Fixed Wireless, Private Networks Highlighted at Mobile World Congress

Fixed-wireless access addresses a longtime “dream” for the wireless sector to enter the broadband business using wireless technology, said Verizon Business CEO Kyle Malady at the Mobile World Congress in Las Vegas Wednesday. Malady and others also noted the growing importance of private networks.

“Now we can compete against fixed landline services,” Malady said. “At the moment we’re seeing a lot of uptake from our customers,” both homes and businesses, he said. “Business customers are finding ways to use [fixed wireless] more than just backup -- a lot of folks thought it was just a backup service and now they’ve moved on to making it their primary,” he said.

People choose FWA because it’s “super simple,” Malady said: “It’s just like getting a cellphone. You turn it on and you’re off and you’re ready to go.” There’s plenty of bandwidth for FWA to work and “the value is good, so people are gravitating towards it,” he said.

Verizon is also focused on private 5G, Malady said. There are “different flavors” that make sense for businesses large and small, he said. At a farmers’ market, a private network can ensure vendors can securely complete credit card transactions, he said. Malady cited the example of a sports stadium: “We do the coast-to-coast communications now for all of the NFL teams and all of the stadiums,” which is considered a private network: “They need reliability and if the plays don’t get in and the coaches can’t talk to each other that can screw up the game and screw up the season.”

“We wake up every single day sweating the network and making sure it works well for our customers,” Malady said. There has been “a lot of work from a lot of people over the years to get to where we are with 5G, in terms of both the technology and our spectrum footprint,” he said.

Boingo Wireless CEO Mike Finley highlighted the new Boingo Innovation Center in Las Vegas and the work the company is doing offering wireless at stadiums like Soldier Field in Chicago. “When you get off a plane or a train … you don’t really care what network you’re on, you just care that it works,” he said.

As better networks offer higher speeds, consumers will be able to use augmented and virtual reality, and other advanced apps “in ways that we don’t know about today,” Finley said. Boingo also sees growth for private networks, he said. The company is in lots of airports and train and transit stations, he said. “We can take a network that’s some combination of cellular and Wi-Fi and add on to that and add private services,” he said.

At airports, Boingo historically provided coverage in the airport but not on the tarmac or the plane. “That was what the airports wanted, but now they want coverage all over,” he said: They also want connections for baggage handling, safety and security, “having security cameras in the bowels of the airports.” There’s a demand for private networks at places like hospital, transportation hubs “and a lot of places where people want to have a network that they can create, develop … secure,” he said. Boingo is on almost 90 U.S. military bases, he said. Once the COVID-19 pandemic hit, “it became much more important to provide connectivity in places other than the barracks,” he said.

DOD Engaged

The U.S. military is focused on “decision superiority,” which is making decisions in the field that are “faster and more accurate than our adversaries,” said Tom Rondeau, principal director at DOD’s FutureG & 5G Office. “That depends on timely, reliable trusted information and what’s better than some of the technologies that are being built in the commercial industry,” he said.

DOD is also leaning on private 5G, in places where commercial networks aren’t secure enough to be trusted and support operations, Rondeau said. “If not, we’ve got to bring our own systems to the field” and “that’s where private 5G really comes in from a tactical perspective,” he said. DOD uses commercial networks on its bases but is also building private networks, he said.

DOD has a number of pilot projects exploring how 5G can be used, Rondeau said, citing a $601 million project funded by Congress (see 2011130051). “We’re really trying to work … closely with industry,” he said. DOD is operating smart warehouses on both coasts of the U.S., he said. “The U.S. military” faces “one of the most challenging logistics problems in the world,” he said.

Notebook

Generative AI has “taken the world by storm” because of consumer-facing apps that have shown everyone what AI can do, said Sameer Vuyyuru, Amazon Web Services head-worldwide business development for communication service providers. “At Amazon, we’ve been at the forefront of gen-AI for a long time, if you used Alexa, if you used Prime Video and looked at your recommendations,” he said. AWS believes generative AI can have much more impact across multiple industries, and telecom tops its list, Vuyyuru said. AI can help carriers improve customer experience, he said. “We’ve all seen what generative AI can do for chatbots,” he said. One AWS customer is taking all of its successful past responses to requests for information and using them “to train a model” so when the next request for proposal comes in, “they can just ask their generative AI model to generate 90%, 95% of a successful RFP response,” he said. Telcos are already using AI for all their ads and other marketing material, Vuyyuru said. For some telecos, AI is already replacing teams of analysts looking at contracts with customers, “comparing them with usage … and basically capturing all the revenue leakage that used to happen,” he said. AWS is releasing a study that found 20% of telcos have already adopted generative AI or will do so this year, he said. That number is expected to grow to 50% in 2025, he said: “This is by far moving at a pace that is unprecedented in the telecom industry.”

“We’re not at the beginning but well into the journey of the industrial revolution 4.0,” said Mark Bidinger, president of Schneider Electric. With the convergence of information technology and operational technology, the industry is relying more on machine-to-machine communications, he said. “While AI is a game changer, it’s really the combination of how we bring the AI with the compute and the cloud together that really becomes the overall paradigm shifter,” Bidinger said. As machines interact with people “much more than before” that creates cybersecurity issues providers need to address, he said. One of the biggest challenges is updating assets already deployed, he said: “There’s going to be more in the ground that needs to be retrofitted going forward than probably new construction.” “By driving more devices, you can create more use cases,” said Shahid Ahmed, NTT executive vice president-new ventures and innovation. “Use cases drive business cases, and ultimately it will drive connections,” he said. Ahmed said a partnership between his company and Qualcomm Technologies (see 2309270035) is designed to address something “we’re seeing in the marketplace … the need for more devices that connect natively to 5G and other IoT systems,” he said.