Carpe diem; the time is now, don’t delay – or the AI revolution will get away from you. This is the message to mobile operators from hyperscale network software company Arrcus at Mobile World Congress 2025 in Barcelona. Shekar Ayyar, the firm’s chief executive, says the carrier community should not be conservative, and only consider AI in terms of internal operational gains; instead, they should be bold and launch new services right away. “Do both,” he says, responding to a question on the show floor from RCR Wireless about whether to look inwards or outwards.
“Operators should dive in head-first. Too often, they think too hard before launching services. They should move faster. AI can [already] generate services which are both network- and application-oriented, which build on top of intelligent infrastructure… A lot of them are struggling to monetize 5G, and are already talking about 6G. They should leverage their real estate to build infrastructure for edge AI inferencing. They have an edge – no pun intended – where they can build this capability. It is an immediately monetizable opportunity. The time to act is now.”
Arrcus, which raised $30 million in a funding round last summer, led by NVIDIA, is a specialist in core, edge, and multi-cloud routing and switching infrastructure, besides. At MWC, it issued a flurry of news: notably, a telco-grade network switch, TGAX, for telcos to monetize edge services for AI workloads, and a network infrastructure for US AI consultancy Actapio, owned by Japanese internet company LY Corporation, to build-out AI clusters to train and deploy large language models (LLMs) on NVIDIA GPUs.
The TGAX product is based on NVIDIA’s Spectrum-4 ethernet switch; the Actapio system is built on Broadcom’s Tomahawk 5 switching silicon and uses open network hardware from UfiSpace. Both make use of Arrcus’ own ACE networking software stack. As well, Arrcus teamed up with Liberty Global at MWC to showcase 5G-AI video for mobile operators to serve clients in the public safety, industrial automation, and entertainment fields. Fujitsu, Eviden, and Philips are also involved, variously. Ayyar talks about “volumetric video apps on top of this infrastructure”.
There is other news, besides; but, between the lines, the message from its announcements, and in its discussion with RCR Wireless, is that operators have all the distributed edge/cloud infrastructure pieces at their disposal now to put the monetization jigsaw together around 5G networks and AI processes. Ayyar comments: “The best way to [launch new services] is to create a programmable network infrastructure, like Arccus is doing for customers – to create and launch services in two or three weeks, rather than over months and even years.”
He references intelligent video applications, such as those Liberty Global has on display at MWC; he talks about “smart city applications, and all these things that have been talked about for a long time”. He goes on: “[Because] they are becoming real. They are all things operators should just jump on now. Otherwise, they will be where they were with the cloud – a decade [from now], looking back and asking, why did we miss that?” The Arrcus pitch is to provide software to connect distributed compute resources across the cloud-edge continuum.
For operators, this includes their metro edge (old MEC) sites, dovetailing also with sundry co-location facilities and private enterprise sites – all knitted together in software as a ‘lossless network fabric’ on an Ethernet backbone. Arrcus is an early member of the Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC), alongside competitors like Cisco and Juniper, to build a complete Ethernet-based comms stack for high-performance networks to support spiraling AI workloads. Its founding members are AMD, Arista, Broadcom, Cisco, Eviden, HPE, Intel, Meta, and Microsoft.
Ayyer says: “The UEC is driving this pretty heavily, and we are participating in that… Everybody is jumping in and saying, ‘look, Ethernet is real’. We are working with our partners, Nvidia and Broadcom, to show how this can be done in a credible and robust manner. That is the opportunity is for operators. They have a good part of the infrastructure. There are some gaps, but, if operators don’t know how to [fill them], then come to us, and we will show you how.” The point about partners is important; the company has grown with its allies.
The telecom industry has learned about cooperation and co-creation through development of open RAN, suggests RCR Wireless. Ayyer explains the ecosystem ethos at Arrcus in terms of interoperability with AI engines – whether from tier-one brands like AMD, Broadcom, Intel, Nvidia, and any Arm-based system, or ‘white-box’ OEMS like UfiSpace and Edgecore Networks; and whether they are selected by operators and enterprises, or stitched together by system integrators. “We want our operating system to work in a diverse landscape – so anyone with a disaggregated infrastructure gets the benefit of disaggregated infrastructure.”
