Senza Fili Sparring Partners

We are midway in our 5G journey. It may not have been as game-changing as many expected, but it did improve connectivity, and it is an impressive new technology. There is ample room for improvement, this much is clear. What can we learn from the beginnings of 5G to continue the innovation? What should we do differently? Azita Arvani , ex-CEO at Rakuten Symphony North America, and I agree that we s...

We usually think about wireline and wireless as alternative, complementary and at times competing ways to provide connectivity. But increasingly connectivity to any device requires the combination of wireline and wireless components. Access is mostly wireless through cellular, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or other interfaces, and, eventually, the connection is transported to fiber. What is variable is where t...

Geoff Hollingworth, CMO at Rakuten Symphony, and I agree on many things, but we have sharply different views on the success of 5G. I think 5G did just fine; Geoff thinks it was a failure. So we set to debate this, and we had quite a revealing conversation (I don’t want to spoil it) on technology, standardization, 3GPP, monetization and, of all things, communism. Sign up for the mailing list at htt...

We often may feel that much of technology innovation in wireless either does not get deployed in commercial networks or that the process is very slow. Is that the case? And what sets the pace of innovation? Are there areas where we should be innovating at a faster rate to meet our connectivity needs, especially those of enterprises and other verticals? Sumit Roy, a professor at the University of W...

Three analysts got together to talk about what we think works and does not work at in-person and virtual analyst events and other industry events. My guests were fellow analysts and friends Emmy Johnson , Founder & Principal Analyst at Sky Light Research and Daryl Schoolar , Director at Recon Analytics. We compared notes of what we find useful and what our suggestions are to make our interacti...

This is the second part of the discussion I had with Preston Marshall , Director of Wireless Standards and Policy at Google Internet Evangelism, Co-Chair of Spectrum Sharing Committee at WInnForum, and Chairman, OnGo (CBRS) Alliance. At the end of the first episode, we realized we did not cover many of the topics we had on our list, so we recorded a second episode. We still did not cover all of th...

Everybody pursues monetization, yet it appears to be increasingly elusive. Just as love can be. Yet, I argue that finding love in life is easier than finding monetization in wireless.   Not everything is lost, as long as we think of monetization not primarily in terms of new or larger revenue streams but in terms of profitability—which takes us to selective adoption of technology to increase effic...

We still do not know what 6G is going to be, but it is the right time to decide what we want it to do. I talked to Preston Marshall , Director of Wireless Standards and Policy at Google Internet Evangelism, CoChair of Spectrum Sharing Committee at WInnForum, and Chairman, OnGo (CBRS) Alliance, about what users, the operators and the rest of the wireless ecosystem need 6G to do differently, and not...

Magnus Olden , CTO at Domos , comes to telco API from an IT and Wi-Fi background and works to make API less complex, more easily usable and valuable to application developers. We talked about what app developers need, and how their perspective can be very different from that of operators and the telco ecosystem. How could we get telcos and app developers to both benefit from API? How can we get AP...

John Baker is the SVP of Business Development at Mavenir and one of the strongest proponents of Open RAN, since the very beginnings. We have talked about Open RAN in a previous Sparring Partners, and this is an update on the progress of Open RAN and the market outlook.  How are we moving from Open RAN to end-to-end open networks? How is the concept of Open RAN evolving? Open RAN deployments are ta...

This is an introduction to the podcast version of Sparring Partners from Monica Paolini, the podcast host on what Sparring Partners is about, its approach and its format. I talk about the reasons why I am starting a weekly podcast, QuickFire, which will coexist with the longer DiveIn Sparring Partners that you may be familiar with.  I have uploaded recent Sparring Partners, but this is the inaugur...

A conversation with Markus Kümmerle, Deutsche Telekom and CAMARA, Daryl Schoolar at Recon Analytics and Monica Paolini at Senza Fili on the value, benefits and challenges of APIs APIs have been around for a long time, but in the last couple of years have become one of the brightest beacons of monetization, even though their role is much wider than that. With the GSMA launch of the Open Gateway, th...

In this final Sparring Partners on AI and automation, we heard the operator's perspective from Jennifer Yates about AT&T's experience to date, ongoing activities, and future roadmap to adopt AI-driven automation and eventually move to autonomous networks. Jennifer shared her deep, first-hand experience in running highly innovative projects to manage and optimize the AT&T network using AI a...

In network operations, we are always looking for areas for improvement. How should we manage applications to best serve end customers? How can we use end-to-end visibility of application and service performance to end customers, anomaly detection for automated pattern discovery and prediction to improve quality of experience? How should we utilize software-driven networks to deliver new services a...

AI will change the way we operate telecom networks. But what’s the best way to get there? How should we introduce AI to get the benefits it promises but avoid duplication, conflicts among different AI models, and undesired outcomes? How do we know AI models will deliver what we expect? In this Sparring Partners, Per Kangru and Takai Eddine Kennouche at VIAVI Solutions shared their AIOps practical...

Most of the time, we talk about how AI, ML and GenAI change the way we run and operate networks, enable automation, tame complexity, and improve efficiency. They also change the way we – the humans in telecoms – operate, the skills we need, and how we deal with AI-based platforms. This will require profound changes and our ability to meet the cultural and technological challenges is going to be cr...

AI-driven automation is going to change the way we run our networks end-to-end, from the access in the RAN all the way to the core, from the edge infrastructure to the cloud. To get there, we need the right silicon and platforms. Are we there yet? In this Sparring Partners, we talked with Cristina Rodriguez at Intel about the network transformation that AI and automation enable and about the role...

It is not coincidental that networks are evolving towards openness and automation at the same time. Openness brings flexibility and choice, but also increased complexity. Automation, aided by cloudification and AI, enables operators to manage complexity and benefit from the flexibility in the network. Together, openness and automation change the way we operate networks and deliver services. In thi...

Intelligent applications and generative AI will help operators increase the value of their already installed and new networks. By using network-specific knowledge, they can empower operators with trusted solutions that increase network efficiency. In this Sparring Partners with Blake Hlavaty, Director of Global Network Software Offers at Fujitsu, we discussed the practical adoption of automation p...

The Middle East is emerging as a hot area for digital transformation, driven by R&D funding, limited resistance from legacy infrastructure and organizational culture, and a desire to get a more prominent role in the global market. Tareq Amin, CEO at Aramco Digital, was our Sparring Partner and talked about his recent move from Japan, where he was the CEO of Rakuten Mobile, to Saudi Arabia. He...

There is much talk about how GenAI will change how we operate and automate telco networks, but there is also much uncertainty about GenAI’s potential, challenges, opportunities and adoption models. We talked with Anbu Ganesh, Business Director of Innovation & Business Development at VIAVI, to get the insider’s view on what GenAI has started to deliver, how it will evolve, and how to implement...

Recent announcements by AT&T, 1&1 and Deutsche Telekom indicate an inflection point in the readiness for open RAN commercial deployments, but also an emerging new approach in vendor selection. In this Sparring Partners, I talked to John Baker at Mavenir, Geoff Hollingworth at Rakuten Symphony and Aji Ed at Nokia about how vendors approach disaggregation in the open RAN market today and how...

Operators are getting ready to deploy open RAN in commercial, live networks. Each operator is defining its strategy and flavor of open RAN, its pace, and its vendor ecosystem. Yet, they all need to ensure that the open RAN architecture and topology they choose work as expected. Are the equipment, the software, the platforms and the applications interoperable? How can they optimize the end-to-end n...

Automation is at an inflection point. It is no longer a future aspiration, it is something that operators have started to implement, both in their new and legacy networks. They see the opportunity for cost savings and increased efficiency, but also the risks and challenges automation brings. In this Sparring Partners, Per Kangru at VIAVI shares how the experience with operators shaped VIAVI’s appr...

RIC promises to make open RAN (and traditional RAN too) more efficient. But when? Are we ready to deploy RIC? And what RIC functionality is available now and what should we expect over the next few years? How dependent are open RAN deployments on RIC? In this Sparring Partners, Simona Marinova at Bell Canada and Monica Paolini at Senza Fili gave an update on RIC availability and maturity, and talk...