Update: Recent Posts & Themes

(This article was initally posted on my LinkedIn newsletter. If you are not already signed up, please subscribe here)

I have a couple of other deep-dive themes cued up for articles in coming weeks, but I wanted to put out a quick newsletter update covering a few recent themes, posts and events that have been occupying me.

 

The last month has featured a lot of thinking, speaking & client engagements on private 5G, infrastructure-sharing and neutral-host business models, network slicing and capability/API exposure, Wi-Fi 6E & 6GHz, Open RAN and the interaction of cellular & other wireless technologies.

Some recent short-form posts that you may have missed:

• Telecom operators (and their partners & regulators) should be giving as much consideration to *buying* APIs and capabilities as selling them - LINK
• Thoughts on the Ericsson / Vonage acquisition - LINK
• Should we be thinking more about "micro-churn" incidents, where subscribers temporarily switch between operators, using technologies such as eSIM? - LINK
• Want me to speak at, or moderate your 2022 event? Or present at an internal workshop or offsite? - LINK
• RCS messaging is still a purposeless zombie technology, continuing to eat brains after 13 years. Google's involvement hasn't changed much - LINK
• The telecoms industry still hasn't gone beyond telephony, to think more broadly about "voice" services & applications - LINK

I've been to a couple of recent "verticals" events, about networking in ports and for railways. There's a lot of interest in private cellular - but also a huge amount of emphasis on Wi-Fi, including specialised versions with 60GHz or unique forms of QoS intended for industrial or trackside use.

I also presented on a webinar recently on behalf of iBwave, about the scope for Private 4G/5G networks for utilities and energy companies (LINK to view on-demand). Watch out for an upcoming eBook on the same topic. Another webinar on the competiton/convergence between Wi-Fi6 and 5G was for Spirent (LINK) 

 

Scott and Iain at Telecoms.com invited me onto their weekly podcast for a (rather irreverent) chat about the current trends and news from the industry, over a couple of beers. We took aim at 5G, the Metaverse, Open RAN & a lot more. YouTube link embedded above!

In addition, I moderated a panel on Infrastructure Sharing for the 5G Techritory event. I'm not sure if an archived version will be put online, but keep a watch out for it here.

And on a personal note, I also took part in my first improv comedy performance. If you book me to speak at one of your events, I can't promise to wear the same shirt as in the picture, but I will certainly be happy to make things up on the spot spontaneously, or deal with any hecklers ruthlessly!

#5G #WiFi #verticals #PrivateLTE #Private5G #mobile #telecoms #spectrum #voice #messaging #networkslicing #neutralhost #regulation

New: Future of Video & RTC Workshop Series, starting May 19th

 "Why do people make phone calls?"

... the opening question at my old Future of Voice workshops. 

 It stumped many attendees and also many of my telco consulting clients during private engagements.

Most just looked blank, or perhaps suggested "to speak to people?". To be fair, the answer isn't obvious. Which is rather odd, given the need or desire for phone calls is the basis for the entire industry.

Few people think broadly about "purpose" of communications. What is the participant trying to achieve? How does the service or application help them do that? How can it be improved? What are the real sources of value?

In reality, there are 100s of uses for phone calls: To get information. Catch up with a friend. Buy something. Complain. Get help. All deserve a different, optimised experience. Yet a phone call is basically a one-size-fits-all, common denominator product. 

Telco's don't do "voice". They just do "telephony" - a single 140-year old, clunky, unnatural, heavily-regulated voice applications

Instead, they should have considered the 1000s of types of voice communication that are NOT phone calls. Audio chat, push-to-talk, karaoke, voice assistants and so on. All designed for particular purposes, with user-interaction models and technology stacks. Some dependent on the network, some on apps, some on devices, some in learned human behaviour.

The same is happening now for video. It's more than just video conferencing.

It's training, collaboration, security, education, medicine, machine vision, infra-red, social broadcast or 1000s of other uses, applications & business models.

There are platforms, enablers & APIs. Developer tools & design & test capabilities. WebRTC is important but not alone.

If telcos, service-providers, cloud/platform players, developers, enterprises and investors really want to understand the value and timelines for future communications - they need to ask the real questions. Not get blinded by ancient standards, or regulatory mandates to measure things in "minutes".

RTC (realtime communications) is getting more complicated, diverse - and has huge opportunities, as well as risks to incumbent providers of old/poor products. We all know which are the good/bad WFH conferencing products, or messaging services these days. 

What does the future bring? New models for UCaaS & cPaaS? Innovative video services for the smart home? New audio drop-in chat apps? AR/VR conferencing? What are the impacts of 5G, edge-computing and AI?

So I'm announcing: 

A new 3-part / 2-timezone "Future of Video & RTC" workshop series with WebRTC maven Tsahi Levent-Levi from May 19th. Early-bird rates end soon.

 

Sign up here.

 

Predictions for the next decade: looking out to 2030 for telecoms, wireless & adjacent technologies

It's tempting to emulate every other analyst & commentator and write a list of 2020 predictions of success and failure. In fact, I got part-way into a set of bulletpoints about what’s overhyped and underhyped. 

But to be honest, if you read my articles and tweets, you probably know what I think about 2020 already. Private cellular networks will be important (4G, initially). 5G fixed wireless is interesting and will grow the FWA market - but won't replace fibre. 5G is Just Another G and is overhyped, especially until the new core matures. RCS is still a worthless zombie, eating brains. But I don't need to repeat all this in detail, just because I'm a bit more sharp-worded than most observers. It wouldn't tell you much new.

But seeing as I spend a fair amount of time advising clients about the longer-term future, 5-10 years out or even further, I thought I'd set my sights higher. I use the term "telco-futurism" to look at the impacts of technology and broader society on telecoms, and vice versa.

So, at the start of the 2020s, what about the next decade? Assuming I haven't retired to my palatial Mars-orbiting private Moon in 10 years' time, what do I think I'll be writing, podcasting (or neural-transmitting) about in 2030?

So, let's have a few shots at this more-distant target...

• 6G: In 2030, the first 6G networks are already gaining traction in the marketplace. The first users are still fixed connections to homes, and personal devices that look a bit similar to phones and wearables, but with a variety of new display and UI technologies, including contact lenses and advanced audio/haptic interfaces. 6G represents the maturing of various 5G concepts (such as the new core), plus greater intelligence to allow efficient operation. 
• Details, details: Much of the 2020s will have been spent dealing with numerous "back-office" problems that have stopped many early 5G visions becoming real. Network-slicing will have thrown up huge operationalisation and security issues. Dealing with QoS/slice roaming or handoff, at borders between networks (outdoor / indoor / private / neutral / international) will be hugely complex. Edge computing scenarios will turn out to need local peering or interconnection points. All of these will have huge extra complexities with billing, pricing and monitoring. mmWave planning and design tools will need to have matured, as well as the processes for installation and operation.Training and skills for all of this will have been time-consuming and expensive - we'll need hundreds of thousands of experts - often multi-domain experts. By the time all these issues get properly fixed, 6G radios and vendors will exploit them, rather than the "legacy 5G" infrastructure. See this post for my discussion about the telecom industry's problems with accurate timelines.
• Device-Network cooperation: By 2030, mobile ecosystems and control software will break today's silos between radio network, devices and applications much more effectively. Sensors in users' devices, cell-towers and elsewhere will be linked to AI which works out how, why and where people or IoT objects need connectivity and how best to deliver it. Recognise a moving truck with machine-vision, and bounce signals off it opportunistically. Work out that someone is approaching the front of a building, and pre-emptively look for Wi-Fi, or negotiate with the in-building neutral host on a marketplace before they enter the door. Spot behavioural patterns such as driving the same route to work, and optimise connectivity accordingly. Recognise a low battery, and tweak the "best-connected" algorithm for power efficiency, and downrate apps' energy demand.Integrate with crowd-flow patterns or weather forecasts. There will be thousands of ways to improve operations if networks stop just thinking of a "terminal" as just an endpoint, and look for external sources of operational data - that's a 20th Century approach. Expect Google's work on its Fi MVNO & Android/Pixel phones, and similar efforts by Samsung and maybe Apple, Qualcomm and ARM, to have driven much of this cross-domain evolution.
• Energy-aware networks: Far more energy-awareness will be designed into all aspects of the network, cloud and device/app ecosystem. I'm not predicting some sort of monolithic and integrated cascading-payments system linked into CO2-taxes, but I expect "energy budget" to be linked much more closely to costs (including externalities) in different areas. How best to optimise wired/wireless data for power demand, where best to charge devices, "scavenging" for power and so on. Maybe even "nudge" people to lower-energy applications or consumption behaviours by including "power-shaming" indicators. If 3GPP and governments get their act together, as well as vendors & CSPs, overall 6G energy use will be a higher priority design-goal than throughput speed and latency.
• Wi-Fi: We'll probably be on Wi-Fi 9 by 2030. It will continue to dominate connectivity inside buildings, especially homes and business premises with FTTX broadband (i.e. most of them in developed markets). It will continue to be used for primary connectivity on high-throughput / low-margin / low-mobility devices like TVs and display screens, PC-type devices, AR/VR headsets and so on. It will be bonded together with 5G/6G and other technologies with ever-better multi-path mechanisms, including ad-hoc device meshes. Ease of use will have improved, with the success of approaches like OpenRoaming. Fairly little public Wi-Fi will be delivered by "service providers" as we think of them today.  We'll probably still have to suffer the "6G will kill Wi-Fi" pundit-pieces and hype, though.
• Spectrum: The spectrum world changes slowly at a global level, thanks to the glacial 4-year cycle of ITU WRCs. By 2030 we will have had 2023 and 2027 conferences, which will probably harmonise more spectrum for 5G/6G, satellites & high-altitude platforms (HAPS) and Wi-Fi type unlicensed use. The more interesting developments will occur at national / regional levels, below the ITU's role, in how these bands actually get released / authorised - and especially whether that's for localised or shared usage suitable for private networks and other innovators. By 2030 we should have been through 2+ cycles of US CBRS and UK/Germany/Japan/France style local licensing experiments, allocation methods, databases and sensing systems. I think we'll be closer to some of the "spectrum-as-a-service" models and marketplaces I've been discussing over the last 24 months, with more fluid resale and temporary usage permits. International allocations will still differ though. We will also see whether other options, such as "national licenses with lots of extra conditions" (eg MVNO access, rural coverage, sharing, power use etc) has helped maintain today's style of MNOs, despite the grumbling. We will also see much more opportunism and flexibility in band support in silicon/devices, and more sophisticated approaches to in-band sharing between different technologies. I'm less certain whether we will have progressed much with commercialisation of mmWave bands 20-100GHz, especially for mobile and indoor use. It's possible and we'll certainly see lots of R&D, but the practicalities may prove insuperable for wide usage.
• Private/neutral cellular: Today, there's around 1000 MNOs globally (public and private). By 2030, I'd expect there to be between 100,000 and a million networks, probably with various new types of service provider, aggregation hubs and consortia. These will span industrial, city, office, rural, utility, "public venue" and many other domains. It will be increasingly hard to distinguish private from public, eg with MNOs' campus networks with private cores and hybrid public/private spectrum. We might even get another zero, if the goals of making private 4G/5G as easy and cheap to build as Wi-Fi prove feasible, although I have doubts. Most of these networks will be user-specific, but a decent fraction will be multi-tenant, either offering wholesale access or roaming to "legacy MNOs" as neutral hosts, or with some sort of landlord model such as a property company running a network with each occupied floor or building on campus as a "semi-private" network. Some such networks will look like micro-telcos (eg an airport providing access to caterers & airlines) and will need billing, management & security tools - and perhaps new forms of regulation. This massive new domain will help catalyse various shifts in the vendor community as well - especially cloud-native core and BSS/OSS, and probably various forms of open RAN, and also "neutral edge".
• Security & privacy: I'm not a security expert, so I hesitate to imagine the risks and responses 10 years out. Both good and bad guys will be armed to the teeth with AI. We'll see networks attacked physically as well as logically. We'll see sophisticated thefts of credentials and what we quaintly term "secrets" today. There will be cameras and mics everywhere. Quantum threats may compromise encryption - and other quantum tools may enhance it, as well as provide new forms of identity and authentication. We will need to be wary of threats within core networks, especially where orchestration and oversight is automated. I think we will be wise to avoid "monocultures" of technologies at various levels of the network - we need to trade off efficiency and scale vs. resilience.
• Satellite / HAPS: We'll definitely have more satellite constellations by 2030, including some huge ones from SpaceX or others. I have my doubts that they will be "game-changers" in terms of our overall broadband use, except in rural/remote areas. They won't have the capacity of terrestrial networks, and signals will struggle with indoor penetration and uplink from anything battery-powered. Vehicles, planes, boats and remote IoT will be much better-connected, though. Space junk & cascading-collision scenarios like the movie Gravity will be a worry, though. I'm not sure about drones and balloons as HAPS for mass-market use, although I suspect they'll have some cool applications we don't know today.
• Cloud & edge: Let's get one thing clear - the bulk of the world's computing cycles & data storage will continue to occur in massive datacentres (perhaps heading towards a terawatt of aggregate power by 2030) and on devices themselves, or nearby gateways. But there will be a thriving mid-market of different sorts of "edge" as I've covered in many posts and presentations recently. This will partly be about low-latency, but not as much as most people think. It will be more about saving mass data-transport costs, protecting "data sovereignty" and perhaps optimising energy consumption. A certain amount will be inside telcos' networks, but without localised peering / aggregation this will be fairly niche, or else it will be wholesaled out to the big cloud players. There will be a lot of value in the overall orchestration of compute tasks for applications between multiple locations in the ecosystem, from chip-level to hyperscale and back again. The fundamental physical quantum of much edge compute will be mundane: a 40ft shipping container, plonked down near sources of power and fibre.
• Multi-network: We should expect all connectivity to be "software-defined" and "multi-network". Devices will have lots of radios, connecting simultaneously, with different paths and providers (and multiple eSIM / other identities). Buildings will have mutliple fibres, wireless connections and management tools. Device-to-device connections and relaying will be prevalent. IoT will use a selection of LPWAN technologies as well as Wi-Fi, cellular and short-range connections. Satellite and maybe LiFi (light-based) connections will play new roles. Arbitrage, bonding, load-balancing will occur at multiple levels from silicon to OS to gateway to mid-network. Very few things will be locked to a single network or provider - unless it has unique value such as managed security or power consumption.
• Voice & messaging: Telephony will be 150yo in 2026. By 2030 we'll still be making some retro-style "phone calls" although it will seem even more clunky, interruptive, unnatural and primitive than today. (It won't stop the cellular industry spending billions upgrading to Vo6G though). SMS won't have disappeared, either. But most consumers will communicate through a broad variety of voice and video interaction models, in-app, group-based, mediated by an array of assistants, and veracity-checked to avoid "fake voice" and man-in-the-middle attacks of ever increasing subtlety. Another 10 years of evolution beyond emojis, stories, filters and live broadcasts will allow communication which is expressive, emotion-first, and perhaps even richer and more nuanced than in-person body language. I'm not sure about AR/VR comms, although it will still be more important than RCS which will no doubt be celebrating its 23rd year of irrelevance, hype and refusal to die.
• Enterprise comms:  UCaaS, cPaaS and related collaboration tools will progress steadily, if unspectacularly - although with ever more cloud focus. There will be more video, more AI-enriched experiences for knowledge management, translation, whispered coaching and search. There will be attempts to reduce travel to meetings and events as carbon taxes bite, although few will come close to the in-person experience or effectiveness. We'll still have some legacy phone calls and numbers (as with consumer communications) although these will be progressively pushed to the margins of B2B and E2E interactions. Ever more communications will take place "contextually" - within apps, natively supported in IoT devices, or with AI-based assistants. Contact centres and customer interactions will be battlegrounds for bots and assistants on both sides. ("Alexa, renegotiate my subscription for a better price - you have permission to emulate my voice"). Security and verification will be highly prized - just because something is heard doesn't mean it will match what was originally spoken
• Network ownership models: Some networks of today will still look mostly like "telcos" in 2030,  but as I wrote in this post the first industry to be transformed by 5G will be the telecom industry itself. We'll see many new stakeholders, some of which look like SPs, some which are private network operators, and many new forms of aggregator, virtual operator, wholesale or neutral mobile/fibre provider. I'm not expecting a major shift back to nationalised or government-run networks, but I think regulations will favour more sharing of assets where it makes sense. Individual industries will take control of their own connectivity and communications, perhaps using standardised 5G, or mild variations of it. There will be major telcos of today still around - but most will not be providing "slices" to companies and offering deep cross-vertical managed services. There will be M&A which means that we'll have a much more heterogeneous telco/CSP market by 2030 than today's 800 identikit national MNOs. Fixed and fibre providers will be diverse as well - especially with the addition of cloud, utility and muncipal providers. I think the towerco / property-telco model will be important as asset owners / builders as well.

I realise that I could go on at length about many other topics here - autonomous and connected vehicles, the future of cities and socio-political spheres, shifts in entertainment models, the second wave of blockchain/ledgers, the role of human enhancement & biotech, new sources of energy and environmental technology, new forms of regulation and so forth. But this list is already long enough, I think. Various of these topics will also appear in podcasts - which I'm intending to ramp up in 2020. At the moment I'm on SoundCloud (link) but watch out here or on Twitter for announcements of other platforms.

If this has piqued your interest, please comment on my blog or LinkedIn article. This is a vision for 2030, which I hope is self-consistent and reasonable - but it is not the only plausible future scenario.

If you're interested in running a private workshop to discuss, debate and strategise around any of these topics, please get in touch via private message, or information AT disruptive-analysis DOT com. I work with numerous operators, vendors, regulators, industry bodies and investors to imagine the future of networks and other advanced technologies - and steer the path of evolution.

Happy New Year! (and New Decade)

How will voice be delivered on private 4G / 5G & CBRS networks? Private VoLTE?

An area I've seen little discussion about is the intersection of new private 4G / 5G networks, with voice and unified communications, UC. Most debate is about either local IoT (i.e. data) connectivity, or neutral-host / wholesale approaches for in-building or rural coverage.

But where enterprises deploy "pure" private networks aimed at employees or visitors, they are likely to want voice / telephony capabilities, plus more advanced communications capabilities. While this is already done for highly-specialised local cellular deployments for mines, military or maritime, it is much less clear how this could scale to more general enterprise users. 

Many of the existing local-cellular users are also just based on 2G/3G, for which simple circuit-switched infrastructure has been available for years (I had a client supplying softswitches for private voice with pico-cells, as early as 2006).

My view is that UCaaS, cPaaS, cloud telephony, IP-PBX & collaboration solution providers should be looking much more closely at the impact of CBRS, and its international equivalents, providing localised 4G/5G wireless in new spectrum, and neutral-host models. 

It is unclear whether enterprises will want to deploy "private IMS" solutions, cloud-based VoLTE & SMS, or use some simpler forms of wireless-capable VoIP in their own domain. There are various deployment scenarios I can see, each of which will require careful thought & focused strategies: 

• Transition from two-way radio (eg TETRA) to cellular push to talk
• Integration of existing UC/UCaaS/PBX with private cellular voice
• IoT integration of realtime voice/video (for example "speak to an engineer" functions)
• Fit with conferencing, collaboration & messaging platforms
• Interoperability / roaming scenarios with public PSTN & mobile calling
• cPaaS scenarios & APIs tailored for private mobile networks
• Will private 5G networks using slicing techniques to prioritise QoS for non-3GPP VoIP?
• For neutral hosts, how will they enable roaming telephony / messaging / other voice & video applications
• What happens with numbering & identity?
• Can private cellular work for contact centres?
• Are there "IMS lite" options for enterprise, that cuts down some of the features and integration seen in telcos?
• Is this a prime candidate for multi-tenant "VoLTE-as-a-service" cloud propositions?

I'm going to be watching this whole area more closely in coming months, as it seems to be rather overlooked, at least publicly. Given that a number of companies in the UCaaS / cPaaS space also have footholds in CBRS or mobile core networks (eg Amazon, Google, Twilio) it wouldn't surprise me if there's a lot going on beneath the surface here too....

(Please contact me if you're interested in exploring this domain, have existing solutions, or would like to engage me on private advisory work)  

#5G, #cloudcommunications, #neutralhost, #UCaaS, #cPaaS, #voice, #collaboration

Huawei Connect: IT services, Enterprise Cellular, video analytics, AI and more

I spent most of last week in Shanghai, attending Huawei's Connect conference and trade show. It was a good chance to get a deep-dive into the company's enterprise activities, as well as get my head around China's broader trends and influences around the technology sector.

I normally engage with Huawei through its analyst relations function, but this trip was organised by a different team. The company apparently considers me a "KOL" ("key opinion leader"), which is a rather diffuse bucket used for a mix of outspoken independent analysts, public-facing academics, video/social bloggers and assorted others. I'm not sure I set out to lead opinions, but I'm certainly happy to voice my own.

(Unlike the analyst events I usually attend, the KOL group isn't really made up of direct competitors, so there's a more collegiate atmosphere - and a very lively WeChat group, partly with logistics about meeting times/locations but also sharing photos or thoughts about the event).

Connect is mostly driven by Huawei's enterprise business unit, which is growing fast (about $6bn revenues in 2016, up 47% [link]), and focuses on cloud and big "infrastructure-led" IT and networking projects. So sectors like smart cities, advanced manufacturing, oil and gas IoT, systems for transport sectors like rail and ports and so on. There's a heavy emphasis on IoT platforms and networks, cloud and storage, video/image surveillance analysis and a lot of AI. 

It clearly intends to be a very significant player in its chosen sectors, using its existing high IT profile in China, plus its global telecom footprint, as a springboard for other international ICT theatres. Unlike Europe, North America and India, China has few global-scale IT companies, especially in systems integration or outsourcing. The closest to a "Chinese version of IBM" is probably ChinaSoft, which has a deep partnership with Huawei anyway, and in which Huawei owns a significant shareholding.

Thinking more about technology-sector comparables, very few have a similar blend of infrastructure/network/telecom expertise, systems integration/services scale and cloud capabilities. Given Ericsson's recent announcements of pulling back on direct enterprise-related initiatives to focus on CSPs and its Cisco partnership as channels (a strategic error, I feel), it's only really Nokia and maybe NEC that have the scope to push the same big-infrastructure enterprise "ICT" vision, although even it doesn't have the full-scale IT services business that Huawei does. Perhaps there's yet more scope for consolidation between traditional IT companies and networks. (Ericsson+IBM? Nokia+HP? NEC+Tata? Who knows....)

One other thing stood out about the event: there was very little spoken about telco networks, Huawei's main business, or the synergies between that business unit and its faster-growing enterprise sibling. 

There was much more about robots and face-recognition than network-slicing and NFV. The main mention of IMS that I saw was in the context of critical communications for public safety, eg push-to-talk. The X-Labs group assessing possible future 5G use-cases was talking about connected drones, or cloud-integrated video-enabled helmets for the blind. There was a "carrier" section in the vertical-industries show hall, but that seemed mostly focused on cloud solutions for telcos.

Conspicuously, there was almost no reference to delivery models for network or IoT capabilities for enterprises. There was no assumption that everything would be provided "as a service", or in particular, delivered by a CSP. There was tacit recognition that some organisations want to own their own infrastructure / private clouds, some may go to a specialist integrator (eg an automation/IoT specialist like Honeywell or GE), and some might use an arm of a telco. For example, T-Systems, Deutsche Telekom's IT unit, was there talking about a Huawei-based storage cloud, deployed for CERN, the leading nuclear and particular research institution on the Swiss/French border.

Huawei also offers its own cloud services, but is quite self-effacing about it, only wishing to become "one of the top 5 clouds" (presumably along with Amazon, Google, IBM and maybe Microsoft - which it also partners) and saying that "1% is enough for us". I don't think Jeff Bezos is going to have too many sleepless nights, although Alibaba, Cisco and Oracle may have different opinions on the top tier's members, the former especially in China itself.

In terms of specific takeouts on my normal coverage areas, a few things stood out:

• Enterprise Cellular: This was everywhere at the event, under the brand eLTE. This is a sort of pre-cursor to a MuLTEfire / CBRS model of non-carrier cellular networks. There's a quite large eLTE ecosystem, especially around public-safety networks but also manufacturing, transport and other verticals. There was a demo of a robot connected with private cellular. There are 3 variants:
• An unlicensed LTE-U version that doesn't need a licensed "anchor" like LAA, so can be deployed by any organisation
• A licensed-band version, where organisations (such as law-enforcement or utilities) can manage to get dedicated spectrum by one means or another
• A narrowband version, which is essentiially NB-IoT in unlicensed bands such as ISM spectrum (which in China, is in the 500MHz range, or 900MHz in the US)
• All of these were targeted at industry verticals. There wasn't any mention of other use-cases like neutral-host providers, hybrid MNO/MVNOs, mesh networks, or consumer-oriented plays. 
• There wasn't any explicit mention of shared-spectrum models like CBRS, but it seems to fit under the second category.
• This all fits nicely with the recent work I've done on private/enterprise cellular. It will be an ongoing theme as it is clearly "happening", including presentations at a few upcoming regulatory conferences, and another workshop with Caroline Gabriel in London on Dec 1 (link)

 

•  IoT networks: There was a huge emphasis on NB-IoT around the event, as well as broadband 4.5G/5G options for drones, connected vehicles and more demanding applications. I didn't see an mention of LoRA, SigFox, or even LTE-M or Cat1 though, but WiFi and ZigBee cropped up on various slides. Some interesting examples of NB-IoT deployments, notably for cities, or specific OEM-led integrations such as China's booming shared-bicycle sector.
• Video and facial networks/analytics: This was a huge theme, as it bridges Huawei's key domains of mobile broadband, cloud services and AI. A major focus is "safe cities", especially using networked video cameras to manage traffic, enforce public safety - and track/spot individual people, whether that is missing children, criminals, or attendees at a trade show. (I joked on Twitter that Huawei had probably been tracking people around the event itself - only for the next slide to reveal that it had been doing exactly that). Missing from most of the material was much mention of privacy - which appears to be less of a concern in China than it would be in much of Europe. That said, we may be fighting a losing battle on that front, as this week's Economist cover & feature articles on face-recognition point out (link).

 
 
 

• AI: Beyond video-analysis, a central thrust of the event was around machine-learning, graph analysis, image-recognition and other forms of AI.  I didn't get a chance to go into too much depth on this, but it's pretty clear this is central to Huawei's cloud ambitions, and probably will link into carrier-domain services like smart-home / personal voice assistants as well as "big data" corporate applications
• We also had a briefing with the handset unit, which discussed the new Kirin AI-oriented chip which includes a neural processing element, as well as CPU, GPU and DSP. This should enable better and more power-efficient local classification of images, without the need to send all data to the cloud. This fits into my ongoing debate on whether 5G's low-latency business case might be undermined by more edge-processing. (link)
• WiFi: Although not as big an emphasis as 4G/5G, Huawei nevertheless had a fair bit of WiFi on display, particularly for large-scale deployments in cities or large public venues like sports stadia. It also had an interesting hybrid WiFi / IoT networking unit, which for now focuses on Bluetooth, RFID and ZigBee but I guess could incorporate NB-IoT (or its eLTE variant), or even LoRa if a client wanted.
• UC/UCaaS: Although not a major focus of the event (itself quite telling) there was a fair bit of unified communications, conferencing and even cPaaS around the show. There was a Broadsoft-style UC platform for operators, and various tools for multi-party meetings. It's not obvious that Huawei is aiming to be a Twilio / Tokbox-style platform provider though, although it does have APIs (including WebRTC) for embedding communications in apps and websites. I didn't see any signs of a Slack/Spark/HipChat rival. Notably, Huawei is partnering Microsoft on Office365, so may not launch its own full UcaaS direct-to-enterprise product. 
• I liked one partner booth in particular "Call Cloud", which uses a crowd-style / sharing economy approach to sourcing customer-service reps, with in-app video. It apparently has 7 million (!) people signed up as potential providers of informal information or support.

Overall, an interesting few days for me, exploring a side to Huawei I hadn't seen before. It's always hard to get a full perspective from a single-vendor event, but it struck me as one of the only real, fully-encompassing examples I've seen of an acronym I normally dislike - ICT. That said, some more candour about positioning vs. competitors would have been welcome. We all know who they are - so descriptions of differentiation would have been useful, even if rose-tinted.

It's also brought home to me how important it is to have a captive market to drive scale, which can then improve adoption rates (and prices) elsewhere. Amazon does it with AWS - its own huge retail business is an "anchor tenant" which helps create traffic volumes that then became reinforced by third parties' cloud usage. Huawei appears to do something similar with domestic government and enterprise business - millions of CCTV cameras, or large-scale city networks, or local IoT uses are helping it exploit pre-existing scale and experience, and then apply elsewhere. There is also a sensible approach to partnering, for example around IoT, with the likes of GE collaborating on distinct parts of the market.

One final comment: the layout of the trade show was excellent. One hall was organised per-vertical, with sections on Manufacturing, Public Safety, Oil & Gas, Finance etc. The other hall was per-technology, with sections on Cloud, eLTE, WiFi, NB-IoT, Developers and so on. I wish other events were similarly well-structured.

Publications & Upcoming Events

This is an "administrative" post, covering my recent and upcoming publications & events. Please get in touch if you'd like any more details about booking me for speaking/workshops, or for considering published output - information AT disruptive-analysis DOT com.


Events
I speak at, or attend, about 30 public events per year, plus a number of private workshops, executive off-sites and online webinars. Recent notable events have included:

• Keynote on Futurism at Ofcom's spectrum workshop day (link)
• Presenting at TMForum's Action Week (on blockchain - link)
• Keynote on new wireless & spectrum models at WiFi Now in Washington DC (link)
• Chairing Total Telecom's Connected Britain event
• My own workshops, run jointly with Caroline Gabriel, on Enterprise/Private Cellular Networks, and AI + Blockchain for the Telecoms Industry (link)

The next few months are looking pretty hectic for events I'm speaking at, attending or moderating. My schedule always a bit of a work-in-progress, and some things may change a bit, so please get in touch with me if you want to arrange meetings/briefings, or need a speaker for other events. 

• 3 Sep, London, London Futurists: Agenda for the Future (link)
• Presentation: "Anti-Forecasting"
• 4-7 Sep, Shanghai, Huawei Connect (link)
• Attending as an analyst
• 18-19 Sep, Bangkok: PTC Spectrum Futures (link)
• Presentation: "A Futuristic View of Spectrum: Where Are We Going?"
• CBRS Workshop
• 25-27 Sep, Busan, S Korea: ITU Telecom World (link)
• Panel Moderator: Reinventing Telcos
• 3-5 Oct  Orlando, US: Astricon (link)
• Keynote on "What the Future Holds for Asterisk - And What's Overhyped"
• 5 Oct (TBA), Webinar: IBwave (link to follow)
• Presenting on Convergence & Evolution in Indoor Wireless
• 11-12 Oct, Brussels: IICom Annual Conference (link)
• Presenting on "Innovation in connectivity technologies - embracing heterogeneity"
• 23-24 Oct, Phoenix, US: Broadsoft Connections (link)
•  Attending as an analyst
• 25-26 Oct, San Francisco: GE Minds & Machines (link)
• Attending as an analyst
• 31 Oct - 1 Nov, London: Total Telecom Congress (link)
• Speaking "Optimising Spectrum Regulation in the 5G era"
• Chairing Day 2
• 02 Nov, The Hague, Netherlands: WiFi Now Europe (link)
• Keynote + Panel
• 14-15 Nov, Lisbon: TADSummit (link)
• Presenting on Enterprise & Industrial IoT mobile networks
• 28-29 Nov, Bangkok: WiFi Now APAC (link)
• Keynote + Panel
• 30 Nov, London: Great Telco Debate (link)
•  Speaker, topic TBA
• 01 Dec, London DB + CG Private Cellular Workshop #2 (link to follow)
• 1-day workshop on Enterprise / Private mobile networks
• Contact: information AT disruptive-analysis DOT com for details

Publications

For my written output, I work through three main channels:

• This blog and cross-posts on my LinkedIn & Medium. Recent topics have included:
• Blockchain/ICOs (link and link)
• Mobile connection bonding & SD-WAN (link)
• Net Neutrality (link)
• Sensors (link)
• Amazon / Edge-Computing (link)
• Data-over-Sound (link)
• UCaaS (link)
• Spectrum Sharing / Enterprise Cellular (link)
• STL's Future of The Network research stream, which I run as associate director. My own recently-contributed reports include: 
• Facebook's Telecom Infra Project (link)
• Edge Computing (link)
• VoLTE (link)
• 5G Spectrum (link)
• eSIM (link)
• Other reports in the stream written by others have covered 4G in Asia, NFV and other topics. 
• My next reports will look at LPWAN, cRAN/vRAN, and WiFi's strategic implications for Telcos.
• Disruptive Analysis branded reports & papers, which include both open-market reports such as last year's eSIM study (link), and client-commissioned papers - some of which are internal and kept under NDA. Recent public documents include
• Blockchain for Telcos, written for Juniper Networks (link)
• Integrating IoT & Video Comms, written for Dialogic (link)
• Data-over-Sound, written for Chirp (link)
• IoT + Voice/Messaging Comms, written for Metaswitch (link) 
• Upcoming paper on consumer communications privacy