GSMA Focused on Open Networks; Carriers Demand Regulatory Change

A top priority of GSMA this year is helping industry move to open networks and allowing application programmable interface (API) roaming, Mats Granryd, GSMA director general, said Monday at the start of the group’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. CEOs of major European providers, meanwhile, called for major changes in how they are regulated.

“5G is the fastest growing mobile standard in history, but we face big challenges,” Granyrd said. Year after year, industry revenue growth has fallen, even as investments in networks increase, he said. “This is a crucial time for us, and we have to find innovative ways to drive growth and close the investment gap,” he said. “We need to look for opportunities in all areas,” he said.

GSMA wants to unlock “the full potential” of 5G networks and help build a “unified ecosystem,” Granyrd said. The industry must work together, he said: “Together we are strong -- alone we are nobody.” The good news is that providers are just starting to realize the potential benefits from 5G and 5G-advanced, he said. Cloud revenues for the largest providers are increasing at a fast rate, he noted.

Another area for revenue is through open APIs, Granyrd said. GSMA is seeing strong growth in its API Open Gateway initiative, with almost 240 operators now participating, he said. GSMA launched the gateway a year ago (see 2302270069).

Most conference attendees are from outside the traditional telecom industry, Granryd said. “In a world increasingly fractured, connectivity brings us together and technology opens possibilities,” he said. The industry’s goal must be coverage for everyone, he said. “The usage gap is real and must be closed,” he said.

The CEOs of Europe’s largest providers agree they must work together to once again make the continent a tech “star,” said Tim Hottges, CEO of Deutsche Telekom. “Something has to change in this continent,” he said: “We are standing for Europe, we serve Europe” with operations in 19 countries.

Hottges and the CEOs of Vodafone Group, Telefonica and Orange called for sweeping regulatory change in Europe to ensure they are able to compete and invest in their networks.

“We are ready to play our part, but if we need to do more, we also need a new deal,” said Vodafone CEO Margherita Della Valle. Local, in-market consolidation needs to become possible, she said. In a 5G world, it’s not economic for four parallel networks to cover the same market, she said. “It makes no sense,” she said. Carriers also need “spectrum certainty,” she said.

The four carriers on stage have to deal with more than 100 different regulators, Della Valle said. Hyperscalers are also big networks, with submarine cables, cloud connectivity and backbones, but face less regulation, she said. In a digital world, companies that offer the same service should operate under the same rules “irrespective of who is the provider,” she said. “I’m talking about fairness, spectrum, consolidation -- all of this is needed” if Europe is to change, she said.

“We are dwarfed here in Europe compared to the hyperscalers, compared to the internet ecosystem from the U.S.,” Hottges said. “We are lagging behind,” he said. European nations are investing only about half as much per user each year on digital infrastructure compared with the U.S., he said. “We are losing the trust of the capital markets” absent regulatory change, he said.

Edge cloud, edge computing and network slicing are "the future,” which all mean new challenges, said Telefonica CEO Jose Maria Alvarez-Pallete. Telefonica was regulated in Spain because “years ago” it was a copper-based, incumbent monopoly. The company is now full-fiber and no longer a monopoly, he said. “The regulation has become obsolete,” based on a framework “from a previous century,” he said. “We are losing innovation,” he said.

Much of the discussion at MWC this week is expected to be on the future of AI.

Future of AI

Google DeepMind sees AI as being built on the ability of machines to learn for themselves and the idea that a single system out of the box can “learn many, many things,” said CEO Demis Hassabis. The company is focused on artificial general intelligence, or AGI. “We simply define it as a system that can perform almost any cognitive task that humans can,” Hassabis said. AGI seeks to “mimic all the cognitive capabilities humans have,” he said.

DeepMind sees a gradual evolution moving to AGI, and the technology is getting “incrementally more powerful,” though it’s possible a few “big innovations” could come in, which would mean moving to the next step quickly, Hassabis said. People already are interacting with AI systems on a daily basis and that’s “just scratching the surface of what’s going to come in the next few years,” probably “way before” AGI arrives, he said.

Notebook

Deutsche Telekom, SK Telecom, e& Group, Singtel and SoftBank announced a joint venture Monday aimed at developing AI for telecom. The companies plan to develop large language models “specifically tailored” to the needs of providers, said a news release. The language models “will be designed to help telcos improve their customer interactions via digital assistants and chatbots,” the companies said.

More than 40 mobile operators across five continents have commercially launched network API services to the developer community, GSMA said Monday. The group said 47 mobile operator groups, representing 239 mobile networks and 65% of connections worldwide, have now signed up to the initiative. The networks have made a combined 94 APIs commercially available to developers in 21 markets in Asia-Pacific, Africa, Europe, the Middle East and the Americas. GSMA said most of the initial focus has targeted combating online crime.