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Insightful audio from the global tech advisory firm.
(lighthearted music)
- Hello and welcome to the IoT Chat
where we explore the latest developments
in the Internet of Things.
I'm your host, Christina Cardoza,
Editorial Director of insight.tech.
And today we're going
to be talking about the
rise of intelligent
networks, thanks to 5G and AI
with Ian Fogg from CCS Insights.
Hey Ian, how are you doing?
- Hey, doing well.
- Thanks for joining us today.
Before we dive into the conversation,
can you tell our audience
a little bit more about
yourself and what you do at CCS Insight?
- Sure. So we're a research
and analysis company.
I lead the networks
or the network technology
research at CCS Insight
before CCS Insight I've worked with,
I've worked operators,
analytics companies,
other analyst firms.
So really many, many years of experience
in network technology.
- Awesome, looking
forward to dive into it.
We just had your colleagues Martin Garner
and Bola Rotibi on the podcast.
We were talking about
IoT protections for 2024,
specifically in the Edge and AI space.
But as part of that report,
and I encourage all our listeners
to go take a look at that,
that report to see what's coming
over the next couple of years.
But part of that report,
there was a lot about 5G
and networks in there.
So I wanted to chat with you
today a little bit more about
what can we expect in that space,
and these things sort of
run parallel sometimes.
So before we jump into
what we have coming,
let's take a look about,
where we are today or
what got us here today.
So can we just start off,
explaining how has the 5G
and IoT network landscape
changed over the last few years?
What have you been seeing?
- Sure. Well, I mean 5G
first launched back in 2019,
but that was really very early
versions of the 5G standards.
And what we've seen more recently
is tremendous enhancements
in what 5G's capable of.
We've seen 5G being used for
more and more different things.
So one of those is for
example, private networks
and we're tracking the number
of private networks that are,
launching or are being announced.
For example,
in 2023
up to Q3 we saw 1,279
private networks
announced with revenues of over €100,000.
That's up from 1,081 in 2022
and 761 in 2021.
5G was deployed in 45% of
those networks we saw announced
in 2023.
We're seeing other things happen too.
We're seeing non-terrestrial
networks arrive.
We saw a lot of activity that
last year around this time
with announcements from
at the time Qualcomm
and that's part of the upcoming release 17
5G standard as well.
We've seen more focus around
REDCap-reduced capability-on 5G
starting to be talked about by the vendors
but not really out
there yet in the market.
One of the other things we've
seen happen in the last year
is the operators,
announce Open API initiative
for something the GSMA
the operators organization
has been very big on.
And that includes network APIs too
to manage network quality and
other network type settings.
So we're seeing all kinds of things
happening over that last year.
- Absolutely a lot happening
and like you mentioned,
5G started to come
around, maybe around 2019.
The conversation started well before that
and the conversations are still happening.
It always amazes me how much
5G is being adopted or deployed
and how much there is still to come
and how much we still
have work in this space.
So what would you say, looking to 2024
or even beyond that, what
would be the next step
for 5G in these IoT networks coming up?
- Well this takes us
back to the predictions
that we put together at
the end of last year.
So some of these are
related where I just said
some of them are looking
a bit beyond that.
So one of the predictions
we had was that by 2025,
a digital marketplace for
app-based network functionality
offers more than a hundred
versions of network capabilities
and APIs.
So we've seen some small initiatives,
but we expect that to expand
tremendously over the next
kind of 18 months or so.
We're also expecting that
hybrid private and public 5G
through network slicing
emerges the dominant option
for private networks by 2030.
So what that is, is that
a standalone private
network is using a dedicated
a network just for that offering.
But a hybrid solution is using
some of the new capabilities
of standalone 5G, network
slicing to give you a quality
of service that is different
to other people using the the
wider cellular 5G network.
And that then bridges the
gap between a location
where an enterprise may have
the dedicated private network
but they maybe want people
or devices to move between
those dedicated sites.
And the macro network,
the regular 5G network
with a network slice bridges
the gap, a hybrid solution.
So that's something we see
becoming very dominant by 2030.
And obviously it'll happen
not just suddenly in 2029,
it'll happen gradually over time
as we see something happening.
Something else we see,
although there's been some
negativity around NTN,
we see that continue to grow.
It's valuable for the IoT space.
If you think about container tracking,
it doesn't require very
high bandwidth services,
but there are other things
that we see happening very near
term like the smartphone
space where we see
that's still growing despite
some of the negativity,
there's a lot of activity in that space.
It's part of the upcoming 5G
standards, part of release 17
to have a non-terrestrial
network capability.
And by 2027 we expect
15% of smartphone users
have satellite enabled devices.
Now what does that mean for IoT?
Well, often what has
happened in the past is
the consumer space has
driven innovation that then
gets reused for other things
because there's a commonality,
once you've built that
satellite capability,
the satellite players can choose
to support more than one type of customer.
- Great. Now you mentioned
more of a rise in
hybrid, private and public networks.
When I think of these terms,
I equate them to the cloud,
hybrid cloud, private cloud, public cloud.
Is this the same concept
of using networks?
So for instance, when you have more
mission critical
solutions or applications,
those would be on a
private network much like
they'd be on a private cloud.
What's the distinction there
or the similarities
between the different types
of cloud uses and then the network uses?
Will these things sort of be
parallel also if you're using a
hybrid cloud, would you likely
be using a hybrid network?
- I think it depends on the use case.
You think about a hybrid
network,
the key thing that's really
driving that's enabling that
is this switch from the
initial versions of 5G
that started back in 2019,
which we're using what's
called non-standalone access.
They relied on a 4G core network,
which means you didn't get
all the capabilities of 5G
that were being hyped in
the 2017, 2018, 2019 period.
You need to have the 5G core network
up and running at the mobile operator
at the service provider.
And that enables a whole
load of new network functions
and one of those is this
thing called network slicing,
where you can have essentially a
dedicated quality of service.
So that's something that's happening.
I think the cloud space is parallel,
but I think it's an
interesting analogy to say,
well there's more than one type of cloud,
there's more than one type of network
that can offer a high quality of service.
- Great and at the same time
that all of this is happening,
5G is getting more advanced
and we're adding more capabilities to it.
The demands and the needs
of the Internet of Rhings
is growing
also companies want to
connect to the internet more.
They want fast, reliable,
realtime information
and that requires the
network to work fast also.
So how can the network and 5G,
keep up with this
ever-growing demand of IoT
and some of these more
intelligent solutions
and devices coming online?
- Well I think there's hybrid
capabilities particularly
important because it does bridge the gap
between maybe a dedicated network
that's maybe a dedicated private network
that's maybe in a port or
in a manufacturing facility
or in maybe a warehouse
or a barn or something.
I mean one of the areas
we looked at here actually
for hybrid private networks or hybrid 5G
was around precision agriculture.
And if you imagine
agriculture you have the farm,
you have some farm buildings
where you may have a dedicated capability
but you can't put that
over the whole farm area.
It's far too big, far too problematic.
And that's a classic example
where a hybrid solution
enables an agricultural
offering to have a high quality
of service right, where
across a wide range of areas.
One of the other things I think we see
as an important thing at the moment
and increasing so will be using AI
in a whole range of different areas.
We think AI is going to be
important in a range of types
of products in different
parts of the network.
But one of them is we see
that AI enables 5G networks
to improve their
availability significantly,
perhaps even to move beyond
five nine's availability
by managing the traffic patterns better,
by making sure that the
network isn't just on,
it's offering a good
enough quality of service
and managing around outages
or downtime issues to give a
self-healing element to the experience.
So that's something
else we see increasingly
important on the network side.
- I love that example of the
agriculture and in the farm
because that's one of the examples that
IoT is just growing and
demand for it farming,
you wouldn't really think becoming online
or using these advanced capabilities,
but that's just the reality today.
Every industry around the
world is leveraging internet
of things and, and network.
I want to dig deeper a little
bit into the role of AI.
You mentioned that it's going
to be improving availability
and it can do things like self-healing.
So exactly what's going on in this space.
How can AI be utilized and
be applied to do these things
and enhance the 5G and IoT networks?
- Well the network guys are
using AI on all kinds of areas.
They're using it to
improve the RAN management
because as you've gone from
original 4G to 4G Advanced
or LT Advanced and then onto
5G and then onto release 17
and onwards, the complexity of
the RAN has got much greater.
And there are more settings
that need to be managed.
The interaction between the base stations,
between different frequency
bands is much more complex
and AI is a key way of enabling
ongoing management of that
and that RAN to to improve the coverage
and improve the performance.
We see it being very important
in the Open RAN rollout too.
So Open RAN is something
where historically
service providers have bought
a base station from a network
vendor and everything
is basically integrated
and included from the same vendor.
The concept of Open RAN is
that there are interfaces
within that base station so
that a service provider can mix
and match different suppliers.
And we think the complexity there
is something that AI can help
improve the Open RAN experience
and help drive Open RAN adoption.
So we think that that's
very important too.
Something else we think is interesting
and important is around green issues,
hitting carbon targets,
managing energy costs
on the network.
And again, what you need to do there
if you're a service
provider is what you want
to do is keep the performance
for your user base good,
but minimize the energy usage.
And so you want to drop the energy usage
but still maintain the
network experience of
how far can you cut back network resources
and yet still offer the
experience that users need.
And that's something where a
machine learning tool can help
with that RAN optimization.
And we feel by 2025,
a combination
of intelligent radio access
network technology automation,
AI driven power down techniques
enables at least three
leading operators to bring
forward their carbon neutral
targets by several years.
It's one of the predictions in our report.
- Yeah, I was just going to ask that.
It's interesting because I think
over the last couple
of years sustainability
and green issues have been
a top concern for industries
all over the place and
being able to use AI
and even these 5G networks
to hit some of these goals.
So I was just going to ask what
you predict for the next couple
of years, is it going to be more important
and do you see organizations
and industries actually
being able to reach some
of their goals or those goals
really becoming a reality over
the next couple of years with some
of the capabilities happening
in 5G and IoT networks?
- One of the sustainability
angles here is around
smart grid.
There's obviously a massive
drive to remove coal,
oil and gas carbon technologies
from power generation.
One of the options to replace,
there's obviously nuclear.
Nuclear has enormous capital cost,
long lead times, a lot of complexity.
So a lot of people are looking
to solar and wind power
as a cost-effective
and versatile way of
generating green electricity.
The challenge there is that solar
and wind power generation
is not always predictable,
depends on cloud cover on the
solar side and time of year.
And on the wind power, it just depends on
what the weather systems
are doing at the time,
time things are happening.
And you could have night times
where there's too much
power being generated
and you want to encourage end users
to consume some of that electricity.
There may be other times you want users
to drop their energy consumption
because it's too expensive
or there isn't enough green
power being generated.
So we think greater use of solar
and wind power necessitates
that smart grid technology
to manage the supply and demand.
And we expect smart grid
technology will become widely
adopted in most advanced economies,
kind of from 2028 if not before.
But we can see some signs
of that happening even now.
Something else we see as
important is power as a service,
an integral part of tower
infrastructure services by 2025
because one of the challenges
or one of the difficulties
of getting power
to tower sites.
It's difficult, it can be time consuming,
it can depend on permits,
but what we see happening
there potentially is the tower
company managing the power to the site.
So taking a greater role
in the site management
they have done before.
And we think that'll become a cornerstone
of tower companies offerings by 2025.
- One thing that interests
me about the smart grid is
obviously we have all of these new
and intelligent devices
connecting to the network
and going online and we need
to prepare the grid to be able
to handle all of this at
the same time we're trying
to be more sustainable and then as part
of being sustainable
people are using more,
electric vehicle technology
or electric technology
and plugging that into the grid.
So is there anything happening in the 5G
or network space that is
going to be able to help
that demand or help the smart
grid really become smart
and become more sustainable
at the same time?
- So if you take electric car EV charging,
typically you want to do
that overnight if you can,
if it's on a residential solution.
So you can see,
a range of ways
that network technology come in there.
Many EVs have cellular capability,
so the user can remotely control their car
and set the power saving modes,
tell it where and when
to schedule the charge.
Many
EV charges in the home,
have also a similar remote control,
often that's on wifi or something else.
But then you have smart
meters in the home,
which typically have a
cellular connectivity.
So the power company can
monitor what's being used
and charge people in
some cases charge people
in very granular ways.
There's a power company
in the UK for example,
which has a tariff which
has half hourly pricing.
So the pricing varies dynamically
during the day based on
what the power generation and
the overall consumption is.
So you can see different
places, whether it's in the EV,
you have connectivity, whether
it's in the EV charger,
whether it's in the smart meter.
Three different places just
involved in the end user EV charging
process where you could see network
technology becoming very important.
- Great. Yeah, it's definitely
very interesting to see.
We always talk about these
elements different from
one another as silos.
This is what AI's doing in this space,
this is what network's
doing in this space,
but it's really interesting
to see it end-to-end solution,
how we're using all of these technologies
to really meet these goals
and to make some of
these ideas of reality.
One thing I wanted to talk about is
obviously from this
conversation it sounds like
there's still a lot of work to go in 5G.
5G is still going to be around for a while
and keep improving itself
and improving industries
and businesses and other technologies,
but we're already hearing
some rumblings about
6G come up.
So I'm not sure if it's too early
to start talking about 6G.
What's the reality there?
People are getting hyped about this,
but where are we with 6G?
When should we prepare for 6G
and how long will you
know 5G still be dominant?
- So there's absolutely
work happening on 6G
and I'll talk about that in a second.
But I think you are absolutely right
the 4G is still important in the 5G era.
You think about that EV scenario
I mentioned a second ago,
most EVs they have cellular,
it's a 4G cellular radio.
You have a smart meter,
it might even have a 2G radio
in it, let alone 3G or 4G.
Although they're obviously progressing
and upgrading them to 4G
to enable a 2G switch off to happen.
So these network eras tend to overlap.
So even when 6G arrives, 5G
will continue to be important,
4G will still be probably around as well
because these things are interoperable
and they will continue to exist.
The reason 6G is interesting
and the things we can
already see happening
are we can see spectrum discussions being
advanced.
We saw WRC the the kind of
international conference
that happens every few years
to coordinate spectrum
alignments globally.
So there is large economies
of scaled in any of
these offerings.
Discussion happened there around 6G bands,
typically in the cellular space,
people looking at the 7
to 16 gigahertz range.
But there's also some terahertz capacity,
which is very, very high frequency.
If you're familiar with
some of the 5G offerings
using millimeter wave,
this is even higher frequency than that.
Which is also being
discussed very line of sight,
very, very high capacity,
probably very short range.
So there's work happening.
There's also work happening
on the use cases for 6G.
One of the use cases, which is
different to what we've seen
before, is using the cellular network
to sense what's happening.
It could be sensing how
much traffic there is
in the roads sensing people
walking down a pavement.
And that is something which is,
you can see examples of
that are happening now.
Some of the...
in the home for example,
some of the wifi access points
can sense whether people are at home
and use that as an alarm system,
like a crude alarm system.
But that's quite a crude
offering at the moment.
But part of the thinking around 6G
is the 6G network would have a wider sense
of capability to sense things
happening across cities,
across large areas.
And then of course
that means you can then
draw analytics from it
and make actions on the back of that.
And that's one of the
kind of key new use cases
that's being discussed around 6G.
In terms of timescale,
which you asked about is
stuff's happening now.
I guess it depends who you are.
If you are a company looking
to deploy something today,
6G isn't probably relevant.
If your product roadmap is much longer,
if you're looking at
kind of around 2029, 2030
or onwards time
and if you are starting
to work on those sorts
of things in your roadmap now,
then 6G should be something
that's in that roadmap.
They're obviously not
imminent, but back off.
If you are a network vendor
then your R&D labs are
fast furiously working
on 6G things at the moment.
And you are much more
advanced in your 6G thinking.
- I think that point you made
about there will still be
some overlap and these
technologies are interoperable.
So I think that's a really
important takeaway for listeners.
Also, obviously you just
mentioned all of these benefits
and capabilities and new
use cases that are coming
with 6G that can make
the industry very excited
to hop on it, but it doesn't
have to be a 6G is here now,
move everything to this technology.
There is overlap, there
is interoperability,
so you can move things over
slowly, what makes sense
and with time and be more
purposeful about these changes
coming rather than
going in all or nothing.
So I think that that's a great point.
This has been a great conversation.
We're running a little bit out of time,
but I'm just curious in this space,
are there any final key thoughts
or any predictions you
want to leave us with
what we can expect to come?
- I think just one last
one on the 6G side.
So one of the predictions
we had around that was that
by 2030 the first 6G powered,
massive twin cities announced.
So digital twinning is this
idea of having a replica
of the physical world
in the digital world.
And we see 6G being important in that,
partly because what we just
talked about around sensing
and around smart city type uses,
6G will have a lot more capacity,
it'll probably have much lower latency,
more consistency and it'll have
this sensing capability too.
I mean one of the classic areas I think
this might get deployed is perhaps
in the Middle East in the Gulf region,
where there's enormous
efforts to build a number
of massive new cities
basically from scratch.
Greenfield, well not greenfield
because it's the Middle East.
But in new locations,
a planned city.
And if you are building
something from scratch,
you are able to do things differently
and it may well be that the
first massive digital twin city
6G enabled happens in that
region for those reasons.
- Wow, 2030 sounds like a long ways away,
but we're already in 2024 so yeah.
It's going to be here before you know it.
So I'm excited to see
how this space progresses
to get us there over the next six years.
Where else 5G and IoT networks are going.
But it's been a pleasure
talking to you today, Ian,
about this.
Again, it's been an
insightful conversation
and for our listeners who want
to learn more about the CCS
Insight predictions, we will
have that ready for you.
You could dig into the edge AI
and this network space also.
So thank you again for joining us
and until next time, this
has been the IoT Chat.