Connected Britain Interview

We caught up with Duncan Hawkins, VP Sales – Europe, Middle East & Africa at Ericsson, at this year’s Connected Britain conference to discuss the state of 5G and its future in the UK’s enterprise segment

While UK’s 5G rollout continues to advance at a steady pace, monetisation for operators remains a problem, with consumers proving largely nonplussed by the new technology. In the enterprise segment, however, the transformative potential of 5G is far more visible, with exciting use cases being announced regularly around the world.

As such, at Connected Britain 2023, the topic of 5G private networks was a major talking point.

“[Regarding 5G] for enterprise, I put us up there with the leading markets in the world,” said Ericsson’s VP Sales – Europe, Middle East & Africa, Duncan Hawkins. “It’s been driven largely by the spectrum available. Ofcom’s been quite forward thinking in allowing enterprises both to have public spectrum and shared spectrum, so that means organisations can actively adopt and experiment with these technologies.”

“I was asked on the panel earlier to give some examples of private 5G and my mind was just exploding with use cases!” he added.

He noted that good support from the government was playing a significant role in helping make these projects a success, noting that discussions were now maturing as enterprises’ understanding of connectivity gradually improves.

“We need to go back to basics. What sustainability goals can this help us hit? What productivity goals will this help us hit? Once we’ve got those, we can start to overcome these challenges,” explained Hawkins.

You can watch the full Connected Britain interview from the link below.

News 

The auction is expected to begin in the final quarter of next year 

UK regulator Ofcom has confirmed plans to make mmWave spectrum in the 26GHz and 40GHz bands available for the nation’s mobile operators.  

In a statement released yesterday, Ofcom outlined its plans to auction 15-year fixed term licenses for 26GHz and 40GHz spectrum covering 68 UK towns and cities. There will also be an assignment of more localised licenses within these areas under the shared access licensing framework. 

But while Ofcom has now confirmed than an auction will be held for the spectrum, a timeline to do so is less clear, with regulator saying it will delay the process until after the UK Competition and Markets Authority makes a decision on the potential Vodafone–Three merger. 

Announced back in June, the merger would reduce the number of mobile players in the market from four to three, potentially giving the combined entity a significant advantage when it comes to spectrum holdings. As a result, Ofcom is looking to avoid giving away the mmWave spectrum early and exacerbating this disbalance.  

The design of the auction will be released later this year, with Ofcom expected to issue a statement and initiate a further consultation on the process. 

Mobile operators’ appetite for mmWave spectrum is likely to be mixed. These higher frequencies are  attractive due to their higher speeds and capacity, compared to low- and mid-band 5G spectrum, as well as being able to deliver lower latency.  However, these benefits come at the cost of high propagation losses and a relatively short effective range, making the spectrum broadly unsuitable for covering large areas in all but the most densely populated of locations.  

Instead, mmWave has proven much more suited to a number of more specific deployments, such as for private 5G mobile networks for industries and enterprises, and providing consumers with fixed wireless access broadband. 

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Also in the news: 
Telekom Deutschland CFO Klaus Werner shifts to enterprise unit
Xavier Niel pledges €200m AI investment
Openreach CEO Clive Selley on the health of the UK broadband market 

PRESS RELEASE

[Copenhagen, Denmark, September 28, 2023] At the Digital Transformation World (DTW) 2023, Huawei and China Mobile jointly released the Green Management White Paper. Themed “Together, Greener”, the paper makes the case for carriers to standardize green management and promote the cooperation between the ICT sector and vertical industries in order to implement sustainable development.

Olga Martynov, chief financial and sustainability officer of TM Forum, interviews Zhou Yu, President of Huawei Global Technical Service Network Consulting and System Integration Services Dept., during the white paper’s launch event on Sept. 19.

As one of the pillars of digitalization, operators play an important role in supporting the carbon neutral and green sustainable development of the whole society. However, there isn’t yet a systematic governance framework, model, and indicator system that would support carriers in effectively managing, planning, and implementing green strategies. This white paper provides a roadmap for the green development of communications networks.

Key concepts in the paper include:

Green management framework: Build a three-layer management framework from “green governance”, “green planning”, and “green execution” to fully support the implementation of carbon reduction initiatives.
Green standard system and baseline: Build a complete green network evaluation index system based on six indicators and baselines (NCIe, NEE, SEE, TEE, RER, and VEI).
Green operation platform: A platform to support detailed operations such as green strategies, measurement, and solutions.

Zhou Yu, President of Huawei Global Technical Service Network Consulting and System Integration Services Dept, said, “In the process of green network transformation, operators should focus on core issues such as service growth, cyber resilience, and return on investment (ROI), and operators should systematically plan the three-layer architecture of Green Infrastructure, Green Network, and Green Operation. This needs to be supported by end-to-end digital capabilities. The communications industry should cooperate extensively to build a green management framework, green governance model, and green standard system to support the greening of the communications industry and enable all industries to reduce carbon dioxide.”

The paper can be downloaded here: https://www.huawei.com/en/huaweitech/industry-trends/green-management-white-paper

Opensignal has published their latest biannual Mobile Network Experience Report for H2 2023, which benchmarks the 4G and 5G (mobile broadband) services from all four primary UK mobile operators – EE, Vodafone, O2 and Three UK – to find which ones deliver the best performance. Overall, EE and Three UK seem to fair the best. […]

The European Commission has published their annual ‘Broadband Coverage in Europe’ study, which reveals how the EU’s fixed broadband and 5G mobile networks compare across all of its 27 countries, plus Norway, Iceland, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. We take a closer look to see how the UK is fairing. The EU’s main goal for […]

European satellite operator Eutelsat has today announced the completion of their all-share combination with London-based broadband satellite operator OneWeb, which had been partly owned by the UK Government but will now become a subsidiary of the Paris-based operator. Just to recap. OneWeb has already launched 634 of their small (c.150kg) first generation (GEN1) Low Earth […]

Broadband ISP and network builder Gigaclear, which currently covers 500,000 premises (430k Ready for Service) across 25 counties in England with their gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network, has today announced that they’re investing £10m to expand their fibre into rural parts of Norfolk. The first engineering work in the county technically began this summer when the […]

News

Werner will become Managing Director of Business Customers, taking over from previous MD Hagen Rickmann

This week, Telekom Deutschland has announced a shift of is management structure, with current chief financial officer Klaus Werner set to take the reins of the company’s enterprise business unit.

The unit’s current head, Hagen Rickmann, is leaving the role after almost 15 years to pursue ‘new professional challenges’, according to the company press release. In a statement thanking his team, Rickmann explained that it was time for him to “take a new direction” and that he was “looking forward to new challenges”.

The unit’s new head, Werner, has been part of Telekom Group for almost 30 years, beginning his career as a controller and progressing to numerous executive roles within various business units, including the Telekom Shop and T-Systems International.

He has served as the CFO of Telekom Deutschland since 2014.

“Hagen Rickmann has done a lot for the group over 15 years and most recently for Telekom’s business customer division in Germany. I would like to thank him for his commitment, especially in the digitalization of medium-sized businesses. During his time as Managing Director, Hagen brought his area of ​​responsibility to the forefront of European B2B telecommunications companies and was able to ensure annual growth,” said Telekom Germany boss Srini Gopalan. “At the same time, I am pleased that Klaus Werner has chosen this new role. Klaus has been part of our management team for many years and knows the challenges well. This will ensure a smooth transition.”

The enterprise unit reportedly has sales of around €9 billion and 10,500 employees.

Werner will take over the role on October 14.

How is the German telecoms market evolving in 2023? Join the industry in discussion at this year’s Connected Germany conference live in Munich

Also in the news:
TalkTalk CEO steps down as de-merger continues
BT outlines timetable for analogue landline switch-off
Broadway Partners, Cadence Networks, and SWS Broadband folded into Voneus

A new analysis of 265,572 consumer broadband ISP speed tests claims to have revealed the top fastest and slowest five areas, as well as five cities, across the United Kingdom. For example, the village of Halkirk in the Highlands of Scotland was named as the slowest area (2.8Mbps), while Canterbury came out as the slowest […]

News

The investment aims to push France to forefront of the AI advancement race 

Xavier Niel, the founder and CEO of telecoms group Iliad, is set to invest €200 million in AI projects in an effort to ensure that Europe remains competitive against US and China in the field. 

“We want – and we can – create a European AI champion. It’s a question of sovereignty: to protect our data, we need platforms established on our territory,” said Niel. 

The investment includes the purchase of an NVIDA supercomputer, said to be the most advanced supercomputing platform in the world; the establishment of a research centre in Paris; the creation of an annual AI conference; and providing funding for startups. 

“To influence the AI market, you need computing power. To have computing power, you need supercomputers. And to have supercomputers, you have to invest massively,” Niel continued. 

In this regard, Iliad has also been pushing to scale up its cloud subsidiary Scaleway, attempting to develop a European cloud system that can act a as an alternative to those offered by US tech companies, like Microsoft and Google. 

However, Niel and Europe at large have an uphill battle on their hands when it comes to AI. Major US tech firms like Google, Microsoft and Meta, are already investing billions on AI R&D, seemingly giving the country a significant lead when it comes to the new technology. China, while somewhat lagging behind in this initial AI frenzy, has plans to massively scale up its AI investments over the coming years, with some industry reports suggesting it will exceed $38 billion in 2027. 

Combined, the North America and Asia Pacific regions are leading the global AI market, according to analysts at GlobalData, with a 63% market share, compared to France and Western Europe’s 19%. 

Nonetheless, Europe racing to close the gap, with Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, announcing a new initiative earlier this month to give fast-track access to AI startups to high-performance computers to train their models.  

“Europe has now become a leader in supercomputing, with three out of the five most powerful supercomputers in the world. We need to capitalise on that,” von der Laden said in a speech to MEPs. 

Want to keep up to date with the latest developments in the world of telecoms? Subscriber to receive Total Telecom’s daily newsletter here   

Also in the news: 
TalkTalk CEO steps down as de-merger continues 
BT outlines timetable for analogue landline switch-off 
Broadway Partners, Cadence Networks, and SWS Broadband folded into Voneus