Ericsson CTO Ulf Ewaldsson joined Limor Schafman of RCR-TV at Mobile World Congress 2014 to discuss emerging opportunities for wireless network operators. He said that in his conversations with carriers he sees a variation of business models. “Some are just choosing the model of connecting,” he said, “but there are also others that are choosing more active roles in media, for instance, which is the fastest growing. In wireless networks, more than 40% [of the traffic] is just pure video now … and on the tablet side, more than 50% of the traffic is video.”
“Voice is noise”
“We made a projection that we will have 10 times growth in the next five years of packet traffic in these networks, and they are totally packet traffic centered,” said Ewaldsson. “Voice has become noise, as we say, it’s such a small part of the traffic in the network. And that requires more spectrum.”
Globally about 350 megahertz of spectrum has been allocated, said Ewaldsson, and Ericsson expects that amount to grow to more than 1 gigahertz. Ewaldsson sees spectrum as an important national resource and likens it to a nation’s mineral resources.
“It will be even more valuable maybe than oil in the future because it will fuel so many other industries that are building on top of the networks,” he said. Ewaldsson said that the analogy to oil could be meaningful in another way. “It becomes economically viable to bring up new resources and it’s the same with spectrum. It becomes more and more economically viable to use different kinds of new technologies to make better use of spectrum.”
NFV: what a difference a year makes
“What was last year only discussions of if it was possible has come into reality,” said Ewaldsson. “We are able to show here on our show floor how we have virtualized every application that we have, in functions that we have in the networks being run in the cloud environment.” Shortly before MWC Ericsson launched a series of NFV-related initiatives, including a virtualized evolved packet core and a network management tool that manages the radio network, the transport, the IP, the packet core and the core network. Software will become more and more essential to operators as the requirements on networks increase.
“Anything that you can imagine … will be put into the network,” said Ewaldsson, who foresees future networks that will even control energy consumption on devices. And when Ewaldsson considers connected devices, he is not just envisioning smartphones and tablets. “Everything that can benefit from a connection will have one,” he said. “That’s the fantastic opportunity of our industry. … We can see the whole transformation that’s going on with industry after industry as they get digitalized.”
M2M: from inside out to outside in
Ewaldsson said that as M2M business models make new industries reliant on mobile networks, the wireless industry will become more demand driven. “This industry is changing from being inside out, where the innovation power was from different types of technologies in the networks, to understanding what the future usage will be, what the future terminals will do,” he said.
According to Analysys Mason, network operators are already generating $10 billion a year in M2M revenue, an amount which the firm says will swell to $88 billion by 2023. Ericsson, which acquired Telenor Connexion’s M2M platform more than two years ago, has recently announced M2M customer wins with operators including Bell Canada and Dialog, Sri Lanka’s leading carrier.
In the Ericsson labs
Ewaldsson said that much of Ericsson’s current research and development is focused on work that will help define the eventual 5G standard for wireless connectivity. “We all agree that this is an open innovation platform for a few years now,” he said. “We’re looking at something beyond 10 Gigabit downlink, maybe 10-20 Gigabit downlinks with latencies of milliseconds, with very low energy consumption, perhaps 20-fold lower. … Those are some of the inputs that everyone is agreeing should be discussed in the 5G scenario.” Ewaldsson also said he would not be at all surprised if support for 4K video were part of the 5G standard. He does not expect 5G to launch until after 2020.
Ericsson is also working on technologies that will make use of higher frequencies, Ewaldsson said, and on initiatives that will make more efficient end-to-end connections through the IP part of the network.
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