value and

convenience as a priority to its customers in Brunei, with a set vision to grow into the region as a digital service provider,” explains Flack.

Adding to this, Kelly Ngo, Head of Controlling – who also looks to take on the role of CFO once Flack’s assignment with UNN is over – comments: “UNN is here to unify and consolidate all the infrastructure from the existing telecommunications companies. In doing so, we get to modernise and create a more cost-efficient digital platform where we provide higher speed, better connectivity, better coverage, and better service quality. In return, the consumers get the best price and can enjoy all these perks.”

This consolidation started in September 2019, when UNN officially took over all network infrastructure operated by the existing telecommunications service providers, to deliver highly resilient, quality services to the whole nation.

Digitally enhancing Brunei with UNN’s modernisation journey

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“ U N N W A S F O R M E D T O H E L P S U P P O R T A BIGGER INITIATIVE CARRIED OUT BY THE BRUNEI GOVERNMENT IN 2004 WHERE THEY LOOKED TO SET UP A PROGRAMME TO RENEW AND ENABLE THE COUNTRY FOR THE FUTURE” BERND FLACK CFO, UNN

Supporting Brunei’s Telco ecosystem with modernisation As an integral element of its programmes, UNN has looked at several diverse ways to digitally enrich Brunei and improve the lives of citizens and residents. It aims to tackle challenges around economic globalisation, growth in world population and the increasing use of digital technologies that put a strain on available resources.

“The market and technology are changing, and we want to respond to that,” says Flack.

“When we look at the data business, data may be the resource that is driving business now. So, we are heavily investing in data centres and related services to make sure that we can provide a professional service to the industries,” he adds.

On top of this, UNN provides infrastructure services and invests heavily in the country’s network, among other technologies. “In the past three years, we have renewed the telecommunications systems in an immense way. When we started, the network was 2G and now it is mostly 4G-based on a highperformance mobile radio access network.

We are now preparing for the launch of 5G we have driven a huge development for the country,” comments Flack.

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Transforming Brunei with innovation from Dell Technologies Dell Technologies and Unified National Networks (UNN) share how their partnership is enabling innovation and transforming Brunei’s technology infrastructure Dell Technologies’ purpose is to create technologies that drive human progress. With the vision to deliver a better tomorrow, Dell Technologies is always innovating, developing technology and offering end-to-end solutions to enable its customers to move forward and go further. This Fortune 500 company is working relentlessly to support Unified National Networks (UNN) in Brunei, as it strives to modernise the country’s telecommunications network.

“Before our partnership with Dell Technologies, commercial cloud was not available in Brunei.

With Dell’s support, we are now able to deliver better and more secure virtual infrastructure to our customers. Since this partnership, our commercial department has received many interesting leads from both local entities and international customers,” says Daniele Cuocci, Senior Vice President of Data Center and IT for UNN. To support both its internal and external customers, UNN collaborated with Dell Technologies to fast-track the modernisation of their network infrastructure, in alignment with the country’s WAWASAN 2035 vision.

Anothai Wettayakorn, Vice President of Dell Technologies, Asia Emerging Markets and South Asia CSB shares how Dell played a key role in

achieving this: “UNN needed to modernise their three data centres. Our goal was to digitally transform their wide-ranging capabilities to deliver next-gen Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and 5G-enabled services.”

Adding to this, Ajit Nair, Senior Director, Dell Technologies Strategic Initiatives, Asia Pacific & Japan Channels says: “We brought an important edge over other technology players in the market with our VxRail-based VMware vSAN Stretched Cluster, enabling synchronous data replication between the data centers. We are also providing end-to-end data center solutions, including Data Protection Solutions (DPS) with simplified support processes and a single point of contact.”

Wettayakorn concludes by sharing how Dell Technologies is proud to be a trusted technology partner to UNN and is committed to supporting its technological aspirations: “Our expertise in telecom solutions and in-depth knowledge of the CSP market, along with the strength of our portfolio will help deliver the desired business outcomes for customers like UNN. Our partnership will further focus on introducing software-defined networking through VMware NSX to help in the development of next-gen UNN services. This will enable them to further scale their infrastructure to better serve their customers.”

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UNIFIED NATIONAL NETWORKS (UNN)

Bernd Flack TITLE: CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER INDUSTRY: INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY & TELECOMMUNICATION

EXECUTIVE BIO

LOCATION: BRUNEI Bernd Flack has held several high-tech Senior Executive management positions in the telecommunication and information technology sector over the past twenty years.

He is currently Chief Financial Officer (CFO) and Managing Director of Unified National Networks (UNN), the leader in telecommunications infrastructure services in Brunei Darussalam. His experience in telecommunication gained Bernd interim mandates as CFO and CEO at telecommunication providers in the Sub-Saharan region of Africa.

Prior to UNN, Bernd was CEO at T-Systems Solutions for Research, responsible for solution provisioning for research institutions in aerospace and applied research institutions.

He graduated in Economics in 1979 and Information Technology in 1988. After graduating, he qualified as a software engineer. Bernd was previously appointed Chairman of the Board of “Höchstleistungsrechner für Wissenschaft und Wirtschaft” (HWW) and represented Malawi Telecommunication Ltd. as a member of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU).

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Imagine a world where limitless connectivity means limitless possibility.

With faster connectivity, ultra-low latency, and greater bandwidth, 5G is advancing societies, transforming industries, and dramatically enhancing, day-to-day experiences.

ericsson.com/imaginepossible

UNIFIED NATIONAL NETWORKS (UNN)

“UNN IS HERE TO UNIFY AND MODERNISE THE EXISTING TELECOMMUNICATION AND DIGITAL INFRASTRUCTURES” KELLY NGO

HEAD OF CONTROLLING, UNN

He adds: “We have also transformed the fixed network. When UNN was formed, it was in the transition phase to fibre access, with a copper network in the ground but not adequate for the services required. Initially, we maintained it, but then we started to accelerate the fibre network rollout so we could deliver higher, better bandwidth and high speeds to our customers - that is a huge achievement for the country.”

Highlighting the significance of this to the country’s WAWASAN 2035 programme, Ngo says: “One of the related objectives is also to implement an ICT transformation journey, where it will transform Brunei to progress into a more digitally integrated future. So, with that, UNN plays a vital role because we are here to provide telecommunication services and to implement a cost-efficient and modernised digital platform.”

“The initiative that looks to provide a digital platform is important. The pandemic, which affected everyone, showed that we need to become more digitised. Most business activities are now done digitally or virtually, so UNN has come in to modernise the network and improve bandwidth to ensure that people are still able to work, regardless of external factors that might challenge them,” she continues. mobile-magazine.com

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To further support Brunei and its businesses as the world becomes more digitalised, UNN has invested in existing buildings to create tier-level data centres in the region and is in the process of setting up new ones to ensure all the needs and demands of its customers are met.

Brunei: from 2G to 4G with UNN Still an ongoing transition, UNN’s modernisation of Brunei’s network from 2G to 4G is one of the organisation's most significant achievements to date. Now, UNN is also investing in 5G and accelerating what needs to be done to modernise the transport and core network to facilitate this.

“UNN’s mission is to offer wholesale services to both national and international clients. This means that retail service providers can focus on rolling out their own products to attract those customers interested in the packages they are offering.

Previously, they would have had to build their own infrastructure, which is not practical for the market size of Brunei. That is why UNN

“UNN PLAYS AN IMPORTANT ROLE IN THE FUTURE OF THE NATION, AS WE ARE THE KEY DRIVER TO TRANSFORM THE NATION TOWARDS A DIGITALISED WORLD” KELLY NGO

HEAD OF CONTROLLING, UNN

comes in to consolidate all the network infrastructure,” explains Ngo. This modernisation was key to creating the base for Brunei’s economic progression, as it gives the population faster, more reliable internet access on a more modern network.

As with any project like this, Flack explains how UNN had to adapt to meet the needs of the different areas in the country: “Although Brunei is a small place, we do have rural areas that do not, or did not, have connectivity. To tackle this, we set up a programme that takes care of this part of the country, to make sure that we can provide the same services to the rural areas. Of course, we have also looked at ways to improve connectivity in more residential areas, too.”

Additionally, the modernisation programme looked at the government, education, and health network. Coming with several challenges, UNN soon realised that, through education and development, it could give back to the country. mobile-magazine.com

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ACHIEVING BRUNEI'S SMART NATION GOALS This year, UNN launched a Cloud Hosting Service, Infrastructure-asa-Service (IaaS). The launch marked a milestone in Brunei’s digital transformation development and aligns with the nation’s digital transformation journey towards achieving the Smart Nation goals.

“In both initiatives, we wanted to give back to the country’s economy in several ways. When we deal with international suppliers, one requirement is that they use subcontractors located in Brunei. This gives local companies the chance to develop their business,” explains Flack.

To ensure the local companies were prepared to support UNN’s network modernisation, the company, in collaboration with universities, educated them to ensure they could effectively contribute to the projects.

“15% of our business is supported by international companies, but the remaining 85% is done by local companies. When we construct towers, we rely on local companies. When we look to connect

Creating Future Business Detecon is a trusted long-term partner of the Brunei government in building a fully functioning telecommunication ecosystem with state-of-the-art infrastructure sharing business models and modernized national infrastructure assets to enable value creation and innovation.

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“U NN’S MISSION IS TO OFFER WHOLESALE SERVICES TO BOTH NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL CLIENTS” KELLY NGO

HEAD OF CONTROLLING, UNN

households and put new cable in the ground, that is done by local suppliers,” outlines Flack.

“This is not just company policy; this underpins our commitment to contribute to the Brunei economy and enable businesses within the community to have a sustainable economy. All those companies will gain more experience and be better positioned for it.

They are all really committed to our business, too,” he adds.

Looking at the significant number of economic benefits this modernisation has brought to Brunei, Ngo notes: “Another way this transformation has boosted the economy is through the creation of jobs. As we have created more work opportunities for local contractors, they need to get more resources to collaborate with us. Many of them have taken on more teams to help them meet the work we have awarded to them.”

Despite these economic benefits, Flack explains that there are some significant challenges around the population’s reaction to this programme: “We have, from timeto-time, faced situations where people have tried to damage the network. This not only impacts UNN, but it also impacts the customers in the country, so we work mobile-magazine.com

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UNIFIED NATIONAL NETWORKS (UNN)

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“ W H E N W E CONSTRUCT TOWERS, WE RELY ON LOCAL COMPANIES. WHEN WE LOOK TO CONNECT HOUSEHOLDS AND PUT NEW CABLE IN THE GROUND, THAT IS DONE BY LOCAL SUPPLIERS” BERND FLACK CFO, UNN

together with the government to make sure these incidents can be stopped. Not only do we lose time and incur costs when this happens, but we also lose confidence from those customers that are affected. To combat this, we need to create awareness around the impact on the country if the network is damaged.”

DRIVING BRUNEI'S GROWTH UNN aims to be a pioneering digital platform, a trusted partner driving growth and innovation for all industries, supporting a skilled and unique Bruneian smart nation that is competitive and collaborating globally.

Cultivating the right partnerships for UNN’s modernisation journey Key to UNN’s modernisation journey is its long-term partnerships with external companies. With over 280 registered partners, UNN has developed a process to ensure prospective partners will be able to meet the needs and expectations when it comes to digitally enhancing Brunei. mobile-magazine.com

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Tech One Global YOUR LEADING

TECH ONE GLOBAL LTD SILVER

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION PARTNER Tech One Global has been a leading content management and cloud solutions provider in Asia.

Our mission is to Lead, Inspire, Motivate, and Empower our clients toward digital transformation.

TALK TO US

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“ A N O T H E R W A Y T H I S TRANSFORMATION HAS BOOSTED THE ECONOMY IS THROUGH THE CREATION OF JOBS” BERND FLACK CFO, UNN

“Becoming UNN’s partner is related to deep knowledge and working experience.

Our partner strategy relies on at least two to three different suppliers that provide specific services to us. We investigate what their capabilities can offer us, and we try to ensure these services would fit for us over a long period of time,” explains Flack.

Among others, one significant partner is T-Systems International, which has supported UNN with its cyber security

portfolio. Keith Lim Chung Chir, Senior IT Architecture and Strategy Manager, and Head of Cyber Security, comments: “UNN is collaborating with internationally acclaimed and established service providers, like T-Systems, to tap on their knowledge, expertise, experiences, and resources to redesign and implement a strong infrastructure and cybersecurity framework suitable for a local context.”

“One such collaboration is the use of the SOAR, whereby Security Operations Centre (SOC) analysts from both UNN and T-Systems are able to plan, manage, track, and coordinate the response to incidents in real-time,” he adds.

By using the built-in live stream functionality, SOC analysts from both companies can collaborate on investigations simultaneously based on mobile-magazine.com

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KELLY NGO TITLE: HEAD OF CONTROLLING INDUSTRY: INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY & TELECOMMUNICATION LOCATION: BRUNEI

EXECUTIVE BIO

real-time information on new or existing cases, tasks, and indicators of compromise.

Outlining another key player in UNN’s modernisation journey, Mona Chin, Cloud Infrastructure Lead, says: “Implementation of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) in UNN Data Centres is delivered by Dell Technologies.

The new hyper-converged infrastructure

by Dell and strategic partnership with VMware allowed UNN to launch our first commercial cloud service hosted in Brunei Darussalam. UNN has become the first Bruneian Certified Cloud Service Provider with Dell Technologies which enables IT transformation.”

This collaboration has enabled UNN to develop a more robust ecosystem and provided them with a multi-cloud strategy.

UNN Cloud, supported by Dell, has the capabilities to accelerate innovation to achieve the organisation's ambition to become the most advanced cloud service provider in Southeast Asia.

Kelly Ngo, as the Head of Controlling in Unified National Networks (UNN), ensures that the business stays compliant regarding all financial policies and regulations.

An experienced professional with more than 15 years in telecoms, Kelly is known for driving business, maximising operational excellence, and delivering financial performance.

Before UNN, she held management positions in Brunei’s telecom industry. Most recently, she was leading the finance department of a Bruneian Mobile Net provider.

In her capacity she successfully delivered projects, such as ERP system implementation, related to performance improvement.

Kelly holds a university degree in “Business and Finance”.

She is based in UNNs headquarter in Bandar Seri Begawan.

UNIFIED NATIONAL NETWORKS (UNN)

THE BEST RUN

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“BECOMING UNN’S PARTNER IS RELATED TO DEEP KNOWLEDGE AND WORKING EXPERIENCE” BERND FLACK CFO, UNN

With such a robust mission and vision, it comes as no surprise that UNN has a whole host of companies looking to support them as they modernise Brunei’s networks.

“Ericsson is another major strategic supplier to UNN for significant parts of the fixed and mobile core that underpins UNN’s fixed and mobile service portfolio,” explains Chris Phan, Deputy Senior Vice President of Network Strategy and Technology.

He adds: “This includes the introduction of the Ericsson IMS core to modernise UNN’s voice service infrastructure, and the introduction of Ericsson’s BSS to modernise UNN’s IT infrastructure and support the improved customer experience.”

Having supplied UNN with Microsoft licensing for internal use and cloud use, Tech One has helped the organisation achieve 100% Microsoft compliance, elevating UNN’s standing as Microsoft Solutions Provider, through Microsoft SPLA Agreement.

“Tech One is recognised for providing quality support and after-sales service, bringing value to UNN's Microsoft ecosystem. UNN has worked together with Tech One since the establishment of Enterprise Infrastructure, and we will continue to work together into future transformation,” comments Yusrin Hadi, Senior Enterprise Infrastructure and Computing Manager.

When looking for guidance and support in commercial and digital areas, UNN turns to Detecon. “Due to their broad and professional expertise, Detecon has supported some of our projects towards success – including some of the key projects: the wholesale service penalty concept, customer experience, BSS transformation, DCIT sales and services etc. This is evident mobile-magazine.com

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of Detecon’s commitment to knowledge transfer and support of locals in achieving a higher benchmark of excellence,” explains Kim Wah Ang, Vice President of Customer Service Management.

As previously stressed by Flack and Ngo, giving back to the economy in Brunei is essential to UNN’s mission. The organisation therefore partners with local companies such as CommVerge Solutions and UNIK Galvanizing.

Juniper Networks provides UNN with equipment for its new IP/MPLS and CG-NAT network through its partner, CommVerge Solutions. In doing so, Juniper Networks has enabled UNN to build a new 100G Core IP/ MPLS and CG-NAT network in the three data centres.

Enabling Enterprises to derive value from Advanced Data Analytics through machine learning and artificial intelligence.

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“ U N N I S C O L L A B O R A T I N G WITH INTERNATIONALLY

UNN IN NUMBERS:

ACCLAIMED AND

3,000km+

ESTABLISHED SERVICE

Over 3,000km of fibre

PROVIDERS”

18 fixed exchanges and 61 serving points connecting over 93,000 homes

BERND FLACK CFO, UNN

With a refreshed experience-first IP/MPLS network from Juniper, this partnership will bolster UNN’s efforts to create a modernized and efficient telecommunication backbone that will support the government’s five-year masterplan towards transforming Brunei into a Smart Nation.

Adding to this, Hamdani comments: “The new IP/MPLS network is also aggregated to 8 other exchanges (or sites), which greatly expands capacity, replaces obsolete equipment, and consolidates multiple IP/ MPLS networks.”1To ensure its network has a robust physical infrastructure to support UNN’s network roll-out and restoration, the organisation looks to UNIK Galvanizing as a major supplier. “It has provided us a constant and reliable supply of materials such as tower strengthening and poles, enabling us to perform strategic planning for our end customers and manage all stakeholders’ expectations,” says Dk Hjh Martini Pg Hj Abdul Rahman, Vice President of Delivery, Field, Rollout and Power.

As the telecom business relies heavily on its data and insights drawn out of that data, Flack explains UNN relies on its partner, GlobeOSS, and its advanced digital analytic solution: “Rich data extraction paired with the right domain knowledge and the right machine learning algorithm are a powerful combination. Various models can be used like clustering, regression,

300+

Connectivity services serving over 300 local entities Over 560 mobile base-stations carrying 4G/3G and 2G service to 90% of populated areas and connecting roads

150+

Over 150 AP locations providing nationwide WIFI

300+

More than 300 roaming partners worldwide

120%

Mobile penetration more than 120%

80%

Broadband penetration

more than 80%

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time series, graph, deep learning, R-Script, Python scripts etc. GlobeOSS’ team builds, trains, validates, experiments, and deploys successful AI models.”

Serving all telco sales companies, UNN acts as the Bruneian provider of wholesale mobile, fixed, converged communications, and data solutions. It serves all sales companies, providing them a great connection and keeping them secure online.

Imagine – a company transformed in response to a nationwide development in the telecommunications industry - is aiming to ensure that Bruneians can maximise their options in the ways they communicate with each other and the world.

Imagine champions freedom, flexibility, simplicity and transparency through mobile, broadband, and bundled products and services. The company wants customers to have the power to stay connected in new ways and supports UNN as it helps Brunei transform.

Also key to the modernisation of the ecosystem is Progresif, one of Brunei’s most innovative telecommunications companies providing residential to enterprise-grade mobile, data, and fibre solutions to Brunei.

“Progresif wants its customers to experience the joys of a connected, inspired, and progressive life. The company is developing creative solutions, innovative pricing plans and uncompromising service to make communications easy, to give our customers the freedom to do more, learn more and achieve more,” comments Flack.

Finally, Ishajaya Technology, UNNs partner for ERP Systems, supports the company with decision making, as Flack outlines: “Jointly we are maximising operational efficiency and transparency – while building a solid foundation for future growth with Ishajaya’s solutions for automated and integrated business processes. Their services help UNN to improve decision making with real-time insights to mobilise our workforce, and more. UNN extends with Ishajayas’s support of our SAP functionalities step by step.”

With these important partners assisting UNN as it supports Brunei with its initiatives for economic growth and continuously rising living standards, Ngo is certain the company will be a key driver for the region, concluding: “UNN will be a contributor to the future of the nation because we will always be one of the key drivers to try and help the country to transform digitally and also be able to help the people, and the businesses to be able to perform their job in a more efficient and effective way.”

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5G

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CSPs NEED TO FIGHT FOR THEIR SHARE OF PRIVATE 5G NETWORKS

Private 5G networks are vital to CSPs avoiding the dearth of ROI they saw from 4G networks; this time round, securing their ROI may be even harder WRITTEN BY: HARRY MENEAR mobile-magazine.com

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round the world, the global telecom industry continues its mad scramble from 4G LTE networks to 5G connectivity.

5G promises everything from viable autonomous cars to the creation of a fully-immersive metaverse. For now, however, despite hundreds of billions of dollars invested by communications service providers (CSPs) in the development of 5G networks, the flashiest possibilities of a 5G world have yet to materialise.

“Right now, CSPs are still trying to build their 5G infrastructure, and the progress is different from country to country. I think they are getting there, but there's still a lot of work to do,” says Jaques Assaraf, Corporate Vice President of Telecom, Media, and Entertainment at global IT consultancy Capgemini.

With the eventual use cases of commercial 5G networks still years away, Assaraf explains that “What we're seeing is a lot of focus and activity around private 5G networks” for reasons like the fact that “It's easier to deploy a greenfield private network and implement standalone 5G rather than transform a complex legacy network”. Especially in countries “like Germany and the UK - where there are private network frequencies for sale at very cheap prices - private network adoption is really accelerating” as larger enterprises start to explore creating their own usecases in closed industrial settings like mines, warehouses, ports, airports, and factories.

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“ PUBLIC NETWORKS WILL TAKE MORE TIME TO GET TO MASS ADOPTION AND MATURITY” JAQUES ASSARAF

CORPORATE VP TELECOM, MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT, CAPGEMINI

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5G

“IF AMAZON AND COMPANIES LIKE IT CAN CAPTURE THIS 5G PRIVATE NETWORK MARKET WITH THEIR OWN SOLUTIONS, WHAT'S LEFT FOR CSPs?” JAQUES ASSARAF

CORPORATE VP TELECOM, MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT, CAPGEMINI

“Public networks will take more time to get to mass adoption and maturity because of the necessary step from 4G to nonstandalone 5G to standalone 5G,” says Assaraf. As a result – for the CSPs that have invested billions in 5G infrastructure so far – it makes sense that private 5G deployments could serve as a financial stepping stone, a way to make 5G profitable while commercial networks progress towards maturity.

Unfortunately for CSPs, when it comes to private 5G networks, securing a piece of what promises to be a very lucrative pie is proving harder than anticipated. In a worst case scenario, CSPs could be about to experience a rerun of the 4G-ROI disaster from a decade ago.

The 4G ROI Disaster and the 5G Risk “4G created immense value for the market, but almost none of that value went to the CSPs that built the 4G networks - it went to Facebook, to Netflix, and companies like them,” says Assaraf.

Essentially, CSPs invested billions in a generation of infrastructure that was used

by Over the Top (OTT) service providers to revolutionise the world in which we live.

Uber, Postmates, and JustEat gave us the on-demand delivery era (and its darker shadow, the gig economy). Streaming services dominate the way we consume content, and social media has had an indelible, irreversible effect on all our lives – for better or arguably worse.

The companies that created the apps and services that have defined the 4G era used the CSPs’ networks, but the CSPs found themselves reaping very few of the rewards.

The result has been an increasingly frayed mobile-magazine.com

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“ 5G WILL CREATE HUGE AMOUNTS OF VALUE, BUT THE QUESTION IS WHO WILL CAPTURE THAT VALUE” JAQUES ASSARAF

CORPORATE VP TELECOM, MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT, CAPGEMINI

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– and in some cases downright adversarial – relationship between CSPs and OTT platform providers.

In October, the phenomenally successful Netflix series Squid Game caused such heavy surges in internet traffic that South Korean CSP SK Broadband sued the streaming platform for costs from increased network traffic and maintenance work – a lawsuit feels emblematic of the resentment felt by CSPs at OTT platforms that reap all the rewards of the streaming age yet pay none of the costs.

With the dawn of 5G networks, the question is becoming increasingly pertinent: how can CSPs ensure that, this time, they’re afforded a seat at the table.

“I don't think there's any question as to whether 5G will create huge amounts of value, but the question is who will capture that value,” Assaraf reflects.

Fighting for a Piece of Private 5G When it comes to CSPs securing their own slice of the private 5G network business, Assaraf concedes, “It's tricky. What we're seeing is companies like Amazon coming

out with their own private network solutions, fully-integrated solutions that deliver the full capabilities of their tech stack to the end customer as a service.” He asks, “If Amazon and companies like it can capture this 5G private network market with their own solutions, what's left for CSPs?” In Germany and the UK, he adds, “there's already nothing left, more or less”. As private frequencies can be bought so easily and cheaply, “no one needs the CSPs to support those private networks”. In other countries such as France and Spain, where the CSPs have greater ownership over frequency, mobile-magazine.com

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5G

“ FOR CSPs, IT'S REALLY IMPORTANT THAT THEY CREATE THE KINDS OF ECOSYSTEMS THAT WILL LET THEM BE A PART OF CAPTURING SOME OF THE VALUE FROM 5G” JAQUES ASSARAF

CORPORATE VP TELECOM, MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT, CAPGEMINI

Assaraf explains they can position themselves to grab a piece of the private 5G business.

Nevertheless, Assaraf reflects: “I think it will be tricky for CSPs to get their own share of the private network business.”

The other issue stems from the fact that the way CSPs are promising to play in the private network space is through virtual networks and network slicing. So far, Assaraf doesn’t “think we've seen them deliver on those promises”. In the end, when the market matures and settles, there will be two types of private network, according to Assaraf. “There will be truly private networks with standalone architecture, and there will be private networks that rely on the public networks provided by the CSPs and use network slicing to carve out a little corner of that public network for an organisation to use,” he says. “The reality today is that, if you're an enterprise and you need a private network, you need to build your own infrastructure because the network slicing technology isn't there yet.”

To stand a chance in what may prove to be an existential battle, CSPs need “to accelerate their efforts to bring something to market that's a viable alternative to

enterprises building full private networks from the ground up, without the CSPs' involvement.” It’s a tall order, and Assaraf maintains that CSPs won’t be able to do it alone.

“You can see it one of two ways. You can say that CSPs are trapped in the middle between the architecture and hardware companies like Nokia or Ericsson and the digital service providers. Or, you could say that they're ideally placed to create an ecosystem around themselves,” Assaraf muses. “Whether CSPs can federate an ecosystem around themselves or not is a really interesting unknown. I think some will be successful and some won't, because it's a significant change of mindset for CSPs.” By choosing to align with key partners such as hyperscale cloud providers or perhaps even niche vertical tech firms, CSPs may be able to improve their private network offerings enough to compete – and potentially turn a few competitors into partners. “For CSPs, it's really important that they create the kinds of ecosystems that will let them be a part of capturing some of the value from 5G, rather than trying to capture all of it alone like they did with 4G and effectively be left with nothing,” Assaraf reflects. mobile-magazine.com

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WRITTEN BY: BLAISE HOPE PRODUCED BY: JAMES BERRY

FROM LOCAL NEWS TO TH

SINCLAIR' SERVES THE U

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SINCLAIR BROADCAST GROUP

HE DEVELOPING WORLD,

S TECHNOLOGY UNDERSERVED mobile-magazine.com

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SINCLAIR BROADCAST GROUP

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Sinclair was a key pioneer in developing NextGen Broadcast technology that is revolutionising the broadcast world, advancing a technology and sharing it where others could not

S

inclair Broadcast Group officially started as one television station in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1971.

Now it is one of the largest media providers, operating almost 200 television stations across the United States, is the largest U.S. local sports and tennis broadcast provider, and has a diversified business, including the manufacture of TV and radio transmission antennas and pioneering broadcast technology that it is bringing to the world.

Sinclair has built a reputation as a leader in broadcast technology and media evolution, serving multiple local US markets with linear and digital content, and paving the way for service to rural parts of the developing world. Its pioneering work on the NextGen Broadcast standard has made it possible for the new IP-based TV transmissions to engage with new 5G technology standards directly reaching mobile users worldwide.

“We started as one independent station that was built by Julian [Sinclair] Smith, the founder of the company. We now own or operate over 185 stations across the country in 86 markets, almost all of which are network affiliates. This includes ABC, NBC Fox, CBS, CW,” says Chris Ripley, President and Chief Executive Officer. “We cover about 40% of the country with many top local news franchises attached to each Example of one of those markets.” an image caption

“ Our thesis is that local news and sports are the most durable types of programming” CHRIS RIPLEY

PRESIDENT & CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER, SINCLAIR BROADCAST GROUP

Del Parks, a veteran of the company and its President of Technology, explains how the founder started Sinclair. Julian Smith and a small group of shareholders had formed a broadcast trade school in 1958 (Commercial Radio Institute, known as CRI), the same year that he applied to build an FM radio station. Smith saw that FM radio had better quality and better signal propagation to cover markets than AM radio.

“Julian Smith started this company with an FM radio station, which he built in 1964,” says Parks. It was a big gamble. “In the

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United States, in the 1960s, AM radio was king, even more so than TV.” “The FM station was broadcasting in stereo when stereo pretty much didn't exist,” says Parks. “So, he built the equipment himself including consoles and multiple accessories. He was also running the technology school, which is where I met him. I started at the school in 1970 while he was building the TV station. So, some of the students pitched in and helped him build it.”

The company then built its Baltimore studio and another one in Pittsburgh in 1976, then another one in Columbus, Ohio in the 1980s. Acquisition of key stations and television groups throughout the country followed, as Sinclair grew to gain its status as a Fortune 500 company in 2021.

Five years ago, the company entered the sports broadcasting market, acquiring Tennis Channel. In 2019, the group established itself as the major regional sports program provider when it acquired the Fox Sports regional sports networks, which it rebranded as “Bally Sports.” As the largest regional sports broadcaster in the United States, Bally

SINCLAIR BROADCAST GROUP

CHRIS RIPLEY TITLE: PRESIDENT AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER COMPANY: SINCLAIR BROADCAST GROUP INDUSTRY: BROADCASTING

EXECUTIVE BIO

LOCATION: MARYLAND, US Christopher S. Ripley has served as President & Chief Executive Officer since January 2017. From April 2014 to January 2017, he served as Chief Financial Officer. Prior to Sinclair, Mr. Ripley was a managing director at UBS Investment Bank’s Global Media Group and served as head of the Los Angeles office where he managed, advised and structured various financings and merger and acquisition transactions in the broadcast and entertainment sectors. Prior to UBS, Mr. Ripley was a principal in Prime Ventures and an analyst at Donaldson Lufkin & Jenrette.

Mr. Ripley graduated from the University of Western Ontario, Richard Ivey School of Business, with a Bachelor of Arts in Honors Business Administration.

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Linear roots, digital growth.

Your evolution starts here.

ltnglobal.com

IP technology is transforming the television industry. However, determining the best IP transmission solution is often challenging. The right IP solution needs to deliver operational consistency in content distribution while also enabling audience growth and new revenue streams.

Sinclair has always been a pioneer in adopting new technologies that elevate the viewing experience. For Sinclair, leveraging the power of IP to distribute live sports content to viewers across platforms and devices while ensuring optimized viewing quality and efficiency was critical. In addition, ATSC 3.0 and NextGen TV transform how viewers consume content bringing a host of new immersive and interactive experiences. NextGen TV also creates more complexity for media companies that have to simulcast in the current and new broadcasting standards.

Sinclair selected LTN Global’s powerful and intelligent transport network to overcome the complexities in ATSC 3.0 deployment and simplify the live stream distribution workflows.

LTN Global delivered the technology solution that met Sinclair’s business needs without compromise. The LTN transport network ensures that every single link delivers live feeds accurately, seamlessly, and with ultralow latency to any destination.

Following the successful launch of the first commercial ATSC 3.0 deployment in May 2020, LTN Global has become the preferred transport network partner for Sinclair Broadcast Group and its subsidiary, ONE Media 3.0, as the companies look to bring the most significant broadcast technology upgrade to new TV markets across the United States.

LTN Global provides the technology solutions that bring the fragmented broadcasting ecosystem together, driving the technology innovation that will revolutionize how we consume live content.

SINCLAIR BROADCAST GROUP

Sports broadcasts about 5,000 live professional baseball, hockey and basketball games annually. Sinclair is seeking the same success as the growth of its television broadcast division as it joins hands with approximately 45 US-based teams. The sports play does not stop there.

“Our thesis is that local news and sports are way more durable than entertainment programming, which has become ubiquitous, and for a smaller company like ours within the media landscape, we could carve out a niche there, and have truly exclusive content,” Ripley says. “We did that by acquiring Tennis Channel and immediately began plans for increasing its distribution. It's now going global. It operates in eight countries now, including the UK, where it launched in August 2021.”

The growth of any company isn’t accomplished alone. Over the years, Sinclair has developed a significant partner ecosystem that has allowed the company to diversify and enter new areas rapidly. Those companies have been critical to Sinclair’s success and include: Televes, Fincons Group, Saankhya Labs, Rohde & Schwartz, DigiCap, and LTN Global.

DAVID SMITH TITLE: EXECUTIVE CHAIRMAN COMPANY: SINCLAIR BROADCAST GROUP INDUSTRY: BROADCASTING

EXECUTIVE BIO

David Smith has spent over a half century in the broadcasting business. From the beginning, he has focused on all its interrelated facets from enhancing transmission capabilities to the content distributed over the channels. His vision that "content is just digital bits" forms the company's guiding principle to enhance its video offerings and enable the future of datacasting. Building on the business founded by his father, he remains the controlling shareholder of the family enterprise turned Fortune 500 Company.

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“ We have people on staff that are very serious technical patent people, electrical engineers and big picture industry planners who think about all these things in an effort to drive the future value of the broadcast industry” DAVID SMITH

EXECUTIVE CHAIRMAN, SINCLAIR BROADCAST GROUP

Sinclair breaks technological boundaries with NextGen Broadcast

Competition Through Diversification and Niche Dominance By some metrics, Sinclair is relatively small within the media landscape currently dominated by tech giants like Google, Amazon, Apple, Disney, and Paramount.

However, Sinclair, through its focused strategy, is pushing a huge range of agendas focused on direct-to-consumer content delivery.

“We are a very diversified company,” says Ripley. “The three big divisions are Broadcast, the Regional Sports Networks and Tennis Channel. But we've got other assets - some broadcast-related, like an antenna manufacturer, and some wholly unrelated, like a funeral home company.

We have a basket of these other assets, which we call our investment portfolio, that amounts to about US$1.4bn.”

“We operate two data centers currently one in Seattle and one in Baltimore - but we are in the process of a major transformation.

We're moving much of our on-premises systems to the cloud,” says Parks. “The idea for centralisation really is not centralisation, it's really content sharing.” It serves as the forward-thinking growth infrastructure for all current and future content distribution.

An Entrepreneurial Mindset at Sinclair’s Core The people at Sinclair drive a constant search for market gaps and innovations. They approach the company as entrepreneurs, with visions and missions that push them to find more profitable strategies.

“I think we're entrepreneurs to the core.

If you go back and look at the history of the evolution of technology and the broadcast mobile-magazine.com

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PARTNER OF YOUR FUTURE DISCOVER MORE

UNLOCKING NEW BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES FOR MEDIA AND BROADCAST COMPANIES Fincons Group supports Media and Broadcast companies as they transform their business models to stay ahead of the curve.

Unlock new opportunities with the power of digital transformation by teaming up with a forward-looking, proven partner.

With over 2000 employees worldwide and 39 years of experience, Fincons is an awardwinning IT family company, spread out across Europe and the US, with offices in New York, Los Angeles, and Austin.

Fincons provides a broad range of business consultancy services and solutions to various vertical sectors but stands out for its innovative drive in Media and Broadcasting, where the Group delivers Tier-1 clients solutions across the whole supply chain covering Rights Management, Programming, Data-driven production, Metadata management, Asset management, Advertising, Digital services, OTT, NextGenTV. Fincons delivers these services via a flexible Smart Shore sourcing model that combines on-site subject matter experts, such as Project Managers, Business Analysts and Solution Architects, with technical and business process experts working from the Delivery Center in Bari, Italy. All resources

are highly skilled in the latest technology and have solid technical skills on market leading solutions such as Comcast Technology Solutions, Irdeto and Mediagenix.

Always at the forefront of pioneering projects, Fincons’ offering has recently been enhanced with a new proprietary solution, AllRights, just launched at NAB Show 2022 in Las Vegas, that provides innovative and disruptive Rights Management to help media businesses face the changing and competitive market landscape by unlocking new opportunities to easily leverage their content.

Fincons is committed to innovative initiatives including the launch of HbbTV in Europe, beyond pilots and live projects on ATSC3powered solutions in the US, by following activities from the earlist phases of concept definition, design, audience engagement, through to UX optimization. Every step of the way, Fincons’ focus is on enabling new audience interaction and monetization models based on content and advertising to help broadcasters leverage their assets and remain competitive.

Come and discover more about Fincons Group and how we can help you achieve your business objectives!

SINCLAIR BROADCAST GROUP

“ We have people on staff to drive the future value of the broadcast industry” MARK AITKEN

SENIOR VP OF ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY, SINCLAIR BROADCAST GROUP

industry, especially the transmission side of the equation, we're really the leader in the industry,” says David Smith, the company’s Executive Chairman.

David took the company with its couple of stations founded by his father and grew it to the titan it is today. While entrepreneurial and tech-focused, Sinclair has retained the 130

May 2022

benefits and traditions of a family company.

Smith carefully adds to that family by taking on people equally focused on an entrepreneurial vision for long-term growth and not constrained by “how things have always been done.”

Smith emphasises his approach by noting, “We have people on staff who are very serious, technical patent people, electrical engineers and big picture industry planners who think about all these things in an effort to drive the future value of the broadcast industry. This value is based on its ability to have a piece of the spectrum, through which we can deliver all different kinds of services and products to the country, to the individual, to the government, anybody who needs it. You have to think of us – the broadcast industry – as a gigantic highway.”

MARK AITKEN TITLE: SENIOR VP OF ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY COMPANY: SINCLAIR BROADCAST GROUP INDUSTRY: BROADCASTING

EXECUTIVE BIO

LOCATION: MARYLAND, US Mark A. Aitken has served as Senior Vice President of Advanced Technology since July 2011 and prior to that, he served as Director of Advanced Technology.

Aitken is responsible for representing the group’s interests in regulatory, technical and standards issues within industry-related organisations and before regulatory agencies both in the US and internationally. Mr. Aitken has been involved in the broadcast industry’s migration to advanced services since 1987, from his participation in the FCC’s Advisory Committee on Advanced Television Services to his current involvement with the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC). Mr. Aitken was the primary architect in the formation of ONE Media, and a driver of key ATSC 3.0 breakthrough technologies.

He is a member of the NAB TV Technology Committee which is focused on the broader technical issues facing the broadcast industry. Mr. Aitken is the author of many papers dealing with innovative RF product developments, advanced

digital broadcast systems designimplementation strategies, and holds patents for various RF devices and Next Gen systems. Mark is a member of the AFCCE, IEEE and SMPTE, as well as an active participant in NAB, ATSC and other industry organisations. He is a recipient of the 2008 “Broadcasting and Cable” Technology Leadership Award, 2013 recipient of the ATSC “Bernard Lechner Outstanding Contributor Award”, 2018 awardee of “Future’s” Industry Innovator Award” and the “2018 NAB Television Engineering Achievement Award”, and serves as a member of the Board of ATSC, ATBA and Saankhya Labs.

A responsive partner for ATSC 3.0 innovation and development

For the past 20 years DigiCAP has used advanced software and clould development to make television and telecom systems easier to use, less costly, and more profitable.

DigiCaster, DigiCAP’s ATSC 3.0 air chain, was introduced in 2017 and is now deployed throughout South Korea and in half of ATSC 3.0 markets in the US.

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Cultivating partnerships for the future of TV with Sinclair Sinclair’s Mark Aitken and DigiCAP’s Sang Jin Yoon on the pair’s partnership and how, together, they will make their mark in the future of TV Sinclair Broadcast Group is one of the largest and most diverse television broadcasting companies in the US. It aims to make a significant mark in the television industry with the development of ATSC 3.0 technology, which offers 4K resolution and HDR content for over-theair broadcasts.

To help with this, Sinclair recognises the need for sound, strategic partnerships.

This is why it enlisted the help of Korea-based DigiCAP, providers of digital media transport technologies, and content protection and rights management solutions.

Commenting on the partnership, Sang Jin Yoon, Senior Vice President at DigiCAP, says: “Sinclair has helped us to fire up our receiver business, which enabled us to establish a supply chain of components, as well as manufacturing, and those devices are now ‒ with the advent of COVID ‒ used for distance learning.”

“It’s been a great partnership. But, by working with DigiCAP, we’ve taken a

standard and put it into action when it comes to ATSC 3.0 technology,” adds Mark Aitken, Senior VP of Advanced Technology at Sinclair.

The significance of this technology is why DigiCAP were keen to support Sinclair as it works on ATSC 3.0., as Yoon explains: “We bring our experiences in the mobile environment to the partnership which we believe fits well with Sinclair’s direction. We developed content protection technologies for mobile devices and also streaming services; Sinclair is our first customer as we enter the broadcast market.”

Both Sinclair and DigiCAP are open to collaboration based on trial and error.

Reflecting on this, Aitken concludes: “What’s great about the relationship is that we don’t mind putting impossible problems on the table and then solving them. This flows out of our walls and into DigiCAP. In years to come, this industry will be reliant on close personal relationships built on trust, where you have the ability to ask difficult questions and work through problems.”

SINCLAIR BROADCAST GROUP

DEL PARKS TITLE: PRESIDENT OF TECHNOLOGY COMPANY: SINCLAIR BROADCAST GROUP INDUSTRY: BROADCASTING

EXECUTIVE BIO

LOCATION: MARYLAND, US

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Delbert R. Parks, III has served as President of Technology since March 2022, holding various operations and engineering positions with Sinclair for the last 50 years. In his current position, he provides the vision, resources and leadership to coordinate all Sinclair’s technology activities and ensure these efforts support the company’s current and future business goals. Prior to his current role, Mr. Parks was the company’s Chief Technology Officer since 2014, and Senior Vice President and Vice President of Operations and Engineering from 1996 to 2014. Mr. Parks is a SMPTE (Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers) Fellow and is a member of the Society of Broadcast Engineers. He is on the Board of Directors of the Baltimore Area Council, Boy Scouts of America. Mr. Parks is also a retired Army Lieutenant Colonel who held various commands during his 26-year reserve career.

May 2022

Pulling an Industry into the Future with NextGen Broadcast “Historically, the television broadcast highway was essentially unusable as it relates to anything on a mobile basis whatsoever,” says Smith. “So this new standard for the United States and other parts of the world provides absolute mobility, and it is a world-class standard that will provide the broadcast industry with the opportunity to do other things that it's never been able to do, therefore really expanding the value of the broadcast industry.”

“ It is a world-class standard that will provide the broadcast industry with the opportunity to do other things that it's never been able to do” DAVID SMITH

EXECUTIVE CHAIRMAN, SINCLAIR BROADCAST GROUP mobile-magazine.com

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GSERTEL AND TELEVES LEAD THE ATSC 3.0 TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE As ATSC 3.0 quickly ramps up, broadcast Operators search for key partners that can swiftly develop professional tools to manage and control their DTT network site deployments. Sinclair has found in Gsertel the perfect ally when it comes to state-of-the-art portable field spectrum analyzers.

Gsertel is the measuring equipment subsidiary of Televes, a technological corporation with more than 60 years of experience designing and manufacturing broadcast distribution equipment in Europe, providing now dedicated technical support in the ATSC 3.0 roll-out in the United States.

The Gsertel Hexylon field spectrum analyzer has been chosen by Sinclair for its versatility and realtime precision on any signal measurement required.

The Gsertel engineering team´s flexibility allows for new features to be developed promptly as the ATSC 3.0 roll-out calls for new demands.

Hexylon is intended for professional users requiring advanced features and precise measurement accuracy, analysis and diagnose of TV and radio signals. Designed with the premise of an intuitive tool, Hexylon is not just a portable meter with a touch screen, but rather a new way of measuring network signals, developed on the basis of a multi-touch screen. With Hexylon, the content becomes the user interface and everything flows in an intuitive way through gestural commands.

Gsertel and Televes are fully owned subsidiaries of Televes Corporation www.gsertel.com

www.televes.com

televes.usa@televes.com (720) 379-3748

Javier Ruano Televes USA General Manager

The future of ATSC 3.0 is already here. Javier Ruano, Televes USA General Manager, is very clear on the starring role of both Gsertel and Televes in this scenario.

“We need to persevere, to continue to provide dedicated and exquisite local support and knowledge to our network Operators, and our advanced technology will take care of the rest. Good things are ahead for broadcast networks in the US and we expect to be a key partner in the ATSC 3.0 and SFN roll-out process”.

And in that near future is evolving the RCS+Gprobe tailor-made SFN monitoring solution, that can be integrated onto any ATSC 3.0 Operator NMS platform for real-time network monitoring and reporting.

Smith is talking about Sinclair's contribution to landmark innovation - ATSC 3.0, also known as NextGen Broadcast. It essentially enables broadcasting to be an integral piece of the 5G telecommunications ecosystem. The project is led by Sinclair’s Senior Vice President of Advanced Technology, Mark Aitken.

“We've invested tens of millions of dollars helping to develop the NextGen Broadcast standard, and no one else in our industry was willing to do that,” says CEO Ripley, “but that's the sort of entrepreneurial spirit and technology focus that we have, the expertise we have with guys like Mark [Aitken] and Del Parks and their teams that enabled us to do that.

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“It was that long-term vision, which caused us to be able to take that leap and invest in the future for which the rest of our peers had no appetite,” notes Ripley.

The technology repurposes the 6 MHz channel that television stations around the world use to transmit their signal. Developed by the Advanced Television Systems Committee - an international standards setting body - with substantial input from Sinclair ATSC 3.0 - also known as NextGen Broadcast utilises the existing infrastructure to do so much more than linear video programming to a fixed TV set in the home. Using the same “language” of the Internet - Internet Protocol or IP - broadcasters can now use their

SINCLAIR BROADCAST GROUP

“It was that long-term vision, which caused us to be able to take that leap and invest in the future for which the rest of our peers had no appetite” CHRIS RIPLEY

PRESIDENT & CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER, SINCLAIR BROADCAST GROUP

channels to enhance traditional programming significantly, reach mobile devices for the first time, hyper-localise content and advertising, combine over-the-air content with streaming content and distribute wholly new forms of non-video data. This brings the modern, fully mobile world, to old broadcast setups using technology already in place.

“It's never been used for anything other than typically delivering network television or news or entertainment to the television in your house,” says Smith. “Now we have the ability to talk to cars, telephones, anything that's mobile, any place, anywhere in the United States and we're working toward getting the adoption of the standard into all devices, into cars and mobile devices into everything that's capable of receiving over-the-air television signals.

“The incremental value to our local TV stations by expanding to mobile viewers and targeting programming and advertising alone is worth the investment before you even get to all the new businesses created by this technology,” says Smith. “[It gives] the ability to talk to mobile devices, and being in the news business and the weather business, it gives us the ability to tell people, ‘Hey, there's a hurricane and there's a tornado. There's whatever coming in your neighborhood, get undercover’,” he says.

“We're the only ones that can do that because

we're on the ground live, real-time and have that ability to connect two devices.”

Smith says this technology can save lives from extreme weather events, hazardous spills, police emergencies or any other critical events since the broadcast tech is one-to-infinite – everyone can receive the message simultaneously with no buffering, pixelation or lost signals. The broadcast tech can’t be overloaded.

“That's what we do. We're in the business of serving everybody that isn't rich,” says Smith. “A local television station covers a radius of typically 45-50 miles. We are able to touch everybody inside that radius, which is millions and millions of people across the country. We do that every day with a new broadcast standard.

“We're going to be able to build that out, so you won't have to be sitting in your house to watch us. You'll be able to watch us everywhere you are.”

Journeying to the Technology to Connect People Mark Aitken worked for a small company, COMARK Industries, at a time in the TV industry when videotape was replacing film and the UHF spectrum was just beginning to be used by independent broadcasters. In 1979, COMARK’s founder, Richard Fiore Sr., started a partnership with mobile-magazine.com

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SINCLAIR BROADCAST GROUP

“ You won't have to be sitting in your house to watch us. You'll be able to watch us everywhere you are” DAVID SMITH

EXECUTIVE CHAIRMAN, SINCLAIR BROADCAST GROUP

David Smith and began manufacturing television transmitters. Those were the old analog days when people just had a square box monitor in their living rooms to watch a linear TV programme. The world changed in 1995 when the United States began converting from analog to digital broadcasting - the so-called ATSC 1.0 standard. Suddenly, we had the promise and flexibility of a digital standard. But how best to exploit it?

“It made great HD pictures, but there's more than pictures in the minds of entrepreneurs and what you can do with the spectrum,” says Aitken. “We were already thinking about - how do we get into these small devices? How do we address a population of devices besides the TV set in the living room? Cell phones were around, people were now communicating, holding conversations and beginning on a personal level to communicate and flinging data to one another.”

After several years of trying to get the US to accept the European digital standard as an alternative to the more limited US version, Sinclair saw its attempts fail due to political factors, industry alignment, and a lack of vision.

“The vision of TV broadcasters was always about better TV, better pictures, better mobile-magazine.com

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sound. So if your vision is better pictures, better sound then HDTV is king and you view the world one way,” says Aitken.

“If you're trying to address a universe of devices that don't yet exist, you have a very different view of the world.”

The company has continued to focus on a more robust digital standard that would enable this future vision. Sinclair pushed the industry to develop and adopt a new standard. That became the new ATSC 3.0 standard and was officially approved by the Federal Communications Commission in 2017. Ripley notes that the existing TV standard is not nearly as efficient as the new one. The new tech, making use of the one-to-many efficiency of IP broadcasting, is more advantageous than the oneto-one distribution of the traditional broadband business. And importantly, the new IP-based standard can do so much more than just TV programming.

“When you think about it, the best use cases are data that a lot of people want,” says Ripley. “Video is a good example of that because a lot of people watch the same videos. But then cars need a lot of information on a regular basis, especially as they become more autonomous and they generally need the same information, especially in a certain geography. So it's way more efficient to send it out once to all devices as opposed to one-to-one to every device.

“On top of that, in terms of just the spectral efficiency and ability to be received below noise levels, the technical performance of the NextGen standard versus any sort of multicast mode in 5G, demonstrates it has a much much greater spectral efficiency.”

“An example of that is LTE Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service (MBMS), 142

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The data transmission innovation enables ubiquitous coverage of broadcast signal that can be received on mobile devices powered by Saankhya’s multi standard receiver chipsets which supports the latest ATSC3.0 broadcast standard.

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SINCLAIR BROADCAST GROUP

“ We've always leveraged our size and our editorial strength to deliver a service to the people that we serve, and technology is extremely important to that” CHRIS RIPLEY

PRESIDENT & CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER, SINCLAIR BROADCAST GROUP

which not many carriers use, but it is available in normal cellular. These types of unicast services have a huge data overhead compared to ATSC Broadcast. That means if you're using LTE MBMS, you are only able to use a fraction of your bandwidth to actually carry the data.”

Sinclair plans to provide a hybrid experience combining NextGen Broadcast and traditional broadband delivery technology in one seamless experience.

“At least from an entertainment perspective and from a content perspective, that's going to be the main mode of operation and then having to be available on a direct consumer basis is a big push for us,” says Ripley. “Gamification is also another big push.

We believe in the convergence of media and gaming. So think video gaming, but also sports betting, I think social gaming is all merging and we want to be on the forefront of that trend.”

Acceleration of Industry in the Most Underserved Areas A couple of decades ago, newspapers kept local government in check, but the landscape is different now as local newspapers have declined. Sinclair considers itself the heir of that legacy.

“What we do in local news is very important, and that then transcends into digital, into our websites, into our mobile apps and then extending that out to regions,” Ripley says. “We've always leveraged our size and our editorial strength to deliver a service to the people that we serve, and technology is extremely important to that.” mobile-magazine.com

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The company believes NextGen Broadcast will allow them to be even more focused on delivering more local news to local communities.

“It's leveraging all our local TV station assets: local programming and local news with reporting “boots on the ground” on a nationwide basis,” says Aitken. “We're ideally positioned to leverage those assets that are going into local news and bringing those all together.

“Newspapers are suffering and failing in large quantities by virtue of the fact that they're still doing what they did a hundred years ago, that's just a fundamental design problem. They haven't adapted to the marketplace,” says Smith.

“This new technology will allow the broadcast industry to do essentially the same thing as everybody else from a delivery perspective. And remember: there's nobody that does what we do in the marketplace. Local television is the primary source of all news in the marketplace because we're live in real-time delivering everything that's going on, that's relevant in our view to the people. That's what we do.”

This technology, instead of implanting several million separately addresses phone numbers in cars or other gadgets, allows information to be distributed straight to a device without needing separate phone numbers, relying on IP addressing instead.

Sinclair, through its ONE Media division and Indian partner Saankhya Labs, is involved in proving out this NextGen Broadcast technology in India. “That's one of the focuses of this trial that we have in Bangalore. The wireless carriers are very interested in this one-to-many offload feature because their networks are so congested. And so they can do a seamless offload from a cellular unicast network to an NextGen 5G broadcast network,” says Ripley.

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“From a consumer perspective, you don't know that you've switched networks, but now all of a sudden you're offloaded from a one-to-one network in 4G or 5G to a oneto-many network in broadcast land using a different piece of the spectrum that's low-band, generally in the 600-700 MHz range. It's a nice complement in terms of offloading data types, where there's a lot of people who want the same thing.”

The alternative distribution system is well received in India where hundreds of millions of people have little to

SINCLAIR BROADCAST GROUP

“There's nobody that does what we do in the marketplace.

Local television is the primary source of all news in the marketplace” DAVID SMITH

EXECUTIVE CHAIRMAN, SINCLAIR BROADCAST GROUP

mobile-magazine.com

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“ This technology will be universal.

The only issue is what day and how fast, that's all” DAVID SMITH

EXECUTIVE CHAIRMAN, SINCLAIR BROADCAST GROUP

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no connectivity. It goes through the broadcasters as the company puts transmitters on cell towers.

“This solution [was used] for things like e-learning, obviously video consumption, which is really big on mobile devices in India. This is a really powerful technology that can be way more efficient and costeffective,” Ripley says. “It's being tested in big cities, too, where congestion on mobile networks is really the target, but then you get out into the rural areas where you've got a lot of people that really have very, very poor service to the internet.”

The technology enables a population of a billion-plus users to access the same or similar content broadcast at a lower cost.

“That's a big drive over the next 12 to 18 months and it also fits in with this wireless technology because it will open up new ways to use the wireless technology. Most of our business today is done through other people's distribution points,” says Ripley. “We distribute our local sports through pay-TV – through cable and satellite – and we do over-the-air.

But only 15-20% of the people actually use the over-the-air signal. They generally get it retransmitted through cable and satellite.

“NextGen Broadcast will get to over 75% of the country [USA] by the end of this year. Approximately 5 million TVs will be sold in the US this year that are NextGen ready. And then we've got all this activity in other countries like India, where we're doing a huge trial in Bangalore with the local public broadcaster there.

“We hope to get into mobile devices as this market matures. Then you've got Jamaica, Brazil and Korea, which are actually looking at rolling out mobility within the 5G Broadcast deployment, so there's a lot going on internationally that we help support. Domestically, we've sort of hit escape velocity on this technology.

The next stop for the speeding technology is mobile devices and personal devices here in the US.” NextGen Broadcast is on the road to becoming the premier global digital standard. It has significant advantages over the European, Japanese and Chinese standards and is compelling as countries like Brazil and India look to upgrade their content distribution technologies.

“It is set to become a significant global standard – probably not every country, but large, significant countries will adopt this standard because it is a much more efficient use of the spectrum, it is all IP-based, it unlocks the spectrum from a mobility perspective and it has massive cost advantages over traditional cellular networks you can imagine coming down the pipe and that really helps the underserved,” says Parks.

“This technology will be universal. The only issue is what day and how fast, that's all,” Smith says.

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WILL OPENRA UNLOCK THE FUTURE OF U Can the UK’s first OpenRAN site give us an insight into how this approach to network architecture might play into the country’s 5G future?

5G

WRITTEN BY: HARRY MENEAR

espite a strong start, the UK’s 5G network rollout and performance has struggled to keep pace with global market leaders like China, South Korea, and the United Arab Emirates in the past two years. A strong industry commitment to fostering OpenRAN 150

May 2022

development and adoption could be on track to change that.

The UK managed to be among the first countries to launch a commercial 5G network when EE’s went live in October of 2019. The combination of an early start, sizeable government investment, and the early release of large portions of 5G spectrum

AN

G?

UK

to the country’s four MNOs put the UK in a strong position to become a global 5G leader — something that should be of interest to a fiscally conservative, neoliberal government that pushed through Brexit literally as the COVID-19 pandemic conspired to send the entire global economy into a state of unprecedented fragility.

According to data published by research firm Analysis Mason, 5G has the potential to add around £15bn of economic growth to the UK economy, if the country can “seize the full potential of 5G networks and implement advanced industrial use cases, over and above the substantial benefits expected from enhanced mobile broadband”. mobile-magazine.com

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Reäl end-to-end.

TECHNOLOGY

“OPENRAN PROVIDES HUGE ADVANTAGES FOR CUSTOMERS” ANDREA DONA CHIEF NETWORK OFFICER FOR VODAFONE UK

However, the issue remains that the UK’s network operators — much like MNOs pretty much everywhere else — continue to be restricted to one of two choices when it comes to building any mobile network at all: Nokia or Ericsson.

5G networks, like 4G and 3G networks before them, are typically sold as an end-toend, proprietary solution by a single vendor.

That vendor supplies the radio antennas, the base stations and — most importantly — the software that makes all the network components run and talk to each other. That software is tied inextricably to the hardware, which doesn’t talk to other types of software, and all of it is sold in neat, custom packages by either Nokia or Ericsson. mobile-magazine.com

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Andrea Dona Chief Network Officer for Vodafone UK

“MIX AND MATCH THE SIZE. KEEP THE STYLE CONSISTENT SAME ARTICLE” NAME SURNAME JOB TITLE, COMPANY NAME

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TECHNOLOGY

Actually, there’s a third choice: until recently, it used to be Huawei, until western sanctions forced option three to become “just don’t build a network at all”.

The upshot of this is that, by and large, the world’s telecom operators have a very limited series of choices when it comes to swapping out and modifying different elements of their 5G networks.

There is a fourth way, however.

OpenRAN: Widening the Field In January of this year, Vodafone — in collaboration with a gaggle of industry partners — switched on the UK’s first 5G site built using OpenRAN. It’s the first ‘scaled’ OpenRAN project in the whole of Europe, and might just prove to be an example of why OpenRAN have the potential to pose a new way forward in the face of the Ericsson/Nokia duopoly.

“OpenRAN provides huge advantages for customers. Our network will become highly programmable and automated, meaning we can release new features simultaneously across multiple sites, add or direct capacity more quickly, resolve outages instantly and provide businesses with on-demand connectivity. OpenRAN is also reinvigorating our industry. It will boost the digital economy by stimulating greater tech innovation from a wider pool of vendors, bringing much needed diversity to the supply chain,” said Andrea Dona, Chief Network Officer for Vodafone UK. “This is the beginning of a new chapter for the mobile industry. Our team has been working tirelessly to take OpenRAN technology from a theory in our lab to our customers in the real-world – it’s remarkable how much has been achieved in such a short period of time. OpenRAN as a concept is only five years old, and we’re already fundamentally changing how we

deploy connectivity infrastructure. This is a watershed moment in the telecoms industry, and a catalyst for change and evolution.”

She adds that while, “so far, OpenRAN deployment has focused on outdoor connectivity, there is significant potential for this technology in the office environment.

A simple plug-and-play product, which includes all the attractive benefits of the OpenRAN philosophy, is one that can build on our strength of providing indoor coverage through both our macro network and our bespoke solutions”.

“THIS IS THE BEGINNING OF A NEW CHAPTER FOR THE MOBILE INDUSTRY” ANDREA DONA CHIEF NETWORK OFFICER FOR VODAFONE UK

OpenRAN: Bigger Competition to Nokia and Ericsson Than They Are to Each Other According to Börje Ekholm, the boss of Ericsson (which is basically building about 50% of the world’s 5G networks), the overall progress towards functional 5G OpenRAN has been a great source of insight into the way that the 6G revolution will probably play out ‒ whenever that may be.

Nevertheless, he'd also prefer it if OpenRAN would leave the current 5G mobile-magazine.com

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TECHNOLOGY

“THIS IS A WATERSHED MOMENT IN THE TELECOMS INDUSTRY, AND A CATALYST FOR CHANGE AND EVOLUTION” ANDREA DONA CHIEF NETWORK OFFICER FOR VODAFONE UK

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revolution alone for now while Ericsson still holds the biggest slice of the pie.

In a Q2 earnings call last year, Ekholm admitted that, while a key component of the development of 6G is likely to be Open-RAN technology, Ericsson is still a few years away from figuring out how to monetise it and, as a result, it would be best if the technology remained on the fringes for now, thank you very much. Given the fact that OpenRAN would, at face value, seem to represent an industry wide assault by smaller firms on

its two giants, Ekholm was understandably keen to kick the problem down the road a few years.

“It’s a here and now question, where we do believe the purpose-built networks actually can deliver the performance that’s required in 5G today,” he said during the earnings call. “By the time OpenRAN is ready, we will also be there with solutions, but we don’t feel it’s the right time right now and divert focus from actually what goes on in the market.” mobile-magazine.com

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HUAWEI & BMW JOIN HANDS TO REACH AUTOMATED MOBILITY AD FEATURE WRITTEN BY: BLAISE HOPE

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PRODUCED BY: STUART IRVING

HUAWEI

mobile-magazine.com

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Automotive innovator BMW and technology giant Huawei join European Commission CCAM to change transportation sector landscape

B

y the end of next decade, it looks as though the European Commission’s Co-Programmed Partnership, CCAM (Connected, Cooperative, Automated Mobility), will have successfully driven the creation of a functional automated transport system, with some of the key members urging the project forward being BMW and Huawei.

“Connected, Cooperative, and Automated Mobility is a partnership under the research programme of the European Commission, which is called Horizon Europe, from 2021 to 2030. We will combine all research activities on a European level, where all these aspects are mentioned — it's a cross-sectoral partnership,” says Armin Gräter, Chairman of the Board of the European Public/Private Partnership on CCAM, who is also Director of Digitalisation and Automated Driving in Brussels for the BMW Group.

“The main targets are making traffic in Europe safer and more sustainable, while also generating more competitiveness for the European industry,” Gräter says.

“We have more than 180 members from authorities, research, industry, road operators, and service providers. All these are combined in collaborative actions of research and innovation, which will lead to at least two large scale demonstration projects in the last phase of the programme.”

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The whole programme consists of seven clusters that slice the big overall goal into individual pieces for which the partners work to identify a viable solution. These solutions will then be combined to reach the final goal of large-scale demonstration in cities, fueled by around €1bn in funding from public and private partners over the next 10 years.

“All these seven clusters fall under the control of CCAM and they start as a basis of coordination for the whole programme,” says Gräter. “Then we have four technical clusters, which are vehicle technology, validation, transport system, and key enabling technologies with a focus on artificial intelligence.”

Under the coordination framework — which focuses on common methodologies and data exchange — these clusters are paired with elements relating to societal aspects and user needs. These 6 will then lead to the most important cluster: one large-scale demonstration, which happens in the last phase of the programme, targeted to be around 2025-2027 onwards.

BMW and Huawei in partnership CCAM is a long-term project to bring all the disparate elements together so that the world, starting with Europe, can have the best initial vestiges of an automated system.

After a turbulent period, this is an inevitable change towards a more efficient system.

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JAN ELLSBERGER TITLE: VICE PRESIDENT OF INDUSTRY DEVELOPMENT COMPANY: HUAWEI TECHNOLOGIES INDUSTRY: TELECOMMUNICATIONS LOCATION: GERMANY Ellsberger is the current Vice President of Industry Development at Huawei Technologies.

He is responsible for Huawei’s research, innovation and industry activities for automotive and road transportation.

He is also a member of the Board of the European Public/Private Partnership on Cooperative Connected and Automated Mobility (CCAM), where his company represents physical and digital road infrastructure suppliers.

EXECUTIVE BIO

“ WE SEE OUR ROLE IN THE PARTNERSHIP IS THAT OF A TECHNOLOGY PROVIDER – WE HAVE QUITE INNOVATIVE SOLUTIONS IN THE SPACE, AND WE WOULD LIKE TO CONTRIBUTE THIS TO FULFIL EUROPE'S AMBITIONS IN BECOMING A WORLD LEADER WHEN IT COMES TO THE DEPLOYMENT OF AUTOMATED TRANSPORTATION SOLUTIONS”

“BMW started working on these projects many years ago — since 2005 — especially when it comes to demonstrations, validation and also regulatory aspects,” Gräter says.

“BMW has a high interest in gaining a better understanding, as well as providing input to the whole external framework, because we believe that standardisation of technology, regulation of the safety aspects and overall system approach are key factors to bringing successful solutions to the market.”

Telco giant Huawei represents physical and digital road infrastructure suppliers on the CCAM board. The company is currently working with Chinese and European cities to deploy C-V2X traffic solutions globally and facilitate autonomous driving.

“Huawei is recognised as a telecom provider, but we actually do a lot of technology development, so we have products and solutions aimed at automotive and road transport,” says Jan Ellsberger,

Vice President of Industry Development at Huawei Technologies and Member of the Board of CCAM. “We are actually a supplier to vehicle manufacturers. We provide the digital platform covering vehicle control systems, intelligent driving and sensor systems. We also have the whole electric power drive system including the charging system, battery management, and even charging pile solutions.”

To introduce automated or selfdriving vehicles on roads, a certain level of infrastructure support is needed — and this is where Huawei comes in with its cockpit solutions, associated intelligence- for-cloud services to support the environment in the vehicle itself, and digital road infrastructure solutions.

“We see our role in the partnership is that of a technology provider — we have quite innovative solutions in this space, and we would like to contribute this to fulfil Europe's mobile-magazine.com

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ambitions in becoming a world leader when it comes to the deployment of automated transportation solutions,” says Ellsberger.

Digital technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) will play a greater role in transport, meaning that carmakers will be able to monitor their vehicles in a realworld environment, tweaking the driving experience and coupling it with machine learning to increase autonomy.

“To make the roads smarter, you deploy sensors on an AI-based solution that enhances perception and also provides the authorities of traffic management systems with the means to safely operate a mixed traffic flow, where there are both automated driving vehicles and conventional vehicles sharing the same road,” he says. “In addition to that, of course, we also have the cellular connectivity side with 5G and its evolution.”

Huawei now develops and integrates smart cockpit solutions for cars using the new Huawei smartphone operating system, Harmony OS, as a basis. In-vehicle applications enable the possibility of combining the car’s resources with a smartphone’s IT resources, welcoming increased efficiency and a seamless user experience.

“ IT NEEDS REGULATION AND THE STANDARDS TO BE IN PLACE, FROM THE REGULATOR POINT OF VIEW, TO FORCE ALL THOSE STAKEHOLDERS TO ACTUALLY SHARE THE RELEVANT DATA AND TO ALLOW DATA SHARING” JAN ELLSBERGER

VICE PRESIDENT OF INDUSTRY DEVELOPMENT AT HUAWEI TECHNOLOGIES

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The future of mobility When it comes to introducing new technology, educating consumers always comes first in the process: after the implementation of the technology, time is needed for the way consumers operate to be both generationally and psychologically altered, which can be a challenge on its own.

“In the future, you will have more immersion, because the driver is going to be less involved in driving. It might take decades but, for the time being, we have a transition,” says Francois Fischer, Expert on Connected Vehicle Standardisation and Policy for Huawei Consumer Business Group. “Our challenge now is using emerging but already existing technology to create the best experience. I think a car and its environment are like a smartphone, it's about application now.”

Fischer believes that not knowing what the future will be like is also a key challenge for businesses, as there’s the possibility that it may vehemently change consumers’ behaviour towards their products “When cars are going to be either shuttles or fully automated vehicles, what will branding versus user experience mean?” he says. “I think the main difference between cars now is the brand and user experience. If you look at today's models of cars, you will have very similar functionality for use, thus the differences are created by the branding and the resulting user experience. This is a very similar situation for smartphones.”

To adapt to new consumer behaviour, for instance, BMW runs a programme on its Mini brand for peer-to-peer car sharing on a private level, which has been running quite successfully. This programme reveals consumers’ tendencies, even amid a shared economy. mobile-magazine.com

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“So yes, it will be more about car usage.

Also, though, there will be segments of the market — many communities — who will share their Minis, but also because they want to have the experience of the other Minis. This is also a matter of brand shaping,”says Gräter.

“The idea of saying that there is a fleet of cars in a city and all these people will use these cars — this can be the case for the future. But if it's based on the majority of use cases, people will still want or need to drive a car.”

From city to countryside The CCAM programme has now secured all its enablers, which is the baseline of the necessary technologies. These research projects are now considered to be in the middle phase of the programme, needing to reach maturity — projected to be from 2023 onwards — before they can really provide 166

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useful functionality on the road in terms of driverless mobility.

“What we are looking at is very much into the stepwise approach, giving feedback from an industrialisation point of view,” says Gräter. “We are teaming up with many partners from all industries to come to the right standards, to get the same level of technology-neutral standards that help find the best solutions with technologies.”

Gräter admits that the current approach is leaning more toward city solutions, but the programme is also heading towards countryside solutions. Getting people to understand what these advancements mean from a technological point of view is, however, the key task for CCAM. “If I'm bringing these technologies on the road for mobility solutions, it means that artificial intelligence applications need to be widely understood and accepted, as well

FRANCOIS FISCHER TITLE: E XPERT OF CONNECTED VEHICLE STANDARDISATION AND POLICY COMPANY: H UAWEI CONSUMER BUSINESS GROUP INDUSTRY: TELECOMMUNICATIONS LOCATION: BELGIUM After 10 years of coordinating large-scale European projects on Autonomous Driving, Fischer leads the industry standardisation and regulation questions in Europe related to Huawei’s Automotive consumer product line.

His key mission is to ensure Huawei’s Automotive Consumer products are in compliance with EU and China regulations and market trends.

EXECUTIVE BIO “ IN THE FUTURE, YOU WILL HAVE MORE IMMERSION BECAUSE THE DRIVER IS GOING TO BE LESS INVOLVED IN DRIVING, IT MIGHT TAKE DECADES BUT, FOR THE TIME BEING, WE HAVE A TRANSITION”

HUAWEI

ARMIN GRÄTER TITLE: D IRECTOR OF DIGITALISATION AND AUTOMATED DRIVING COMPANY: BMW GROUP INDUSTRY: MOTOR VEHICLE MANUFACTURING LOCATION: BELGIUM Gräter is the Director of Digitalisation and Automated Driving for BMW Group in Brussels, after working in various roles at the group, including as Safety Manager of the BMW Hydrogen7 and MINI e, and Functional Safety Coordinator. He is also the Chairman of the Board of the European Public/Private Partnership on Cooperative Connected and Automated Mobility (CCAM).

EXECUTIVE BIO

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as from a validation and regulation point of view, too. They will look into concrete technologies, such as computer vision in cameras, voice recognition, traffic sign recognition, but also within the overall system,” he says.

“For example, the whole validation stream method of mobility will increase in quality and allow for large-scale validation of scenario-based technologies all over European cities, in particular, but also in the countryside. In the third phase of the programme, we will see large-scale demonstrations in big cities all over Europe, aiming to demonstrate that connected cooperative automated mobility will have industrial solutions within Europe.”

Choosing Europe to be ‘ground zero’ for such a project is considered natural, what with its robust advancements and demands in transportation. Nevertheless, to actually achieve the goal, the members admitted that some global-scale syncing is necessary.

“ THE IDEA OF SAYING THAT THERE IS A FLEET OF CARS IN A CITY AND ALL THESE PEOPLE WILL USE THESE CARS, THIS CAN BE THE CASE FOR THE FUTURE. BUT IF IT'S BASED ON THE MAJORITY OF USE CASES, PEOPLE WILL EITHER WANT OR NEED TO DRIVE A CAR”

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“The automotive industry in Europe is world-class, so Europe will have a headstart when it comes to really trialling those solutions,” says Ellsberger. “I think global alignment is something that is important here, so we need a conjoined effort from Europe and the other regions to ensure that we have as much harmonisation as possible and prevent regional differences that create problems for the manufacturers.”

With AI, IoT and all the new technology involved in mobility, it boils down to whether the industry is able to organise the data or not.

“You need to solidify the security, because you share data across all the key stakeholders in the mobility industry,” says Ellsberger. “It needs regulation and the standards to be in place, from a regulator’s point-of-view, to force all those stakeholders to actually share the relevant data and to allow data sharing. From the European Commission's point of view, there's a lot of effort and focus on the new data regulation coming up associated with the data for the mobility sector. There will be a lot of activity in Europe to enable this.”

“ THE MAIN TARGETS ARE MAKING TRAFFIC IN EUROPE SAFER, MORE SUSTAINABLE AND LEAD TO MORE COMPETITIVENESS FOR THE EUROPEAN INDUSTRY” ARMIN GRÄTER

DIRECTOR OF DIGITALISATION AND AUTOMATED DRIVING AT BMW GROUP

On top of the cross-region alignment, according to Gräter, it is also necessary for communication between different partners to be clear and efficient, while still leaving room for technology innovation for service providers and manufacturers.

“The point is that this partnership has a focus on research. It also supports innovation and technology projects, especially when it comes to large-scale demonstration, but it's always clear that all companies, all industries that are contributing, are always on a precompetitive level with their engagement.”

Gräter points out one key success factor in Europe that differentiates the region from other parts of the world.

“It is that the European Commission offers such funding — not only by venture capital or use cases, but on purpose, to generate cooperation between local, regional, national and European authorities, and this is combined with industrial solutions and resources, as well as the research community, making a common effort to solve the problems of society,” he says. “This is a big advantage of the European approach.”

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F OR T RADIT IO N A L T EL EC O M COMP ANIES U N DER G O IN G A GE NE R A T IO N A L M E T AMO R PH O SI S, CYBE RS E C U R I T Y W I L L B E T H E D IFFE R EN C E B ET W EEN FAI LU RE A N D SU C C ESS.

WRITTEN BY: HARRY MENEAR

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efore the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the telecommunications sector was already in a state of unease. 4G hadn’t worked out especially well — with OTT digital players, apps, and streaming companies swooping in to reap the rewards of a technological foundation that the telcos shelled out to build — and 5G was looking like it was going to be an even bigger investment, yet again with no guarantee of how telcos were going to secure their piece of the pie.

“ I N TH E W A K E O F Y E A R S O F S L U G G I S H GRO W T H I N T R A D I T I O N A L S E R VI C E S,

TE L E C O M M U N I C A T I O N O P E R A T O R S AR E TRY I N G T O R E I N VE N T T H E M S E L VE S A S D I GI TA L S E R VI C E S P R O VI D E R S

”

EY (2020)

ALIGNING CYBERSECURITY TO ENABLE THE TELCO METAMORPHOSIS IN A POST-COVID-19 ERA

At the same time, rising competition from the hyperscale data centre sector, alt-nets, and MVNOs continued to push telcos further and further into a corner where the margins were slim and the potential opportunities were slimmer.

The industry’s response has been one of necessity, of survival. And the COVID-19 crisis has had a profound impact upon the speed and scope of that response.

“In the wake of years of sluggish growth in traditional services, telecommunication

operators are trying to reinvent themselves as digital services providers,” wrote an EY report from the first year of the pandemic, which added that telcos’ investment in new breeds of technology “represents immense opportunities to move up the value chain and find new streams of revenues.”

It should come as no great revelation to anyone that the pandemic itself has played a huge part in driving the opportunities behind “the new breed” of telecommunications tech. The rise of remote work, the need

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for greater automation, and record spikes in e-commerce adoption by new demographics finding themselves trapped inside by lockdown orders is just the half of it. Consulting firm McKinsey found in October of 2020 that “the COVID-19 crisis has brought about years of change in the way companies in all sectors and regions do business” in a matter of mere months.

Digital transformation, fueled by exponential growth in data consumption, and a paramount need for digital communication, could potentially put

telecoms back in a very powerful position as the decade wears on.

However, the pandemic increased more than just opportunities to support digital transformation. Worldwide, enterprises embracing digital technology and remote work have had to contend with an increasingly dangerous, chimeric threat: cybercrime.

“If we've learned one thing from the last 2 years, it’s that cybersecurity trends can change in the blink of an eye,” says Bechara Kaddoum, Head of Cybersecurity Services

W E ' VE L E A R N E D O N E T H I N G “ IF

FR OM T H E L A S T 2 YE ARS , I T ’ S T H A T CY BE R SE C U R ITY TR E N D S C AN CHA NG E IN TH E B L IN K O F A N EY E BECHARA KADDOUM

HEAD OF CYBERSECURITY SERVICES, TELEFONICA

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”

BECHARA KADDOUM TITLE: HEAD OF CYBERSECURITY SERVICES EMEA & APAC COMPANY: TELEFONICA INDUSTRY: CYBERSECURITY LOCATION: MADRID, SPAIN

EMEA & APAC for Spanish multinational telecom operator Telefonica. “Just as it has affected all industries worldwide, the COVID-19 crisis has impacted the cybersecurity situation everywhere.

The huge rise in demand for digital communications due to the shift to remote work was accompanied by a huge rise in threats and sophisticated attacks against organisations that were moving to the cloud as a way to cope with the pandemic.”

EXECUTIVE BIO

Bechara Kaddoum is the Head of Cybersecurity Services EMEA & APAC for Telefonica, where he is focused on establishing an ecosystem of partnerships while engaging in product and marketing strategic decision making. Prior to joining Telefonica, Kaddoum was the founder of BTK Lebanon, a Lebanesebased IT startup that he sold in 2018.

Bechara has been a keynote speaker in several events talking about the evolving role of cybersecurity in the telecom industry.

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Globally, the number of cyberattacks — especially ransomware and phishing — skyrocketed almost in lockstep with the number of COVID-19 cases. Except, as cases have started to fall around the world, the cyberattacks have just kept on rising.

Because of their role as key infrastructure operators, telcos have found themselves one of the prime targets of cybercrime in the past two years, standing in between malicious attackers and their customers’ precious data.

“I believe the telecommunications sector is at the core of fighting cybercriminals and protecting its clients’ data,” says Kaddoum.

Telefonica itself has, he explains, been working hard over the past two years to pool industry resources, and share critical information that may help prevent future attacks.

“At Telefonica, we've been part of several initiatives both in Europe and globally trying to combat cybercrime,” he adds. “We believe 178

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“ JUST AS IT HAS AFFECTED ALL INDUSTRIES

WORLDWIDE, THE COVID-19 CRISIS HAS IMPACTED THE CYBERSECURITY SITUATION EVERYWHERE

”

BECHARA KADDOUM

HEAD OF CYBERSECURITY SERVICES, TELEFONICA

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“ A T T E L E F O NIC A, W E 'VE BEEN P A RT OF

S E V E R A L INIT IA T IVE S BOTH IN EU ROP E AND G L O B A L L Y T R Y ING TO COMBAT C Y BERCRIME

”

BECHARA KADDOUM

HEAD OF CYBERSECURITY SERVICES, TELEFONICA

sharing intelligence and collaborating between different players in the industry will help in fighting threats and cybercriminals.

For that, we've formed the Telco Security Alliance, which aims to share intelligence among telco participants in different regions around the world.”

Interestingly, this newly expanded threat vector could also be a key part of the telecom industry’s attempt to reinvent itself as a digital services provider. “Having a long history of providing secure and reliable network access both within their own organisation or to businesses, this experience puts telcos in a strong position to meet organisations' need for security as they look to incorporate more cloud-based solutions and services,” Kaddoum adds.

“During the first wave of COVID-19, telcos all over the world had to meet the rising need for connectivity, with most companies shifting to remote work.” As Kaddoum sees it, the industry did a tremendous job to secure and provide the necessary services to customers, businesses or individuals, in short periods of time. He reflects: “Why can’t the telcos that have protected a huge amount of customer data for decades also provide their expertise to the B2B market?”

33%

increase in monthly volume of threat activities within the first two months of the pandemic

103.7mn number of detections in January 2020

118.7mn number of detections in March 2020

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NTT DATA: Open Network Innovation in the 5G Era WRITTEN BY: RHYS THOMAS

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PRODUCED BY: JAMES BERRY

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New all-photonics technology and acceleration of open network standards will propel NTT DATA’s global vision for 5G solutions in the B2B market

N

TT DATA is Japan’s second sister company NTT DOCOMO launched a largest provider of IT services proof-of-concept, successfully transmitting by market share, and one of 4k and 8k video data over a 5G connection the nation’s most influential to a Shinkansen bullet train travelling at technology firms. A 1988 360km/h – with no handover issues. offshoot from parent company NTT Group From a consumer perspective, it is a – which, in 2021, exceeded revenues of value-added benefit to travelling on board US$100bn – it has spearheaded innovations Japan’s iconic high-speed trains. But that have established Japan’s position as a Yasuhiro Higashiyama, NTT DATA Japan’s global leader in technological convenience Head of Global Business, Telecom and Utility and security, from the introduction of smart Sector, believes there are wider implications cards to virtual shopping malls. in leveraging 5G to unlock new use cases In 2018, NTT R&D published a thesis across a vast array of B2B environments. in Nature Photonics outlining its latest “In the 5G era, telecoms should transform innovation: a groundbreaking vision for themselves, not just as a voice and data the future of communications technology service provider, but as a solutions provider called the Innovative Optical and Wireless to the B2B market, from IoT and automated Network (IOWN). It is a global initiative factories, to extended reality healthcare of two parts that will power NTT DATA’s and the burgeoning automated vehicle global expansion: the first is collaboratively ecosystem,” he says. developing and establishing a global infrastructure standard as a The All-Photonics Future proponent of Open Radio NTT R&D’s major innovation Access Networks (Open RAN) is the all-photonics network, technologies; the second a “new-generation of is the introduction of allcomputing chips, which photonics technology that will cause lower power will bring greater speed consumption than existing to the network, while technology, and high simultaneously reducing performance”, according energy consumption. to Higashiyama.

Over the past four years, The all-photonics YASUHIRO HIGASHIYAMA NTT DATA has been working technology is a complex HEAD OF GLOBAL BUSINESS, on commercialising the engineering achievement, TELECOM & UTILITY SECTOR, vision. In February 2021, its NTT DATA JAPAN and Higashiyama admits

“Our success and our clients’ success in 5G will come from the B2B market”

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Yasuhiro Higashiyama, Head of Global Business, Telecom & Utility Sector

NTT DATA CORP

“In the 5G era, NTT DATA needs to strengthen our crossindustry activity”

the technical details are By leveraging all-photonics difficult to comprehend; the technology, NTT DATA result is, however, simple in forecasts a 100x reduction concept. “At the moment, in energy consumption. everything in the current Collaborating with Fujitsu infrastructure is driven by to develop a hyper-energy electricity,” Higashiyama says. exchange network and IT “Inside data centres, even infrastructure, NTT R&D those for fibre networks, a lot is commercialising the of energy is expended. That’s technology for communication because we need to convert service providers (CSPs). all the optical ‘photonic’ Without this dramatic decrease signals into an electric signal, in energy consumption, YASUHIRO HIGASHIYAMA compute something, and Higashiyama believes that HEAD OF GLOBAL BUSINESS, TELECOM & UTILITY SECTOR, convert the signal again from current infrastructure will no NTT DATA JAPAN electronic back to photonic. longer be sustainable in as It is not efficient and it little as three years’ time. requires an enormous amount of energy.

“Green technology is key to our But in the all-photonics future, you no longer success. As network traffic will continue to need to convert the signal. The technology exponentially grow roughly 20-30% year-onallows the signal to flow between destinations year, the network will require twice as much seamlessly, and therefore dramatically cuts energy as it currently does within the next energy consumption.” three to five years,” he says. “That growth will

NTT DATA Corporate movie 2021

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NTT DATA CORP

continue, and will not be sustainable. If we are successful in delivering the new greenenergy exchange technologies, it will help our business, will bring new opportunities globally in green markets, and will help our clients also deliver on their own sustainability commitments. That’s why we are investing a lot in these technologies.”

Wholesale transformation of infrastructure can be prohibitively expensive, but NTT’s all-photonics tech has one additional benefit: it is backwards compatible. “We can adopt this technology inside existing computing infrastructure,” Higashiyama says.

“If your computer has a motherboard, it is compatible with the all-photonics network and this technology. We can transmit the signal fully photonically.”

Open RAN is Key NTT group will begin deploying all-photonics technology in its domestic market by 2025.

But a wider rollout is contingent upon the development of Open RAN. Last year, NTT DOCOMO launched its 5G Open RAN ecosystem, the O-RAN Alliance. Formed of 12 global vendors – including Fujitsu, Mavenir, Intel K.K, Dell Technologies

YASUHIRO HIGASHIYAMA TITLE: H EAD OF GLOBAL BUSINESS, TELECOM & UTILITY SECTOR

139,700

COMPANY: NTT DATA JAPAN

Employees as of March 2021

Revenue as of March 2021

1988

Year founded

EXECUTIVE BIO

2,897.0bn yen

LOCATION: TOKYO, JAPAN Yasuhiro has 20 years of experience in the IT industry as an expert of CMT, leading global 5G innovations around the world with strong focus on Open network and cloud-native technologies. Until 2020, he was based in London as a leader of Global Telecom and managed Global accounts in Europe and LatAm. He completed a Master of Science course at the University of Tokyo, majoring in quantum computing, and is looking forward to translating his studies into reality this decade.

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Japan, and Qualcomm Technologies – the alliance will jointly work towards promoting industrial innovations together, accelerating the development of Open RAN to help enable flexible network deployment.

"Our home market is Japan, but now we have a strong footprint in Europe, LatAm and other major markets where we are now strongly focusing on Open RAN adoption,” Higashiyama says. “This, 190

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along with vRAN technologies, which we are developing in partnership with Mavenir, are the prerequisites for our vision. We need to transform the legacy infrastructure into an open network.

“We are heavily investing in cloud-native and open source-based IT infrastructure,” Higashiyama adds. “NTT DATA and DOCOMO are jointly developing an open source-based service management operations system. We are also developing

“We need to transform the legacy infrastructure into an open network” YASUHIRO HIGASHIYAMA HEAD OF GLOBAL BUSINESS, TELECOM & UTILITY SECTOR, NTT DATA JAPAN

autonomous operation systems for Open RAN together with Fujitsu and DOCOMO." By 2025, NTT DATA expects this open network to account for a major share of the market. “At the moment mobile operators such as Huawei, Nokia, and Ericsson dominate the network,” Higashiyama says. “But in our view, we expect that over the next three to five years, most of the market will be an open network.”

NTT DATA CORP

“Green technology is key to our success”

B2B is The Future The company’s partnership As the 5G era matures, a shift in with Mavenir is a good example technology will also drive a new of this, Higashiyama adds: focus on B2B markets for NTT “Mavenir can deliver cloudDATA and the wider telecoms native vRAN solutions, but in industry. “Our success and the B2B market, a non telco our clients’ success in 5G will client requires a full-stack come from the B2B market,” solution. On top of the private YASUHIRO HIGASHIYAMA Higashiyama says. “CSPs in mobile network, the client will HEAD OF GLOBAL BUSINESS, TELECOM & UTILITY SECTOR, the B2B market will provide want to deploy some use-case NTT DATA JAPAN not just connectivity, but applications. Mavenir cannot also additional value-added provide that, but as a system services on top of that infrastructure.” integrated and IT services specialists, NTT It will also require a more collaborative DATA is good at providing those solutions. mindset and the forging of partnerships – So through our partnership, we can deliver approaches that Higashiyama admits the that full-stack solution to all industries.” company has historically not engaged in.

Many other collaborative programmes “But now, in the 5G era, we need to are already underway. In LatAm, NTT DATA strengthen our cross-industry activity.” partnered with Facebook and Telefonica,

Transform Your Network： ： Expertise that Drives Network ： Digital Transformation Network can be more flexible. More robust. More secure.

You can also make them more environmentally friendly.

How? We have the solutions.

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delivering the lean operations with open source technologies to bring low-cost mobile connection to rural areas of Peru. In more mature markets, such as Europe, the company is teaming with industry leaders to set standards for autonomous and connected vehicles, among other emerging technologies.

“In the near future, there will be more cars connected to the network, and it will be very important to have a global standard for navigation technologies,” Higashiyama

says. “Cars will be connected not just for voice and content, but for cloud services, and those services are not necessarily standardised across the globe. Vodafone and NTT DATA are creating the standard for 5G roaming across Europe, where we are providing standardised compliance solutions to CSPs.” Manufacturing industries, particularly the automotive sector, will be a major driver of NTT DATA’s mid-term growth, Higashiyama says. In Germany, the company is working together with BMW and other Tier mobile-magazine.com

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1 suppliers to establish industry standards for automated parking solutions. “We provide what we call the Campus Network,” Higashiyama says. “Together with network and AI-based solutions and video sensors, businesses can use this form of autonomous driving within their own localised factories and logistics operations. Meanwhile, consumers can enjoy this convenience in retail locations, for example.”

Roadmap for the Future NTT DATA’s long-term vision is a 10-year plan that begins with standardisation, and then culminates in the creation and maturation of markets and technologies that have yet to be envisioned. Over the next two years, NTT Group will begin prototyping new all-photonics devices, which will be deployed in Japanese domestic infrastructure from 2025. “By 2030, we’d like to have a more global impact, and we hope this technology will be more popular and have a tangible market share,” says Higashiyama.

But there will be competition. “I understand that other IT giants and some other hyperscalers have similar views as ours for the future, and are starting to develop their own technology,” says Higashiyama. "We will compete with those other organisations in technological advancement. But our competitive advantages are two-fold. NTT DATA is a telco down to our very DNA, and we have a long history of contributing to society – not just for our own business. We can differentiate ourselves by extending our values to benefit society, and our competence in telecoms technology.”

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SMARTPHONE CEOs Here, we take a look at some of the leading CEOs in the smartphone world, from long-standing legends with reliable brands to up-and-coming innovators, poised to make a mark

S

WRITTEN BY: HARRY MENEAR

martphones made their first entrance in 2007, with Apple’s iPhone setting the stage for competition and innovation on a global level. Ever since, not only has everyday life been infiltrated by these little touchscreen devices and the groundbreaking technology that makes them up, but competition between the global

smartphone brands has been fierce. Luckily, this breeds a one-upmanship-style approach to development, meaning that we’ve never been short of devices to um-and-ah over.

Here, we look at the Top 10 smartphone CEOs who have helped keep the game fresh and made a significant impact.

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10

GEORGE ZHAO Title: CEO, Honor Nationality: China Appointed: 2013

As CEO of ex-Huawei subsidiary Honor – sold in late 2020 as a way for the beleaguered firm’s budget smartphone division to skirt US sanctions – George Zhao has taken the smartphone industry by surprise. Despite assurances that Honor would continue to produce budget devices and essentially not rock the boat, Zhao’s firm has launched a succession of flagshipkiller phones that have been widely well-received. With room to grow, at last, it seems as though Zhao has big plans for Honor.

“As a consumer-centric company, HONOR maintains its technological idealism with a can-do attitude, always thinking about how we can do better to meet consumer needs” 198

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09

XU ZIYANG

Title: CEO, Executive Director, ZTE Nationality: China Appointed: 2018 Xu Ziyang joined ZTE in 1998, becoming CEO and Executive Director of the partially stateowned Chinese electronics firm in 2018. Lauded for a “global mindset and deep insights into the international communications market”, Xu has kept a steady hand on the wheel of the firm, which reported strong revenues in 2021. Xu is a graduate of the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China.

08

REN ZHENGFEI Title: CEO, Huawei Nationality: China Appointed: 1988

A celebrated member of the Chinese military’s Engineering Corps, Ren Zhengfei founded Huawei in 1987, subsequently building the brand into an electronics and technology powerhouse. Despite ongoing success in the data centre, cloud computing and Chinese consumer electronics industries, Huawei’s smartphone business is on the decline, marred by overseas sanctions and overtaken by younger Chinese competitors.

Despite setbacks, Zhengfei has continued to call on employees in his smartphone division to fight hard for a future in which “no one dares to bully us”.

07

SUNDAR PICHAI

Title: CEO, Alphabet, Inc Nationality: India Appointed: 2015 As the CEO of Alphabet, Inc., Sundar Pichai has to wear a lot of hats. In addition to heading up the world’s largest software company, being a cloud entrepreneur and sustainability advocate, Pichai (along with his SVP of devices, Rick Osterloh) is setting about finally conquering the smartphone market. Despite early lack of brand recognition (something which feels really weird when you’re describing a Google product), the latest generation of Pixel phones looks set to go to war with Apple and Samsung in earnest. mobile-magazine.com

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Unleash the full Power of 5G with Samsung networks As a long time innovation powerhouse, Samsung has been inspiring the industry and unleashing the full power of 5G. With our advanced end-to-end solutions, we keep pushing the industry forward for a better tomorrow.

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TOP 10

05

SHEN WEI

06 SKI LI

Title: Founder, Global CEO, realme Nationality: China Appointed: 2018 Founder of the world’s fastestgrowing smartphone brand, realme, Ski Li has taken his company (which he founded under the umbrella of BBK Electronics, China’s smartphone conglomerate and the biggest company you’ve never heard of) from unknown underdog to a front runner in the industry in just a few short years. Li graduated from the Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and served as Oppo’s head of overseas operations prior to founding realme ‒ experience that he has leveraged into record-breaking growth of the brand outside of China, especially in the Indian market.

Title: Founder, CEO, Vivo Nationality: China Appointed: 2009 Previously the CEO at Chinese smartphone giant BBK Electronics, Shen Wei stepped away from that position in 2009 to take a leading role in the creation of one of its leading subsidiaries, Vivo.

Focusing on “creating products that combine beautiful design, professional acoustic fidelity, as well as extreme video display, in order to create a joyful experience for the young and trendy”, Wei has led Vivo to become a leading light of China’s smartphone market.

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04

TONY CHEN

Title: Founder, CEO, Oppo Nationality: China Appointed: 2004 Since helping found the brand ‑ another subsidiary of Chinese smartphone mega-conglomerate BBK Electronics ‑ in 2004, Tony Chen has been the guiding force behind the company’s meteoric rise to one of the biggest growth drivers for China’s smartphone industry over the past two decades.

Oppo’s sleek, simple designs that emphasise user-friendliness are credited as being a large part of China’s rise to dominance in the affordable smartphone space.

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03

LEI JUN

Title: Co-Founder and CEO, Xiaomi Nationality: China Appointed: 2010 As co-founder and CEO of Xiaomi, Lei Jun has overseen one of the most successful startups in history, taking the Chinese smartphone brand from an industry upstart in 2010 to a global industry leader.

In 2021, Xiaomi ‑ leveraging both its strong portfolio and the downfall of Huawei’s smartphone division – managed to rise to second place in the global smartphone sales rankings, even briefly capturing the top spot. Jun is a prolific investor, both inside Xiaomi’s walls, where he is pouring huge amounts of money into the development of the company’s first electric vehicle, and personally.

HYUN SUK KIM

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Title: President, Co-CEO, Head of Consumer Electronics, Samsung Nationality: South Korea Appointed: 2018 One of three co-CEOs at South Korean electronics giant, Samsung, Hyun Suk Kim has shared the title with Dong Jin Koh and Ki Nam Kim since 2018. Kim oversees the company’s Consumer Electronics division, which is responsible for Samsung’s ubiquitous series of Galaxy-branded handsets – as well as tablets and wearables.

Samsung has spent the past few years locked in a fierce battle with Apple and Xiaomi, trading places with the American and Chinese firms for the title of world’s biggest smartphone

brand. Despite lowering the price of the Galaxy S21 line last year and impressive demand for the latest generation of its foldable smartphones, supply chain issues and record-breaking sales of the iPhone 13 have conspired to push Samsung out of the top spot this year.

Under Kim’s leadership, however, the South Korean conglomerate continues to dominate in its home market and fiercely contend with its rivals abroad.

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TIM COOK

Title: CEO, Apple Inc Nationality: USA Appointed: 2011

“As the world emerges from a pandemic… we have the oncein-a-lifetime opportunity to shape the future we want to live in”

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ast year marked the tenyear anniversary of Tim Cook stepping into Steve Jobs’ shoes as the CEO of Apple. Over the last decade, the Cupertino-based electronics giant has grown into one of the world’s biggest brands. The latest generation iPhone smashed both expectations and its competitors’ sales figures in 2021, buoyed further by the success of its more affordably-priced iPhone SE (the newest version of which launched in February to strong sales).

Cook is often held in contrast to his predecessor — a businessman and supply chain organiser rather than a tech visionary.

Nevertheless, his leadership over the past decade has seen Apple repeatedly smash just about every record for smartphone sales that existed and, for a brief moment last year, top a $3tn valuation.

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AT THE DIGITAL FRONTIER OF CUSTOMER E XPERIENCE WRITTEN BY: ALEX TUCK PRODUCED BY: STUART IRVING

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MULTICHOICE

Dr. Durrel Ramrathan, Senior Manager, Operational Performance, Quality Analytics and ML at MultiChoice, drives value by focusing on customer experience

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n his role of Senior Manager, Operational Performance, Quality Analytics and ML, Durrel Ramrathan leads the analytics and machine learning teams within operations at MultiChoice Group Ltd, Africa’s biggest pay TV provider.

As a data-driven business, his team enhances the organisation’s data maturity, with decisions based on feedback gathered from customers to improve the MultiChoice product landscape and make it reflective of what customers actually need.

With a relentless focus on customer experience, Ramrathan and his colleagues have ensured what they do is customer-centric by creating an ecosystem supported by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), enabling customers both internally and externally.

As with any pay TV provider, subscription is key, and a vital component of retaining subscribers is a seamless customer experience.

Customer experience a competitive difference for MultiChoice At MultiChoice, there is a big focus on purpose-driven leadership. This trickles down through the different teams to create a culture that drives innovation. Ramrathan insists that innovation's not something that you can give a framework to, all wrapped up in a two-day workshop, as some would suggest: “Our culture at MultiChoice is about giving leaders the autonomy to develop their

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At the digital frontier of customer experience

“ Our culture at MultiChoice is about giving leaders the autonomy to develop their staff” DR. DURREL RAMRATHAN SENIOR MANAGER, MULTICHOICE

staff and give them that space to make not just big innovations, but also small ones, too”.

Formerly of IBM, Ramrathan is from a consulting background, where he learned that, historically, the customer experience is generally relegated to a certain department, whose job is to drive it out. But, according to the AI and Analytics Leader, customer experience activities are, in fact, everyone’s responsibility: 212

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“Everything that you do in an organisation impacts a customer in some way or form. Everybody should be measured on customer experience.”

“One of our main competitive advantages is the customer experience.

People are comparing the experience they get across every industry nowadays.

So the experience I get when going to a bank is something that I will compare to an experience I get with MultiChoice. If I come to us and it's two steps and I'm able to join, then go to a bank and it's 10 steps — people are comparing those experiences.

“I think some companies are still trying to identify how they set up their organisation to work from that perspective. Because traditional organisations are not set up like that. They are set up to work in certain silos. Starting with experience and driving backwards is something that will take most companies significant amounts of time to achieve,” he says.

MULTICHOICE

DR. DURREL RAMRATHAN TITLE: SENIOR MANAGER: OPERATIONAL PERFORMANCE, QUALITY ANALYTICS AND MACHINE LEARNING LOCATION: CITY OF JOHANNESBURG Dr. Durrel Ramrathan is a Senior Analytics and AI leader, with in-depth experience designing and implementing cognitive solutions. Durrel has an extensive consulting background, driving a number of large-scale advanced analytics solutions, as well as first-of-their-kind cognitive application implementations. In addition to pioneering AI in the industry, Durrel has contributed extensively to the academic field through research and publication in the attainment of his PhD. Durrel currently leads Customer Operations Analytics and AI competency, within MultiChoice which has an intense focus on crafting innovative solutions to improve and evolve customer experience.

EXECUTIVE BIO

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Harness the power of Cloud and turn insights into value.

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Fused with Advanced Analytics, we enable Clients to adapt their ways of working, embedding a culture of agility and innovation to leverage sustained business value from actionable insights.

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Contact Ryan Norris

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Director – Deloitte Analytics

Associate Director – Deloitte Analytics

Deloitte and Multichoice partner to harness data insights reaching new heights in pay TV Deloitte’s Ryan Norris and Quentin Williams join Multichoice’s Debra Goosen to discuss the quest to turn Multichoice into an insight-driven company Deloitte started their journey with South Africa’s Multichoice in September 2019, with a shared vision around making Multichoice a data, analytics and insightdriven organisation. With a cloud based data and analytics platform and innovations such as warehouse automation, they are achieving things in the pay TV space that are world-leading.

Ryan Norris and Quentin Williams are two of the Deloitte Africa Analytics leaders.

Together, they work with Debra Goosen, Lead: Analytics Innovation at Multichoice, who sets the vision and course of the current programme, as well as ensuring execution against the enterprise data strategy.

Goosen is pleased that Multichoice achieved a balance between governance versus squad autonomy: “What we’ve established is an architecture community in order to set up those guardrails, and an important component or construct of

that is the representatives from across the data and analytics community, engaging and participating in that architecture community forum.”

The Vibranium Programme The idea behind Vibranium originates from Marvel’s Black Panther. Much like Wakanda is a city of scientific advancement, Vibranium symbolises the powerful insights that data (the Vibranium ore) can provide, in terms of getting closer to the customer and their needs.

Williams adds: “Deloitte is on the journey with Multichoice. With Vibranium we had to look at the process and the approach, ensuring that every aspect of Vibranium is value-driven, not just insight-driven.”

Norris remarks: “We have a shared culture and ethos, so we clicked right from the beginning. It’s one of the largest programmes from an analytics perspective, with 140+ analysts within Multichoice, from data engineers and data scientists to principal business analysts and scrum masters,”.

Williams reveals that it is possible to get the best of both worlds: “Excellence and flexibility can go hand-in-hand. They’re not mutually exclusive. You can be agile and you can still deliver excellent outcomes.”

Learn more

MULTICHOICE

Since Ramrathan’s team helped to co-create a single, unifying purpose to change the norm for a better future, the business has seen a massive increase in productivity and innovation.

“We've seen much better collaboration within the department and with others too.

Focusing on enabling people and building them up reaped very tangible benefits. We make people aware that we’re on their side and we’ve got their backs,” says Ramrathan.

Awarded for NLP (natural language processing) chatbot In 2021, Durrel Ramrathan and his team collected an internal Innovation of the Year Award for their work on Africa’s ‘AI Agent Assist’ (T.U.M.I), selected in the Customer First category by MultiChoice Group.

T.U.M.I stands for The Ultimate Master of Information and is MultiChoice’s latest AI customer service chatbot, available 24/7 to answer customer queries about products and services. It also enables our service agents to respond to customer queries quicker. It interacts with customers online in a text-based conversation in real time, using advanced natural language capabilities; which means it can understand different variations of questions to help customers resolve their queries.

An NLP-based chatbot, the AI Agent is a computer programmed-AI that communicates with a customer via textual or sound methods. According to Ramrathan, the chatbot wasn’t just one of the ‘question and answer’ types that you commonly see online.

“I think the real innovation here was to ensure that the chatbot contextualises and tries to understand what the customer is talking about, powered by information we already know about them.

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“So if a customer returns and has already raised specific issues, it's able to implement that within the dialogue and help a customer get to a resolution much quicker,” says Ramrathan.

By creating the ecosystem that a customer can operate in, Ramrathan states that the queries are resolved much quicker.

“The outcome of this was an improvement in customer satisfaction. We've also seen a large deflection away from traditional channels. So we migrate customers to digital channels to get their queries resolved. By keeping customers engaged, they feel that they've been given the attention that they deserve,” he added.

Ramrathan acknowledges that the work on the AI Assistant was a team effort, requiring lots of collaboration across the organisation. The difficulty came with the use of natural language processing (NLP) components.

“Generally, those are quite tricky when you use them in real-life situations and deal with customers, because you don't really know what will happen for sure, you can only account for a certain amount of scenarios.

The team did lots of work to get the AI to a certain level where we were comfortable for it to engage with customers,” he added. “(The award) was great for the team, for them to be recognised in this way [by the organisation],” says Ramrathan.

According to Ramrathan, linking these kinds of AI projects to customer experience is crucial, as many tech projects fail because stakeholders can’t link them to the sort of value that they're trying to drive: “Whenever we tackle a problem — and specifically with this innovation — we start by considering the experience we want to drive for customers.

So we started building backwards from that. I think that's why this innovation was mobile-magazine.com

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so successful and why it ended up getting selected. I think with our intense focus on bringing in that customer experience lens, we overlay that over our analytics and machine learning initiatives,” says Ramrathan.

The MultiChoice technology ecosystem Explaining how MultiChoice delivers a superior customer experience, Ramrathan says it’s because of the close working relationships of customer operations, technology and business planning teams who ensure they are prepared for any changes that may arise within the Group, and help mitigate the impacts.

“And then you get insights from our various tools to improve these customer journeys, while helping to identify key impact areas,” he adds.

Staying ahead of the game is of particular importance since Ramrathan and his team deal with customers who have immediate issues that must be resolved in real-time.

“By utilising the insights created for my analytics teams, the ML team is able to identify gaps in areas where they can alleviate internal and external problems. This is why our machine learning teams actually have a high success rate for projects that they implement,” says Ramrathan.

By working as one ecosystem to compound the value that the teams deliver, the analytics products and machine learning products can evolve to support the customer experience while continually improving it. In this ecosystem, they can gather all customer information together so that when a customer interacts with MultiChoice, the business can draw on all past predictive models and behaviours 218

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“ We start with the experience we want to drive for customers” DR. DURREL RAMRATHAN SENIOR MANAGER, MULTICHOICE

MULTICHOICE

to determine payments, churn, viewing preferences, and other types of insight — all collated into one holistic experience.

“This means a customer won’t have a fragmented experience when they interact with us. It’s a seamless experience and helps inform the next best action for the customer,” adds Ramrathan.

If a customer is contacting MultiChoice, they usually have an issue, according to Ramrathan, so he believes that by turning

this experience into something that's valuable to the customer, they get what they want and the company gets the issue resolved, but the customer might also get longer term value from the interaction.

“This also incorporates new technologies, whether it is our AI Assist or we’re using AR/VR and so on. They can be a major competitive advantage if used well, to address a customer issue and build that trust,” says Ramrathan.

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How to leverage data to feed decision makers One of the key issues when dealing with data is its complexity.

“We always need to have a clear understanding of the strategic objectives of the business and how we use the data we have as an asset to drive growth. Using that data to give us the correct insights that will ultimately lead to making decisions, which will benefit our customers,” says Ramrathan.

In reality, Ramrathan explains, business people don’t really care how you acquired the data or what you had to do in order to process it.

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“What they care about is that they have a problem, and they need the relevant insights to help resolve the problem. My team needs to be able to make a recommendation, but we also know that we need to keep our engagements focused,” he says.

Ramrathan adds: “You must grab their attention and maintain that attention, making them curious to understand what provides value and impacts the business drivers.”

The business translator and motivator While Ramrathan’s job role is undoubtedly to deliver analytics and machine learning

MULTICHOICE

“ By keeping customers engaged, they feel that they've been given the attention that they deserve”

capabilities to improve the customer experience, he believes that his role at MultiChoice is also to be the business translator between the analytics function and the business function, to ensure his team delivers business value.

He says: “I think most importantly, I must be a motivator for my teams, to ensure they're high performing, enabled and fulfilled as individuals. We are all just human beings and we must listen to our staff as intently as our customers.”

DR. DURREL RAMRATHAN SENIOR MANAGER, MULTICHOICE

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EVENT PREVIEW

Cloud & 5G LIVE EVENT Cloud & 5G LIVE takes place from 23rd to 24th June at London’s famous Tobacco Dock and will cover core themes such as telecommunications, women in tech, cloud, and 5G WRITTEN BY: SAM STEERS

A

hybrid event that’s part of Tech LIVE, Cloud & 5G LIVE kicks off on 23rd June at the Tobacco Dock, London, and ends 24th June 2022.

Hosted by BizClik Media Group, the two-day event – sponsored by Salesforce, Umlaut, Virtus Data Centres, and the Norwegian Data Center Industry – will feature live roundtable sessions featuring insightful Q&As, networking opportunities, and influential keynote speakers from companies such as Three, Compass Datacenters, Yondr, and T-Mobile. As well as coming to you live and in-person, the event will also be broadcast live via Brella, a fully interactive virtual platform.

Speakers will deliver presentations on core themes including women in technology, telecommunications, and enterprise technology, as well as cloud and 5G. At the end of each session, audiences will have the opportunity to ask any questions they may have relating to the topics discussed.

Let’s take a look at the event agenda in more detail.

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The Global Cloud & 5G Conference

2022 23rd - 24th June

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Join us at Cloud & 5G LIVE Showcase your values, products and services to your partners and customers at Cloud & 5G LIVE 2022.

From keynote addresses to lively roundtables, fireside discussions to topical presentations, Q&A sessions to 1-2-1 networking, the 2-day hybrid show is an essential deep dive into issues impacting the future of each industry today.

Brought to you by BizClik Media Group, the hybrid event will be held in London co-located with sister events: Cyber LIVE and Technology & AI LIVE between June 23rd-24th and broadcast live to the world.

Global giants and innovative startups will all find the perfect platform with direct access to an engaged and active audience. You can’t afford to miss this opportunity.

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EVENT PREVIEW

“ It was truly fantastic to see the masses return to in-person industry events once more” STUART IRVING

MANAGING DIRECTOR OF TELECOMMUNICATIONS AND DATA CENTRES AT BIZCLIK MEDIA GROUP

Cloud & 5G LIVE Agenda Day one, 23rd June, commences with a welcome presentation, followed shortly afterwards by the first of the keynote presentations, in which Louise Bunting discusses how businesses in the cloud industry can use automation to transform operational processes.

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After this, presentations from Beatriz Arias of Nokia and Mark Cooper of Atlas Edge will provide further insights into both industries and will be centred around core themes.

The afternoon will then consist of further presentations from companies such as Orange and AT&T, which will take place on the Cloud and 5G stage – as well as virtually on the Brella platform – and take a closer look into the 5G industry.

The second day will see a wide variety of presentations and roundtable discussions in action. These include a ‘Fireside Chat’, where panellists will discuss Open Radio Access Networks (OpenRAN), a panel discussion on digital infrastructure, and a presentation from Colin, Chairman of the Board at 6G-IA, about implementation of 6G in Europe.

In between each session, there will be an opportunity to network with other attendees, where you can build high-level relationships and gain insider knowledge from top industry experts.

EVENT PREVIEW Confirmed speakers so far The list of speakers for Cloud & 5G LIVE continues to grow each day – take a look at who is scheduled so far: Tony Grayson, General Manager, Compass Quantum at Compass Datacenters Robert Franks, Managing Director at West Midlands 5G Dr. Colin Willcock, Chairman of the Board at 6G-IA Belinda Finch, Chief Information Officer at Three Ceren Clulow, Digital Connectivity Manager, Nottinghamshire County Council Leah Hidden, Global DEI Program Manager, Yondr

Join us at LIVE If you would like to attend, whether that be in-person or virtually, you can purchase your tickets here – see you there!

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Edwige Robinson, SVP, Network Engineering, Operations & Transformation at T-Mobile Andrew McGrath, Group Chief Commercial Officer at BAI Communications Vicky Nisbet, Industry Leader - Comms, Media & Tech at Salesforce Samer Geissah, Director, Technology, Strategy, and Architecture at Telus

Commenting on the event, Stuart Irving, Managing Director of Telecommunications and Data Centres at BizClik Media Group, said: “At MWC Barcelona back in March, it was truly fantastic to see the masses return to in-person industry events once more. So roll on June 23rd-24th, where TECH LIVE LONDON brings The Global 5G and Cloud Conference to the people and hears from some of the most innovative, exciting and industry-leading 5G and Cloud executives.

See you there!”. mobile-magazine.com

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The mobile operator’s journey to SUCCESS WRITTEN BY: SAM STEERS

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PRODUCED BY: STUART IRVING

OOREDOO ALGERIE

From ‘problem child’ to success, this is the story of how Mathias Hanel transformed Ooredoo Algeria to become a leading mobile operator

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oredoo Algeria, also known as Wataniya Télécom Algérie, is the Algerian subsidiary of Ooredoo Group, a telecommunications company based in Doha in Qatar. The mobile operator offers a range of services to its Algerian customers, and was originally part of the Nedjma brand which was commercially launched in 2004.

Operating with three core values - caring, connecting and challenging - Ooredoo Algeria rebranded in 2013 from Nedjma, and has seen significant growth since.

Mathias Hanel joined the company in 2019 and is currently its Chief Commercial Officer responsible for marketing, sales and customer care. Discussing how Ooredoo Algeria has evolved since then, Hanel said: “Over the last two years, I think there has been a lot of positive change in the commercial areas and as well as in the entire company.”

Due to the way the company has grown, Ooredoo has quickly become the leading digital mobile operator in Algeria and it has the fastest network available in the country. It has also achieved several notable milestones on its journey. One of the biggest, according to Hanel, was the transformation of the company’s product portfolio.

“We changed our portfolio from a priceonly model to differentiation and services,” Hanel explains, who describes the alteration

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as a “crucial step” in moving not just the company but also the market out of what he refers to as the “ruinous price war”.

Recovering from the “ruinous price war” Reflecting on the beginning of his career with Ooredoo Algeria, Hanel noted that when he joined two years ago, the mobile operator was struggling in what he called a “commoditised prepay market” with a “ruinous and lasting price war.” This caused market revenue valued in the multi-millions to fall and resulted in the lowest ever gigabyte prices both across the region of Algeria and worldwide.

On top of this, there were many internal management changes within the company and the network was struggling to cope with frequent outages. “All of this reflected the staff and employee moral, and financially, of course, it had a big impact on the company which resulted in years and years of tumbling revenues and falling profits,” Hanel said.

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However, Ooredoo had several strategies in place to help it get back on its feet. In this type of situation, Hanel believes that having the right mindset is key to recovery, saying that “it’s really important to keep focus and have a clear sense of your priorities.” Equally as crucial in this situation was the need for a transformation plan. “I knew we had to develop a very comprehensive transformation plan covering marketing, sales, customer care and technology.

We needed clear priorities to achieve our objective of creating an agile, digital, leading telco and to return to revenue and profitability,” Hanel said. However, he stresses that due to the task being so complex implementing the plan wasn’t a quick job, taking two years of planning and preparation.

Discussing in more detail, Hanel said: “In the first year, the focus of the transformation was really on fixing the basics.” To ensure the

MATHIAS HANEL TITLE: CHIEF COMMERCIAL OFFICER INDUSTRY: TELECOMMUNICATIONS

EXECUTIVE BIO

LOCATION: ALGER Mathias Hanel is the Chief Commercial Officer of Ooredoo Algeria since 2019 and initiated a comprehensive commercial transformation to achieve full financial recovery following several years of falling revenue and profits.

His journey in the telecoms industry started right after university and he has been working for fixed, mobileonly and integrated operators in Europe, Asia and Africa ever since.

For 20 years he worked for Deutsche Telekom, managing several integrated operators as chief commercial officer in Europe.

Mathias holds a Batchelor Degree of Middlesex Business School and Reutlingen University ESB Business School

AppGallery paves the way for a frictionless digital payment experience in Algeria

Lu Geng, Vice President of the Middle East and Africa, Huawei Global Partnerships & Eco-Development, highlights the success of AppGallery’s direct carrier billing payments in Algeria.

As the world shifts towards a streamlined mobile and digital experience, certain markets are still nascent and present tremendous growth opportunities. Huawei Mobile Services (HMS) plays a pivotal role in offering end-users curated solutions to overcome the challenges of digital transformation and respond to the growing needs of a tech-savvy consumer base.

Following a thorough market study that identified a considerable need in the digital wallet sector, AppGallery, in partnership with Ooredoo, launched a Direct Carrier Billing (DCB) channel in Algeria, offering secure and contactless options to consumers in the country.

Ooredoo subscribers were hence able to use the new method to benefit from a seamless purchasing experience.

“The much-needed service launched in Algeria in July 2021, much to the delight of mobile internet users and gamers. The launch of DCB Method solutions witnessed exponential growth in AppGallery users as they increased by 30% within eight months compared to the number of users before the launch, simultaneously increasing our partner’s revenue.

Meanwhile, AppGallery became the top app aggregator platform in Algeria.” said Lu Geng, Vice President of the Middle East and Africa, Huawei Global Partnerships & Eco-Development.

“The success of this service is a clear testimony of Huawei’s efforts to empower users with more enabling that cater to their specific needs. The frictionless payment experience is emerging as the preferred model to access paid content without the need for credit or debit cards. Within a short period, the service witnessed a huge demand which is anticipated to grow even further with increased awareness. This partnership paves the way to further opportunities with our carrier partners in the future,” added Lu Geng.

As the world evolves towards integrated digital experiences, service providers must prioritise customers’ needs to remain relevant. HMS demonstrates its ability to empower users and provide a flawless experience to customers everywhere with innovative solutions and successful partnerships.

“ I knew we had to develop a very comprehensive transformation plan covering marketing, sales, customer care and technology. We needed clear priorities to achieve our objective of creating an agile, digital, leading telco and to return to revenue and profitability” MATHIAS HANEL

CHIEF COMMERCIAL OFFICER, OOREDOO

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DID YOU KNOW Ooredoo has a presence in markets such as Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, Algeria, Tunisia, Iraq, Palestine, the Maldives, Myanmar and Indonesia. The company was named “Best Mobile Operator of the Year” at the World Communication Awards 2013.

company could get out of the price war, it created all-new product portfolios with lots of differentiators. Hanel explained that they also had to “optimise distribution structures and incentive systems to shift from volume to value,” adding that it was very important to have a more differentiated distribution landscape.

Year two of the transformation plan and the launch of Ooredoo Algeria’s “game-changer” Continuing on its path to recovery, Hanel explains the next steps the company took

to ensure its safety in the telecoms industry.

“We created the foundation for a digitalenabled operator for digital sales, digital marketing, digital care, and digital services. We also created a state-of-the-art Customer Value Management (CVM) project enabled by big data analytics.”

In its second year, 2021, despite the global impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the plan carried on uninterrupted with the enhancement of Ooredoo Algeria’s distribution channels. “We added twenty franchise shops.

We introduced six digital flagship stores and we launched a fully digital contract activation across all of our distribution channels. It was the first of its kind in the market and allowed us to make digital sales,” commented Hanel.

Following this, the company then launched what Hanel says is a “real game-changer”, its USP, which is its innovative offer for the young segment called “YOOZ“. “It’s 100% digital and it allows the customer to choose and configure products and services within an app. It also lets them choose from a large range of music and video streaming services with support from an entirely AI-enabled digital avatar called ‘Roogy.’”

Two-year transformation plan surpasses expectations Hanel says that the results of Ooredoo’s efforts to pull itself out of the dark and the light have exceeded expectations. “Besides implementing the entire transformation plans with all of the milestones, the new product portfolios for B2C and B2B, and the unique offer for the young segment use, and the much more efficient omnichannel distribution and incentive systems.

“All of this resulted in strong year-on-year revenue growth. In terms of profit and cash we multiplied the returns to our shareholders over the period of only two years, and at the same time, we also expanded our revenue market share in the Algerian market versus our competitors. mobile-magazine.com

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REIMAGINING YOUR EVERYDAY

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“After two years, I can truly say that Algeria is now the leader in digital and in customer satisfaction and has a much stronger brand, thanks to the work of a motivated more committed team strengthened throughout the common journey,” Hanel said.

Working with Huawei and Arimac Like many mobile operators, Ooredoo Algeria works closely with its partners on a wide variety of products and services.

For example, the aforementioned “gamechanging” youth segment offer was the result of a close collaboration with Sri Lanka (to be checked with Chamira, Arimac) technology start-up Arimac.

Ooredoo Algeria has also worked with Huawei, a Chinese multinational technology and communications company founded in 1987. It designs, develops and sells telecommunications equipment, consumer electronics and various smart devices for the mobile and telecommunications industry.

Commenting on the collaboration, Hanel said: “Together with Huawei, we launched the Huawei app store, which provides a wide range of content from developers around the world covering many different categories.

“ The vision for the future of Ooredoo is to focus on customer experience and to move it to the next level, and create a true differentiator for Algeria as a customercentric company” MATHIAS HANEL

CHIEF COMMERCIAL OFFICER, OOREDOO

“Since its launch late last year, this became an instant success and generated growth, the highest in the region and globally from what I understand. This really speaks to the fact that, with a good partner, a good product, and good execution, you can really have a big impact and generate new revenue streams,” Hanel said.

A more customer-centric focus for the future After its successful transformation, Ooredoo Algeria’s future seems to be predominantly focused on its customers. The company also looks to expand its digital portfolio further as well as explore more avenues with other businesses. “The vision for the future of Ooredoo is to focus on customer experience and to move it to the next level, and create a true differentiator for Algeria as a customercentric company,” Hanel projects.

“This also includes removing pain points for the customer and creating true emotional experiences for all of our customers. In addition, we will continue the digital journey, which we have started, by adding more digital mobile-magazine.com

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“ I can truly say that Algeria is now the leader in digital and in customer satisfaction and has a much stronger brand, and a highly motitvated team committed to continue the companys successful transformation” MATHIAS HANEL

CHIEF COMMERCIAL OFFICER, OOREDOO

services and products to our portfolio and leveraging our big data capabilities across the entire company. And last, not least we will also explore new opportunities in business-tobusiness (B2B) in the era of ICT services,” he said.

Hanel’s core message is that “this is a story about the transformation of an operator who had a very difficult past in terms of facing difficult market situations, and that helped it to transform the entire business model in marketing, sales, customer care, and technology to deliver the maximum impact in terms of financial results,” which drove its success and made it one of the leading mobile operators in the telecommunications industry.

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DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION AND ETHOS OF DEVELOPER CULTURE WRITTEN BY: İLKHAN ÖZSEVIM PRODUCED BY: STUART IRVING

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KPN

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KPN

Sailing through two waves of digital transformation, Dutch telco KPN puts trust and creativity in the hands of developers to yield remarkable results

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eams are vital to KPN. “For many years, we’ve had a culture where the teams are the ones that are in the lead, because that is where the knowledge and the expertise really is; our leadership team is there to provide vision and set parameters,” says Bastiaan Gerrits, Director of IT Mass Market at KPN, the leading telco in the Netherlands.

This team-led structure originates from KPN’s core values of autonomy and trust, as well as the synergies between its workforce, developers, internal structures and external markets – all of which are remarkable, underscoring how work culture directly impacts a company’s performance and their ability to adapt.

At KPN, creativity is essential to the entire process.

Gerrits has been at KPN since 2008, occupying several roles concerned with Business and IT. From 2017, his role was Programme Director of Business Transformation, where he was responsible for the simplification of the company’s OSS landscape. For the past three years, he’s been responsible for IT for the consumer market.

“People are key to our organisation, developers are our oxygen” says Gerrits.

“We've been focusing very much on creating an engineering culture, for which our three core values are central. We build on trust, show courage and live to grow.

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Digital Transformation and Ethos of Developer Culture

These values contribute to our purpose: Every day we go all out to connect everyone in The Netherlands to a connected and sustainable future.”

“For growth, we have implemented our Future Fit Friday scheme, where every week developers are able to join our courses where they can be developed and stay up-to-date with the latest techniques (since such techniques are evolving at an exponential rate).”

“We have also developed a learning platform ‘TechFlix’, which is by developers, for developers, and enables them to teach and learn from one another. This is part of ‘learning by doing’, and connected to our core value of ‘courage’, which is very important for them to be able to experiment and learn in a safe environment. Last but not least our ‘purpose’, because it is becoming more and more important for people to understand their contribution to the greater good. Our IT teams are crucial to 246

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“ We've recently been awarded ‘best mobile network’ with the, highest score worldwide’ by the Umlaut Benchmark” BASTIAAN GERRITS

DIRECTOR, IT MASS MARKET, KPN

realise KPN’s goals and on a bigger scale we are crucial to connect the Dutch society, especially in this digital era.”

This is the ethos at KPN that directly informs its ability to remodel and transform itself to shifting markets. Telcos are successful only insofar as they are able to rapidly adapt to a changing environment and, because they serve to maintain a region’s informational nervous system, their swift adjustment is key to the survival of the entire digital organism.

KPN

EXECUTIVE BIO BASTIAAN GERRITS TITLE: DIRECTOR, IT MASS MARKET LOCATION: NETHERLANDS Bastiaan Gerrits has been working at KPN since 2008, after 5 years in consultancy. In April 2019 he was appointed as Director IT Mass Market, where he leads the IT DevOps practice for the consumer and wholesale market and manages the online/omnichannel domain.

Furthermore Bastiaan is responsible for improvement of Business and Operational Support Systems. Over the past years, he has led many projects that are part of KPN’s digital transformation.

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CSPs are facing pressures on all fronts.

Transforming CX and end-to-end journeys across channels may be the solution.

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Our modernization initiatives are focused on three ke Simplifying lead to cash

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Phasing out legacy systems, reducing interface layers and migrating to Pega and BRM drives efficiency. Powerful Pegabased features like a configurable validation engine can automatically clean an installed base and dramatically reduce duplicate orders and billing.

Moving key applications to AW Cloud and leveraging Pega a BRM offers flexibility and help increase infrastructure stabilit and performance. Cognizant 6R (Rehost, Replatform, Repurchase, Refactor, Retire and Retain) framework delive successful migrations in minim timeframes.

Helping KPN achieve impressive outcomes:

86% reduction in BSS order dropouts and unclean orders

30% improvement in cycle times

90% red order fa

Cognizant is enabling end-to-end journeys for KPN using PEGA center simplify processes. By streamlining and modernizing business operati continue to deliver the greatest value to customers and stakeholders can help, contact pavan.malladi@cognizant.com or visit https://www

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Communication service providers are at a crossroads.

Revenues and profitability are shrinking. Customers are demanding exceptional experiences, anytime and anywhere.

Regulatory and competitive pressures aren’t letting up.

Cognizant works with leading CSPs to digitally transform and modernize business operations to meet these challenges.

We’ve partnered with Pegasystems to create best-in-class CRM, customer experiences and end-to-end journeys across channels. The result? Faster, better and more cost-effective services for customers – and streamlined, more profitable operations for the business.

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Targeted streaming and OTT media offerings connect customers to the live sports and popular content they demand. Strategic bundling of services adds value and encourages loyalty.

Cognizant’s expertise in Master Data Management helps deliver new product offerings quickly and keep time to market low.

Helping KPN achieve impressive outcomes:

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Simplified, 86% reduction in user-friendly BSS 30% improvement order product dropoutsportfolio and in cycle times unclean orders

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© Copyright 2022, Cognizant. All rights reserved.

© Copyright 2022, Cognizant. All rights reserved.

KPN

Due to interconnectivity, if a telco fails, the consequences can be far-reaching.

“8 years ago, we were kind of like a snail trying to cross the highway,” says Gerrits, “and the question was not if, but when this snail would be run over. So we decided things had to change drastically. We changed the setup of our IT department, recruited fresh blood, started a new front-end stack and made sure that our new developers had all the tools in hand to undergo this transformation. It was very successful.”

“We then applied similar tactics for the BSS (Business Support Systems) and OSS (Operational Support Systems), where we had a lot of technical depth in order to clean up a complex IT landscape, in which almost every product-technology combination had its own stack.

Around two years ago, we finished our OSS transformation, which is also quite unique in the Telco world and is really the heart of our IT, functioning between the consumers and the network.”

“Such a transformation is like open heart surgery, in that every telco struggles with it, so many never undertake it, and the ones that do tend to quit halfway,” says Gerrits.

“This achievement has decreased our lead-times for customer connectivity and halved our order-fallout. It has also increased our time-to-market for innovations like XGS. PON with the 10gb up-and-down speed. Our OSS transformation also allowed for big brand IT integrations that would previously have been impossible.”

This was KPN’s first-wave of digital transformation, brought on by the accelerating technological landscape. Its second wave of digital transformation was accelerated by COVID and its own fallout.

“We needed to speed up the digitisation of our customer journeys during Covid,” 250

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says Gerrits. “With the central role for a digital touchpoint, the app, the web and the systems that our colleagues use at the call centre. We essentially had to rethink our strategy in the omnichannel domain, transforming from channel-specific solutions to omnichannel solutions. After good conversations with our developers – who asked for six months of innovation freeze and trust – we decided to go with their courageous plan (courage being a central touchstone at KPN). Indeed, after six months, the entire app architecture was not only much better than before, but it also came with bonus features like message inbox, push notifications, improved MB sharing capabilities and dark mode to improve our customer journeys. Our rating went from 3.2 to 4.5 in the Apple and Google stores and is still increasing.”

“In the last 6 years, we have been in the top five most sustainable telcos in the world. We don't brag about that too often in public, but I must say, I'm proud of that” BASTIAAN GERRITS

DIRECTOR, IT MASS MARKET, KPN

“When I zoom into my department and its purpose,” says Gerrits, “it’s to make sure that our customers have access to KPN’s services in a frictionless manner, and that when they have a specific problem or disruption, they can easily fix this digitally or via a call centre, if they wish.”

KPN plays a crucial role in connecting all of Dutch society: “Our strategy is to go all-out to connect everyone in the Netherlands to a sustainable future. During the COVID pandemic, that became very clear once again, as the whole country was mobile-magazine.com

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working, studying and connecting from home. We recognised once again that a stable and robust internet connection is central to the functioning of all of Dutch society.”

Just as KPN is integral to Dutch Society, Developers are at the heart of KPN, according to Gerrits: “A lot of corporates struggle with developer’s professional developments, because the standard Junior- Senior-Manager growth paths are not fit for developers, and this is something that they fail to understand.

“As we become a more technical company, and developers naturally play 252

May 2022

“ We've been focusing very much on creating an engineering culture” BASTIAAN GERRITS

DIRECTOR, IT MASS MARKET, KPN

a more crucial role, it is only logical to have a developer-growth path, which includes the Junior-Middle-Senior developer, but also includes Tech-Leads, principal engineer and numerous other roles that eventually lead up to CIO if a developer aspires to that, but

KPN

where a position leads is not as important as the journey in-between.”

This is the kind of corporate and professional vision that makes KPN exceptional as a telco. Traditionally, one of the assumptions underlying corporate economics has been that, if you can build it yourself, it’ll reduce costs. The ‘eliminatethe-middle-man’ principle. But this principle doesn't always hold and depends entirely on the circumstances.

“Until about two, three years ago,” says Gerrits, “we had quite a rigorous strategy in our front-end to build everything ourselves. But now we've changed that into

a common-off-the-shelf strategy ‘unless’ (it doesn't fit our needs).

“An interesting example is our marketingautomation system. Eight years ago, we decided that we needed to build it ourselves, which was a lot of work, but it served our purpose very well. When that application was almost end-of-life two years ago, we asked ourselves, ‘do we want to buy off-the-shelf, or do we continue with our self-build strategy?’, and decided to go with the solution from one of the front-runners in this domain. Under the circumstances this was more cost-effective, time-saving and efficient. mobile-magazine.com

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On the other end, we also have an example in the opposite direction: an application for our call-centres and shops that overarched our other backend applications, and there, we decided to stay with our own-build, since that’s best fitting for the specific needs of our colleagues on the front-ends.”

KPN is clearly a solutions-focused telco, and its corporate ethos revolves not around a one-size-fits-all approach, but a specialised, relative and case-by-case MO. “In terms of KPN’s sustainability practices, we have achieved CO2 neutrality since 2015 and we aim to achieve net zero emissions in the chain by 2040. What our IT department contributes in sustainability is our developers, who always want to create the most efficient code, which uses less data centre capacity and therefore electricity,” explains Gerrits. “Also, we use auto scaling mechanisms which downscale capacity when systems are used less f.e. during the night. And we enable the wider KPN organisation with IT solutions for closed-loop logistics, so that devices that our customers are not using anymore are sent back with track and trace. This allows us to refurbish them or, alternatively, give them to our supply chain partners to recycle.”

“We've recently been awarded ‘best mobile network’ with the Highest score worldwide’ by the Umlaut Benchmark,” says Gerrits with pride. “And, in the last 6 years, we have been in the top five most sustainable Telcos in the world.

We don't brag about that too often in public, but I must say, I'm proud of that.”

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