 Well, good morning everybody. My name is Ross Roseboro. I am a senior analyst at heavy reading covering the data center in Mano and has spent a lot of time looking at open source open source projects and Just to kick things off. I'm sure many of you have heard over the past few days that 5g is going to be a big deal apparently and So I'm very happy to have a group of People here who are going to be very instrumental in actually making 5g reality so what I'd like to do to start off with is have each one of you introduce yourselves and Tell us. Why are you excited about 5g? Okay, my name is Martin Bextram. I joined Ericsson four years ago to overlook the the cloud and virtualization strategies after been working out selling v-pans and virtual machines and other things for the enterprise sector from an operator and I'm very excited on the opportunity of 5g because 5g Represented chance for growth in our industry. Of course 5g is mobile broadband But beyond that it's also an integration to other industries And I think it's the real opportunity for operators to grow their top line So my name is Drew Schulke vice president of networking at Dell EMC I'm excited about 5g because what I think it's going to do is actually unleash a new era of computing And maybe contrary to some you know current conventional wisdom that all computing is going to collapse into a couple of centralized mega clouds I think 5g is going to unleash this era of massive massively distributed compute And I think it's good news for a great many people in this audience because when that becomes a reality It's going to open up You know similar what Martin said a lot of economic opportunities at the edge for additional services for folks in this room to make a lot of money And good morning. I'm John Healy. I'm responsible for network solutions with an Intel and 5g for me I think is as much a personal excitement as it is an industry excitement. I despite my youthful looks I've been in networking for a long time I was involved in the build out of the first some of the first digital Wireless networks and cellular networks in Europe, you know years and years ago and all of those were evolutions of technology What if 5g brings is a revolution to the technology? It's truly going to change the industry from a Vendor relationship and as Martin said participation from new new entities, but it's also going to change people's lives Fundamentally the depth and breadth of of applications and experiences that can be enabled by 5g is what makes it really exciting from a personal perspective I feel it like the culmination of my career On business perspective, I think truly it represents a whole lot of new opportunity for industries that Participated before together, but didn't naturally collaborate partner as much and 5g will create the fabric to allow that to happen Okay, great. So first off like let's talk about what do you think of the most significant technical challenges that we're going to face with? 5g obviously we're talking about like you said it's going to be on the enterprise side the service provider side in the Rand and the core You know, where do you think the biggest challenges are and you know, how confident are you that the industry would be able to Overcome those challenges. I know it's still pretty early I'll start. I think they're you know, like every change in technology. There are a lot of challenge There's a higher degree of complexity in the network now if you think about virtualization and the need for more agile placement of resources and management of service There's also a lot of challenge around maintaining some of the expected tight tolerances You know ultra low bandwidth and our ultra low latency and high bandwidth provisioning to mass numbers of devices all of that comes with a whole new set of interoperability challenges and implementation challenges That are they're different because it they want to be implemented in a multi-vendor environment So it's it requires partnering it requires standardization. It also requires a speed of innovation across the market So not they're not insurmountable, but they're not insignificant either So I think there are But events like this one bring together the right mind share desire to address How can we collaboratively resolve some of those those issues? Then from a kind of a level of confidence in the market I'm very confident the industry will make this happen I think the the the prospect of return for a much broader ecosystem of vendors is so so profound That it's causing the collaboration to happen in ways we might not have seen before And I'm very confident that the inter the the the efforts around the communities that are following Forming to solve for 5g at the various levels of the solution stack are also Enabling a broader participation at the innovation and test an implementation level, which I think will help to speed it along What do you think I Might go so far to say I don't know if there's any technical challenges that come to mind I think to me what really jumps out is For 5g to be successful the current efforts that we have going in terms of desegregating the stack and decoupling function and location are an absolute prerequisite and to me Much of what we need to do to make 5g successful is going to become apparent as we get more of this current model deployed and into production We don't know what we don't know yet And so there's probably some technical elements that because we don't have necessarily the widespread adoption yet Making very good progress, and we're certainly very happy with that. I think the biggest technical challenges we haven't seen yet I think automation is really key we have sort of Reinvented technology so we can take care of much bigger mobile broadband usage today than just a couple of years ago Basically with the same capex as before But if we are looking on OPEX and the efficiency of our industry, we are very much where we were 10 years ago And what we do today mobile broadband will just be one portion of what we do so Automation of what we do today and a much higher productivity Productivity also in handling our networks rolling out commissioning them is absolutely key to also have the capabilities To do the network slices and integration with other industry, which is key to growth Okay, that's actually gonna lead me to one of my other other questions is about how do you think the relationship between servers? Providers and the enterprise is going to change I think Alex me was talking a little bit about that in her presentation Because there has been some discussion that perhaps the enterprises will be rolling out their own private IoT networks I mean do you think that's gonna happen? Do you think that's gonna change the the relationship or the balance of power between those two entities? Do we start sure yeah, I think that it sort there are a couple of levels to it I think it provides for a new set of partnerships and relationships that might not have existed before Where services tailored toward the requirements of the business of the enterprise can be created and then a partnering and how they're deployed and How they're implemented That's certainly from a business perspective. There's there's that opportunity, but it also starts to put more assets in the hands of the enterprise to create business opportunities for themselves that might not have been as as a flexibly Accessible in the past a lot of what Lakshmi spoke about another is spoken about this week is you know the level and degree of internal Development work they're prepared to do and wants to do for their business So as a as a path toward the implementation of 5g and that infrastructure It creates an opportunity for partnering at the innovation and development end as well in tailoring how those New types of applications and services can be brought to market Yeah, I think it unleashes a whole new realm of you know to the previous point of of opportunities to cooperate I Have to believe that with the with the launch of 5g the need to do more and more things at the edge is Going to be critical And enterprises and let's just we just had target up here previously I have to imagine that as they tap into some of the capabilities be it augmented reality or things like that to Increase the attractiveness of their business that there's going to be a need to do more things at the edge Which to do on their own globally would be very very challenging Which means you're going to be partnering as carriers to go make it a reality. That's sort of one aspect of it the other thing I come back to is You know analytics and machine learning are driving so much of what we have doing going on today I don't see that changing any time in the future with 5g And they need to do real-time analytics again back at the edge Partnering with the carriers. I think would make a ton of sense for a lot of enterprises if they have Businesses that are you know very much dependent upon that real-time feedback Yeah, the The IOT market this is sort of an emerging market opportunity And we can see some ideas of building sort of network by themselves by some players in the market by some enterprises I however believe that the mission critical type of IOT like burglar alarms and anything like that Will be the important factor there and then to to run anything on unlocks and spectrum without supervision or anything Is is not the long-term solution So I think the operators stand a very good chance to capture also the low-power wide area network with NB IOT and similar technologies And that most of the enterprises will actually go to operators for that There is of course challenges Many operators has a nationwide coverage where many enterprises are having a completely different coverage It's many countries and so on and that might create the need for for mitigators in between and and for different business solutions Yet to be seen however All of this development is ongoing in small scale and and will happen as we go for further Okay, so you were talking about having more distributed architectures. Do you think that 5g is really going to Increase the pressure on the service providers to virtualize and cloudify and get that automation Do you think that might be the catalyst to really try to kick this thing in gear? I? Don't know how you do 5g without that Sorry, I mean I just can't I can't see it happening. Yeah, I just it's a non-starter for me I think we're already on that path This is the the natural kind of trajectory that the industry is already moving toward 5g becomes the the new platform of innovation That really is reliant on the path as Drew said, you know of virtualization That's already having more automation I mean Martin mentioned it as one of the impediments and it challenges But it's also where a lot of the focus in a software to find network software to find infrastructure is is focusing itself And then the use cases are what becomes enabled on top of that Absolutely, I mean as I said automation is key because we need to become more efficient and To become more efficient without cloud without virtualization and new collaborative models is is It's impossible for me to imagine Maybe if you just stay with mobile broadband, but I don't think so all operators are looking for growth Yeah, absolutely, so maybe I'll I'll inject the little potential controversy here Which was always fun that we talked about When we had our pre-call Do you see that open source has the? Potentia to accelerate 5g or perhaps to slow it down There's been a lot of discussions this week about the fact that there are so many open source projects and a lot of uncertainty yet and You know then we're throwing this whole new business model and whole new types of competition and and things into the mix Do you think open source is going to help accelerate that whole process or do you think it could actually slow things down? And I'm hoping that you don't agree So it's all of these Concepts have potential to do a number of things good question because you could it has the potential to do both however the Experience and this is you know from our purview our lens of the world the experience has been that the benefit of an open source approach from a Broadening of the participation lowering of barrier to participation broadening of the innovation that's a that's invited in and The sharing of the load frankly Has tremendous value to move an agenda forward for a market What's unique a little bit unique about the network and open source in the network and it really started with NFV in many ways and All the work we've seen through other efforts like opnfv and all of the various consortia and Communities that have evolved around it is that it has brought a mind bringing together a mindset that didn't necessarily Naturally collaborate across a market with entities that weren't Participating in their sandbox at that time so that's good. That's a very important thing. It's happened I think we've made as much progress as we've seen because of that in many ways But it also has the the the risk of Fragmenting multiple communities looking at the same problem from slightly different perspectives and not gravitating towards a standard implementation In a way that will be mutually beneficial. I think we're going through still some of those growing pains To be to be honest, but but I but I do believe fundamentally it has the potential to accelerate rather than decelerate We have to be you know collectively very mindful that we're that we're aware of the risk and that we're navigating in the right direction And but I think the benefit is going to be you know continue to to accelerate because it brings new parties in that are We materially part of what kind of applications developed on top what type of services developed on top and with domain expertise as each of the Verticals, you know whether you're in industrial or in retail like we saw from Target or in health care or in insurance All of those have a value to bring and the the participation of their own ecosystem is more facilitated through open source you know, I think it's It's not it's a somewhat complicated question to answer and let me explain why we you know I view open source as there's a problem that affects the community And there's no real good reason for all of us to go solve it, you know the exact same way, right? So the the value in terms of what we have going on in this move to virtualized software to find the network I think comes from desegregating the stack into A known set of components and then making that incredibly flexible There are open source elements that can play into each one of those components and some out there are very very Compelling and if and if you're a carrier and you're trying to get the 5g fast and and that works for you grab it integrate it Start stitching that together and put that flexible architecture out there At the same time, you know sometimes I get the sense certainly coming to events like this you'll go to a couple of different sessions and You know like there's one that comes to mind this week, you know You know somebody put up their their vision for how they're going to get to the virtualized network And it was this you know kind of logo slide of all these different open-source projects that we're going to get them there Different levels of maturity of them some of them were sort of competing with one another and and sometimes In the midst of these big changes you can sort of kind of grab onto that pure open-source ethos and kind of say Well, this is my goal is to go do all this. I'd say That certainly is noble and do it where it makes sense But every now and then there might be a commercial off-the-shelf product that you can fit into one of those layers That doesn't inherently limit your flexibility that might make you move faster, right? So we talked about accelerating decelerating so I'd say you know don't You got to look at it and make make wise decisions open-source can't accelerate in a great many places But don't don't go in kind of with a religious view. Let me just put one example up I and it wasn't a carrier but two nights ago Amadeus was up here kind of walking through their vision for how they virtualized their network and moved to the software-defined Environment took advantage of a great many open-source projects if you went through the slide But they also if you noticed they grabbed a couple of commercial off-the-shelf solutions along the way And they've got a very capable solution in production today. So I think it's just about making smart decisions as you go through And so my point is yes, it can accelerate it But being almost too ambitious about it could could be a decelerator for you at the same time, right? I think there are values that are important for telecom that needs to be honored within open-source It is things like vendor interoperability and backwards compatibility Right of times in telecom is is at large much longer than in other industries And we should also remember that this world consists of some 650 operators where not everyone yet Has learned what server less really is so if the pace of technology and changes is too fast and if there is no backwards Compatibility no vendor interoperability The risk is that a lot of operators that doesn't have the same capabilities as a tier one Operators in the US or in China are capable of actually will not invest So for open source to become fully relevant in telecom So we can take all the good things out of of the higher innovation patience on also the values of backwards compatibility and Vendor interoperability needs to be honored and worked upon in in the open-source community It's interesting you say that because I had a conversation with somebody about that this week I think it might have been someone from open stack and I Think there's part of what what needs to change You know perhaps is the mindset, you know the telcosie and this is how we've always done We've always been able to have back with compatibility does is that still relevant given that so many other things are changing You know does that does that mentality still hold water? But but mindset is one thing think of yourself being head of networks here in the US and all of a sudden the network is down in New York for hours People can't make 9-11 calls and then you call your vendors. Please help me and they start to Discuss who's fault it is between an interface which isn't defined anywhere. I don't think you want to put yourself in that position It hasn't so much to do with sort of mindset versus Standardization versus open source. It's just that the Availability requirement that we have in the telecom industry also from a formal perspective in terms of legislation is so extreme So these things needs to be honored if you should dare to invest Here in the US you might take the risk because there is so much competence so much capability available Also inside the operators, but move yourself to to Asia and and other emerging countries the situation is different But the requirement on the telecom network is the same for availability Yeah, just to comment on an Observation from talking to customers over very many times the point you brought up around kind of the tier 2 and tier 3 carriers around the world Like there are real issues in terms of getting good capable resources in some of those countries around some of these open source projects, right? And those are the ones who I see personally kind of gravitating to more of the commercial off-the-shelf model simply because It's hard to find the people that can help stitch this stuff together And so it'll be interesting to see how this plays out because all of these carriers are going to have to shift to this This virtualized model and are we going to get kind of this two-tiered model at the other side of it kind of? big big Carriers that have the wherewithal to kind of invest a lot of time to bring this together in a very capable way That's backward compatible versus those who might have had to you know choose some off-the-shelf components along the way to get It stood up. It'll be interesting to see how it plays out Yeah, I think the points are well made there is an interesting dynamic I think implicit in it that I don't think it is in either or I agree completely withdrew but the you know the theme of does it accelerate it has the propensity to accelerate within the the path toward implementations of commercially viable Solutions for the network and then there'll be a tiering of how much participation occurs or not dependent on your own Capacity to to innovate and invest However, if we then kind of roll ourselves forward a couple of years Do you think of the spirit of or the theme of open source from a community perspective? We should continually see though an up-streaming and Contribution back into the community of some of the innovations and learnings such that those who aren't as equipped to do much work on Their own and reliant on more commercial offerings are also seeing benefit from that innovation through the industry Which is down streamed and commercialized through those through those product offerings So I think it has that you know flywheel sort of effect at least the propensity for it, right? Okay, I still have another question But I want to make sure you have time for the audience if anybody's got any questions We've got about nine or nine minutes or so left. I can't see if anybody's up If not, I will ask another question. I think we're good. Oh, no, there's one back there Great panel Ross So I'd like to hear from the panelists what their feelings are on Slicing being able to disaggregate the network so that you get these Highly specialized mobile cores instead of the one generic core that everyone offers today and and where? Enterprises might start becoming more directly involved especially through competing Open networking technologies to participate in that slice economy Great question. Thanks Let's take it and network slicing It's an important element of 5g definitely and if you think of it you can take for instance National safety public security type of applications We know that we have tetra network out there Which has a rather limited coverage compared to cellular networks and we know that many police departments are looking into to using Basically cellular networks for their operations rather than to rely on on on their own network If that should happen then of course Authorities like that will need to have their own Guaranteed capacity also at occasions where there is a lot of people they need maybe to have their own codec They might have a way of working with the command chain and other things that needs to be supported in the core network so absolutely To make slices for different industries health care industry But also entertainment industries like gaming and other things is an important way to create the network of the quality that the different industries are in need of I think all of that will happen and and I think that The challenges on on us As I said before is that we become efficient enough We need to sort of recognize that we are today an industry Which if a company is calling a normal operator in a normal country and asking for a longing to connect is Actually given the answer that that can be delivered in three months I think we need to sort of take on the challenge of being faster and more agile in general Before we really can build those network slices at the pace our other industries adjacent industries are asking for Yeah, I think that's really well made points and I think you know even within the Concept of slicing on a per industry basis. There is the potential for network slicing on a per application Or at least use case basis Performance tolerances for one latency tolerances for another even a drew mentioned earlier more and more intelligence moving toward the edge of the Network in a in a media or video consumption environment you think of IOT and all the propensity of applications built around video analytics a slice tailor towards the specific requirements for those kinds of applications becomes possible now if you think of an enterprise Participating and part of the question was how does the enterprise participate in that if they consider how they run their operation and Think of the 5g network as a platform for innovation for their business It changes the dynamics is how you're I mean I remember and you know being concerned about setting up an e1 t1 In two different countries for a customer to provide connectivity Now imagine if you're talking to them about their line of business and saying here's how you're the network will look Uniquely to you to support your business just for that part of your line of business. That's enabled by slicing Right. Yeah, not all great points. Just to me it seems History kind of my background more on the data center side We had to deal with this internally with sort of competing application flows already within the data center Just seems like a logical extension to kind of move it out to the rest of the network, right? I think it has to happen and it's going to happen, but a lot of work has to go into it making it successful But I would like to make the point also that operators has fantastic Assets if you look on on most countries you have central offices in hundreds if not thousands of locations Central offices can easy be rebuilt to data center and that in itself is a distributed computing opportunity That is unmatched by any other provider of cloud on top of that They have thousands and thousands of base station all of them connected with fiber and and a lot of other Equipment needed such as cooling and so on and so forth This is an asset which I think will be very very useful also for other industries and and that that Edge computing that distributed cloud Is an opportunity for the operators to really become relevant with the network slices To other industries You know so on the back of that 5g's been led by Conversations around use cases and business models So it's very expensive to provide ultra low latency in 5g network. So the question is Looking back on history, you know and voice-centric networks. We customer. We've got used to paying for minutes and for messages on sms and in You know three and four g networks. They got used to paying for bandwidth. So my question is it's very expensive to provide ultra low latency Capability in 5g so will the customer what will be the business model will customers pay for latency in those networks? So latency is very important for entertainment. It is important for professional applications Will they be willing to pay? I think we had a lot of discussions when we moved from 3g to LTE With for instance, why max where it was said and stated that the cost level of seller networks We wouldn't wouldn't really allow for mobile data usage for mobile broadband The cost levels today means that that you can find operators in this World that sits with an ARPU between five and ten US dollar and and are looking at an EBITDA over 60 percent And so I think the opportunities for the seller industry over its scale to drive down cost to levels Where consumption is possible is definitely there of course as I said before we all need to look at automation productivity and efficiency But if we can take care of that, I'm pretty sure that we have the scale the technology to find the right price and cost points Yeah, I to me it seems logical that people would be willing to pay for latency And I think that's one of the points that we talked about in terms of additional economic value Ad that carriers can provide is being able to tear that the wild card and all that obviously is government regulators in terms of Depending upon what country a country you're in whether they look favorably upon that or not So that's kind of a wild card Yeah, and I think there's an when we've mentioned it in some of the earlier sort of comments there's an implicit expectation of business collaboration and partnering and you know, maybe an overused term of two-sided business models in previous technical generational sort of Evolutions, but in this case if it truly plays out of it and it really does fulfill that promise Then we all maybe ought to think as an industry differently around how we tariff for what is essentially performance levels around connectivity and what it enables in terms of a business consequence or an experience and then price according to the tiers of Granulated services that are enabled as a result of it, which is maybe the first time We've truly been able to go do that because the technology enables it to occur Pricing on a per-performance level, you know Specification wise this level of latency that level of security this level of performance Maybe something that's implicit in the service, but it is presented at a higher level Okay, we've got about a minute left. Oh, I think there's one over there. Oh great panel What do you see the role of? daughter 11 ex or Wi-Fi in 5g with carriers see the role of Wi-Fi for the carriers I think so there the It really becomes a question of which Technology is best suited for the application to be supported and where is their mutual? you know inclusivity between them and where is there an exclusivity when you consider the the the Breath of the density and the breath of support that 5g brings For the carriers or these the calm service providers specifically it presents tremendous opportunity for fully automated end-to-end service provisioning and really is you know You've seen in some of the sessions this week a sort of data center through network down to application continuum of Flexible provisioning Intelligence and management of the of the of the service that does not mean that there isn't a role to be played for Connectivity around Wi-Fi because of what it provides but but it's a different set of parameters around what's enabled in that way So I don't see them as mutually exclusive efforts It's more of how one is positioned and used relative to the other for the for the applications that it's supporting Yeah, I don't see them as mutually exclusive either, but I certainly Expect to see 5g to put pressure on Wi-Fi Like all our views in terms of where we see that market going it. Yes, it will come in and supplant Wi-Fi in certain use case 5d will enable millimeter wave bands 28 gigahertz and other things and we'll unleash a lot of capacity On top of that also the pun personal area network for for the local Communities which means that I'm pretty sure that that it will put the pressure on Wi-Fi for a number of use cases Even if Wi-Fi of course is here to stay Thanks, that's our time and like to thank our panelists. Thanks very much