Day one of Brooklyn 5G Summit balances technical presentations with business-focused “reality check” from key tech buyers
The Brooklyn 5G Summit is a deeply technical symposium held at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering. Typically, tech events held at engineering schools tend to skew towards science fairs on steroids. And, while there was no shortage of technical data presented, two of the day’s keynotes delivered by Melissa Arnoldi, AT&T’s president of technology and operations, and Karri Kuoppamaki, T-Mobile US’ VP of technology development and strategy, made sure to steer the conversation from the “far out” to the ways in which technology must be able to support the near-term 5G network strategies of carriers from a practical business perspective.
Business-focused keynote highlights from AT&T
After Marc Rouanne, president of mobile networks at Nokia, had the audience thinking well outside the box and pondering the future of haptic interactions with our cellphone networks, Arnoldi helped the audience understand what that all means in terms of a major network operator’s near-term network evolution challenges and plans. Beginning by pointing out that traffic on AT&T’s network has grown 360,000% since 2007, Arnoldi set the stage for a talk that focused on why the carrier believes that a software-centric 5G network architecture is the only way for AT&T, and other service providers, to cope with the exponential increase in data requirements that has yet to come close to reaching a crescendo.
Source: IEEE event live stream
Put into the context of business requirements, AT&T’s vision behinds its push towards introducing SDN and NFV into its network begins to take shape. In this session, it was framed as being able to support a variety of use cases originating from a variety of vertical industries. A few examples cited suggest that key near-term next step priorities in AT&T’s software-centric 5G network evolution key on ultra-low latency enabled by edge computing. These examples included:
- Healthcare: the ability of healthcare providers to respond to changes in patient vitals in real-time.
- FinTech: the use of augmented reality and/or virtual-reality-based video capabilities to transform an ATM into a full-featured branch office.
- Public Safety: the use of AR to provide 3D building schematics to first responders in emergency situations.
- Retail: the use of VR to render a holographic mannequin of a shopper dressed in the clothes on display at [insert favorite clothing store here].
Interestingly, after finishing her prepared remarks, Arnoldi spent a few minutes “speaking candidly” about what she feels are key tech developments that AT&T will need to see from its suppliers to help realize its 5G vision. One point that she made was that in order to satisfy all the use case requirements, networks would have to become hyper-local in their ability to deliver content. Against this backdrop, Nokia’s announcement with NTT-DoCoMo dovetails completely with the requirements of being “hyper-local” in future 5G network build-outs.
Network-focused keynote highlights from T-Mobile
When Karri Kuoppamaki of T-Mobile US took the stage for the late afternoon keynote, his presentation befitted a carrier that, unlike AT&T, has a decidedly mobile-only focus on 5G network development. And, in a similarly befitting manner, Kuoppamaki’s talk focused on T-Mobile’s need to squeeze all possible utility out of it’s spectrum resources. Of course, spectrum assets are a key is a key pain point that his company must contend with as it seeks to meet the same exponentially rising traffic demands as its peers.
Coincidentally, in a question asked about LTE evolution, Kuoppamaki’s statement that 5G would be an evolution of current LTE networks seemed mildly at odds with an answer given by an equipment vendor to a similar question asked during the morning session.
