how companies are putting 5g, mec and virtualization to
TRANSCRIPT
How companies are putting 5G, MEC and virtualization to work for themselves first
LEARNING BY DOING:
By Kelly Hill
A P R I L 2 0 2 1
REPORT SPONSORS:
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In a world where 5G and mobile
edge computing are developing
rapidly into reality and virtualiza-
tion has been table-stakes for some
time, one of the key differentia-
tors for a telecom company is: How
much firsthand experience do you
have with these technologies?
In marked contrast to the 3G-to-4G
transition, telecom ecosystem play-
ers aren’t just putting up networks
and waiting to see what killer app
emerges: They’re taking a far more
active role this time in trying to sup-
port the development of whatever
that killer app (if there’s just one)
turns out to be, through a network of
labs that are customer-facing and fo-
cus on everything from critical com-
munications to IoT. With 5G expect-
ed to generate value from enterprise
verticals, engagement and expertise
is more important than ever.
This report looks at how five dif-
ferent companies in the telecom
and tech ecosystems are “learning
by doing”: How they’re leveraging
5G, MEC and/or virtualization in
their own settings to derive busi-
ness value from it.
Qualcomm on 5G: If you build it, they
will come
Let’s start with research that
lays the groundwork for ecosystem
development: Learning by 5G about
doing the research that forms 5G and
a technology roadmap for both the
industry and a company. Dr. John
Smee, Qualcomm’s VP of engineer-
ing, says that even when he started
at the company two decades ago,
what differentiated it from other
tech companies was its “if you build
it, they will come” research men-
tality: To build what you thought
would enable future applications,
and try to bring those applications
to work in a holistic way. Qualcomm
still has that “let’s build it ourselves,
first” approach, he says, through ad-
vanced prototyping on its research
side: In smart factories, automotive
applications for cellular, millime-
ter-wave systems, 5G and augment-
ed/virtual reality.
The company seeks to set up an
end-to-end system for tests, and
bring applications on top of that,
Smee said. “That enables us to fig-
ure out where are the bottlenecks,
where do we further have to im-
prove, either in the standard or in
our implementation; and who else
do we have to partner with in the
ecosystem to help bring these tech-
nologies so that they end up in con-
sumers’ hands or end up enabling
new industries to adopt 5G?”
While Qualcomm has been
working with pre-standards tech-
nologies that would become 5G
and millimeter wave for years now,
one specific thing that it has done
to take 5G beyond the laboratory
is to install a live 5G network site
in its San Diego headquarters. In
addition to showcasing the newest
generation of cellular technology,
the site also helped provide insights
into millimeter-wave propagation
indoors, insights that Qualcomm
has shared with the rest of the in-
dustry along with other data that it
has gleaned from outdoor mobility
testing that informs network de-
ployments. It continues to weigh
both at the present and the future,
in terms of optimizing 5G, engaging
in the current standards work – and
looking beyond it.
“5G is continuing to evolve in
these relatively significant steps,
and … even as we’re starting to look
at ‘hey, what’s next? What’s 6G?’ –
there’s a lot of evolution left in 5G,”
Smee says. That includes improving
coverage and having a deep under-
standing of latency in the context
of different applications, such as
XR and automotive, for instance.
Then there are the larger ques-
tions: Fundamentally, Smee says,
part of the reason that cellular net-
works continue to be deployed and
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of the 3GPP standards process and
ahead of its own product roadmap,
it has to have intimate knowledge
of where the technology stands,
how it might be improved upon and
what applications might benefit
from such improvements. After all,
technology has to make business
sense in the real world in order to
be deployed.
As 5G has developed, the con-
versations this time are different,
as reflected in Qualcomm’s work
with manufacturing or automotive
partners, cloud companies and oth-
ers. Industry-specific groups such
as the 5G Automotive Association
(of which Qualcomm is a founding
interested in how 5G, AI, time-sensi-
tive networking and other technol-
ogies can be used. The chip compa-
ny also has its own vehicles on the
roads, he says, showcasing sidelink
communications with roadside
units and other vehicles as well as
cellular-network connectivity. The
wireless industry can’t ignore or
develop 5G in isolation from cloud
computing, from smart transpor-
tation or industrial IoT or the
myriad verticals that it wants to
serve with 5G, Smee says. “We work
closely with [these ecosytems] be-
cause it helps pull us forward.” And
because Qualcomm’s research and
testing work happens well ahead
garner billions in investment in up-
grades is that there are continual
improvements in coverage, laten-
cy and capacity, the last of which
is coming into particularly sharp
focus in 5G. “Say you’re trying to
provide capacity to some AGVs,
some ground robots in a factory,”
he offers. “We literally built our
own 5G smart factory, and then we
start loading it up with more devic-
es, and we start seeing, what is the
overall effect on the experience of
one device in the presence of multi-
ple other devices? … What fraction
of capacity can the system dedicate
to that one link in the presence of
these other links?” Qualcomm’s
smart factory environment is set
up at its corporate campus in San
Diego. Smee describes a large ware-
house building with a footprint has
been expanded over time for its 5G
research, where Qualcomm has a
series of robots, an industrial con-
veyor belt equipped with various
devices and a series of robots with
capabilities that include being able
to detect and move items on the
line. It’s both a prototyping space
and one for customer engagement
directly with other companies
and industries who have exper-
tise in that environment and are Qualcomm headquarters in San Diego
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member) have been formed early to
figure out 5G might apply to them,
and what 5G needs to be in order to
meet their technology needs. Car-
riers tout their 5G labs focused on
IoT, critical communications and
other specific 5G areas of applica-
tion. Those conversations — and the
listening and learning that comes
from them — help contribute to
how 5G comes to life, and what it
evolves to be in the future.
“We have to work with those in-
dustries and bring them into our
network,” Smee says. “That’s an in-
teresting conundrum: That we’re
trying to improve the foundation
of mobile, but we’re also trying to
improve the applicability of mobile
to many of these new industries. So
we kind of have that inherent du-
al-prong approach to our research
test beds as well.
“The value we’re trying to bring,
it’s not like one company can do
itself any more,” Smee said, add-
ing: “The industry is larger now,
and we have a responsibility to
get it right. That starts with ear-
ly prototype investigations, and it
also starts with opening our own
eyes to more and more other com-
panies, other industries, [and] the
global landscape of some of these
technology scenarios.”
Rohde & Schwarz:
Testing the 5G waters
Rohde & Schwarz’s Teisnach fac-
tory sits among picturesque moun-
tains in southeastern Germany,
near the Czech border and about a
two hours’ drive from Munich. One
of two R&S factories in Germany,
the company chose the Teisnach
factory as the location of its first
deployment of a private 5G wire-
less network, using spectrum which
Germany has specifically set aside
for industrial users.
Rohde & Schwarz had two moti-
vations for setting up a private 5G
network: To optimize its produc-
tion processes with a stable, reli-
able and secure wireless network,
and to validate its own network
testing solutions, according to
Meik Kottkamp, principal technol-
ogy manager at R&S.
“It was a natural step for us to
say, yes, let’s try this for our own
purposes, and find out what we can
do,” Kottkamp says, adding that
that meant both in terms of its use
in the factory and for adapting its
own 5G test solutions based on first-
hand network testing experience.
The 5G NonStandalone network
relies on 5G in midband spectrum
(Band 78, 3.7-3.8 GHz) and an LTE
anchor in Band 40 (2.3 GHz) and
was built using Nokia’s Digital Au-
tomation Cloud private wireless
and edge platform. It consists of two
Rohde & Schwarz’s Teisnach factory in Germany
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base stations covering about 1,500
square meters – what Kottkamp
calls “a reasonable starting point
for a deployment.” He describes the
network as covering two parts of a
hall that are connected with each
other, and notes that R&S owns the
spectrum involved and can expand
either indoors, outdoors or both in
order to accommodate future plans.
Both Rohde & Schwarz and Nokia
used R&S test solutions to evaluate
the network’s coverage and perfor-
mance as the network was set up
and went through site acceptance
testing, according to the company:
Specifically, the network was evalu-
ated using R&S’ FPH handheld spec-
trum analyzer, its TSMx6 scanning
receiver, 5G STS site testing solution
and its QualiPoc Android smart-
phone-based network optimization
set-up for walk-testing.
The network is in its very early
stages for production-related use
cases – but R&S has plenty of ideas
on how to use it, Kottkamp says,
starting with very simple mobile
information for workers within the
factory. That doesn’t necessarily re-
quire 5G, he acknowledges, but it’s
a way to try out localized commu-
nications over the air. Eventually,
he adds, the company may look at
connecting stationary robots or
autonomous robot vehicles to take
items from place to place on the
production floor, relying on the
smooth handovers and low laten-
cy of 5G to provide better perfor-
mance than a Wi-Fi network would.
“One use case which I personally
feel is interesting is, you can cen-
tralize the computation power,”
Kottkamp says, giving an exam-
ple of the ability to take images or
high-quality video of production
processes, transit them over the
5G network and do advanced pro-
cessing on them for quality control
purposes. “Whenever you can do
something centrally in terms of
computational power, this is inter-
esting,” he added. Kottkamp also
points out that R&S’ eagerness to
deploy 5G in its factory may not
necessarily be reflected in the pro-
duction equipment that gets used
in that environment: Industrial
players have made LTE commonly
available, but they have their own
roadmaps for technology adoption
within their product lines, and
those will only shift toward 5G with
enough of a push from the entire
manufacturing industry. There may
be hundreds of 5G smartphones
available globally, but that doesn’t
hold true for industrial equipment
options – at least, not yet.
While the operational aspects are
limited at this point in deployment,
Rohde and Schwarz has already
been using the Teisnach network
is for firsthand, real-world insights
into testing 5G private wireless
coverage, capacity and configura-
tion parameters in a factory en-
vironment, and which it can then
applying to its test offerings and to
support customers who also want
to deploy such networks. Kottkamp
says that based on R&S’ testing, the
network’s coverage is quite good
and its performance is very sta-
ble. Industrial environments can
be tricky for coverage, with lots
of metal and reflective surfaces,
but “in our case, we have managed
quite well,” he says.
Kottkamp said that several test-
ing issues come into play in pri-
vate networks such as R&S’. One
very fundamental issue is that
smartphones — which are com-
monly used for network bench-
marking in commercial mobile
networks — may not be the best
end-user device on which to base
network testing. R&S, he says, has
begun doing more testing work
with modules as test UEs, because
they can be integrated into mul-
tiple IoT devices. Another is, who
will perform the testing during the
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deployment process (The company
itself? A system integrator? Will
it be part of a service from a net-
work equipment vendor?) as well
as how ongoing monitoring will be
conducted.
“We think it’s really important to
do this kind of testing and to really
have an independent understand-
ing” of the network’s coverage, per-
formance and latency, he says.
In addition to the initial charac-
terization of the network itself and
the spectrum environment, one of
the areas that R&S seeks to learn
from the factory environment has
to do with ongoing monitoring and
how to know when interference
might be impacting the network,
which in turn could disrupt factory
operations. “We are also looking into,
can we detect that early enough and
have specific measurements created
that allows us to react very quickly
if it takes place, to ensure that the
production line is not standing still
for hours because no one knows if it
is ongoing?” Kottkamp says. Along
these lines, Rohde & Schwarz re-
cently announced a research collab-
oration with Industrial Radio Lab
Dresden, which focuses on research
and testing of radio systems for in-
dustrial applications. IRL Dresden is
using R&S network scanners to dis-
tributed real-time radio spectrum
and interference monitoring, hop-
ing to “gather important data on
how to detect, locate and prevent
interference and to keep a local
spectrum band clear for reliable
wireless connectivity.”
As one of the early private net-
work adopters in Germany, and one
which already has deep 5G exper-
tise due to its test and measurement
business, R&S is already having
conversations with other German
companies about its experience.
Kottkamp added that within Ger-
many’s thriving industrial sector,
manufacturing players often en-
gage with each other and the fact
that Rohde & Schwarz isn’t, say, an
automaker, takes the competitive
angle out of such conversations
about private networks. One such
collaboration will be highlighted
at the virtual Hannover Messe 2021
event, with Kottkamp representing
Rohde & Schwarz in a session about
validating 5G in real-world factory
environments alongside speakers
from Nokia, Bosch, HMS Industrial
Networks and the 5G Allinace for
Connected Industries and Auto-
mation, which focuses on global
5G development for industry and
is based in Germany and of which
Rohde & Schwarz is a member.
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How virtualization got Dell through a
pandemic pivot
Danny Cobb, fellow and VP engi-
neering for Dell Technologies’ telco
systems business, remembers his
company cruising into early 2020:
Starting a new fiscal year with
its operating plan in place, supply
chain nailed down and factories
humming; people coming into the
office each day to the usual routine
of looking for parking spots and tak-
ing laptops down to the cafeteria.
Then came March, and the first
wave of the Covid-19 pandemic hit
U.S. shores. In the course of one
weekend, Dell pivoted to more than
90% of its workforce working from
home. That meant a dramatic shift
in its network needs and opera-
tions – one that was only able to be
accomplished so quickly because of
virtualized infrastructure.
“We had to completely reconfig-
ure all employee access, security
and the paths to our most import-
ant enterprise applications, and we
did that in a weekend,” Cobb said.
“We could have never done that
without a virtualized world -- and
I mean virtualized in the broadest
sense of it.” For example, Dell was
able to expand capacity with soft-
ware-defined technologies and
beef up security by changing policy
as opposed to changing out hard-
ware, he added.
In addition, the abrupt shift to
work-from-home “forced us to en-
tirely redefine what our edge was,”
Cobb said. “Our edge used to be the
ports coming in from the internet
into the company. Now, it was wher-
ever there was an employee, that
was an edge. You couldn’t do that in
a physically defined world, it had
to be a software-defined world, a
virtual world.”
Dell runs its infrastructure as “a
very agile kind of hybrid cloud,”
Cobb says, hosting most of its own
business functions but also using
a variety of cloud services to meet
specific needs. He credited the com-
pany’s design and management of
its network for the flexibility that
enabled it to pivot rapidly to adapt
to pandemic conditions: Many work-
loads, all containerized, all designed
to scale up and scale out as appropri-
ate and adapt to whatever creates a
run on resources. The company has
designed its infrastructure “to be
containerized, to be able to shift de-
mand geographically or according
to application, to prioritize things
that are critical, things that are re-
ally important, [and] things that, if
you have to wait an extra second
for that email to send, no big deal,
that’s okay, we’d much rather have
the real-time response in the supply
chain. We’ve purposely designed
our hybrid cloud to work that way
and be able to scale up and down
the resources that we apply to any
given business opportunity at any
given moment,” he said, adding that
such cloud-native agility is becom-
ing increasingly important not just
under the specific conditions of the
pandemic, but as enterprises and
telecom operators navigate a new
world that includes 5G.
In addition to leveraging its
cloud-native capabilities to adjust
its own operations, Dell drew di-
rectly on that experience to help its
customers do the same.
“What we were able to do very
quickly was to hold up the mirror
and say, ‘Here’s what we did,’” Cobb
said. “Here’s how we rolled out …
end-user capabilities over a week-
end. Here are the policies that we
had to change. Here are the play-
books that we followed. Here are the
logistics problems that we handled
and how we essentially fanned out
our supply chain out to sites across
the world and managed configu-
ration remotely, and those sorts of
things.” Some things were already
in place, and sometimes Dell found
gaps in its implementation and
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fixed them. “Any time we learned
something, we literally used [it] as
a learning opportunity and then a
teaching opportunity with and for
our customers: ‘Here’s what we did,
here’s what you might want to do,’”
Cobb continued.
As part of that deepening conver-
sation, customer asks shifted from
product-oriented orders to requests
for help with more impactful busi-
ness needs: Secure access, end user
compute, SD-WAN and inter-site
connectivity, for example.
“It wasn’t, ‘Send me a few pallets
of servers’; it wasn’t, ‘Send me a
couple dozen laptops,’” he added. “It
was, ‘I now need to accelerate my
entire end-user transformation as
part of my overall digital transfor-
mation. I need to make that happen
in a quarter instead of a year.’ So
that’s what we did. It was all about
learning quickly and turning our
learnings into best practices that
could become customer relevant
and customer-facing.”
5G played a role in Dell’s pandem-
ic pivot as well. In a stroke of for-
tuitous timing, Cobb says, the com-
pany just happened to have a newly
available laptop, the Latitude 9510,
that was 5G-enabled – so some of its
employees who needed new laptops
to handle the changeover to work-
ing from home got to unbox one
that supported 5G. Cobb described
the 9510 as supporting connectiv-
ity that is “instant-on, always on,
no complexity of
Wi-Fi passwords or
access point names
… just, boom, I’m
provisioned and I’m
connected.” It was, he
says, “just a wonder-
ful vision of what the
simplicity of that con-
nectivity model could
deliver.” Cobb points to the exam-
ple of his boss, who didn’t have
particularly good connectivity in
his region of the country and was
sharing his home network with two
high school students, two college
students and his wife, all compet-
ing for home internet bandwidth.
“We’re all used to personal com-
puters, but we weren’t used to the
fact that our personal computers
use shared bandwidth and shared
network resources until it became
palpable for us,” Cobb said. After
receiving the 9510, though, his boss
showed off his upload and down-
load speeds in a virtual meeting
-- the 9510’s 5G connectivity felt
like having personal, dedicated
network bandwidth to enable pro-
ductivity.
The global demand to get users
online at home with sufficient
computing power and connectivi-
ty affected more than where Dell’s
employees were working and its
own operations. It im-
pacted Dell’s entire
business – and in a
broad sense, the
company’s level
of digitalization
“Any time we learned something, we literally used [it] as a learning opportunity and then a teaching opportunity with and for our customers.”
Danny Cobb, Fellow/VP Engineering for Dell Technologies
Dell 9510
F E A T U R E R E P O R T
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and connectedness drove how it
revamped the plans with which it
had entered 2020. Suddenly, infra-
structure orders such as servers
and storage weren’t as high a pri-
ority for customers as making sure
their users were online and con-
nected. In that environment, the
most important thing Dell could
bring to the market was mobile
computing, Cobb says. How did
the company rethink how it would
operate the rest of the year? By
drawing on digitalized and con-
nected data.
“We did dozens of business re-
forecasts to try to figure out, how
should we operate our company?
What expectations should we set to
our investors?” Cobb recalls. “All of
that meant that we had to go in and
essentially pivot our logistics and
our supply chain capability from
the plan that we had set up, know-
ing what we knew at the begin-
ning of the year, to something that
said, ‘Hey, what if the entire world
has to work from home, not just
for a couple of months, but may-
be for a year? What about school
from home? What about all the
other things that involve custom-
er demand — enterprise demand,
consumer demand, educational de-
mand — for our mobile computing
platforms, our laptops?”
A complete reforecast of the
company’s business in terms of its
logistics and supply chain was en-
abled through a massive amount of
telemetry information, he added:
What material was where, when it
would show up, where things were
within factories, what pieces were
in and out of stock, which things
could ship today, tomorrow or the
next day, where they were going in
the world and what was the best
way to get them there.
As Dell leveraged its digitalization
and data to navigate the changed
business environment, its custom-
ers across the spectrum were do-
ing the same. “Anybody who had
digital transformation effort going
already suddenly accelerated it,”
Cobb says. “They found themselves
in a new situation where they had
to suddenly be able to consume an
entire new operating model, a new
set of technologies to keep their
business up and running. And in or-
der for that to be successful at the
scope that they wanted or the scale
that they wanted, or the speed that
they wanted, it had to be driven by
data. You couldn’t suddenly double
the size of your operations staff
because you needed to double the
SD-WAN capability or your firewall
capability or your remote access ca-
pability.” Getting end-users online
was one aspect, but so was figuring
out how to use machine-to-machine
policies or business processes, be-
cause you could no longer count on
people being physically co-located
to accomplish them. Companies
that may have started the pandem-
ic at 20, 30 or 40% digitalized began
asking themselves how they could
get to 80%, Cobb says.
“The more digitally native you
were, probably the better you came
out of this situation in a more agile
way, in a more automated way, than
maybe if you weren’t,” he said. “That
could have turned into competitive
advantage for many people.”
It certainly seems to have worked
out that way for Dell. The company
reported record full-year revenues
for 2020, and Tom Sweet, Dell’s CFO,
said that the results were driven by
“operational focus and expanding
synergies across Dell Technolo-
gies and our ability to adjust to win
in any environment.”
Learning by doing 5G in a factory, a
lab and a connected campus
Given the nature of Ericsson’s re-
lationship with 5G, as a hardware
and software vendor who helps op-
erators to deliver the 5G networks
Ericsson enables communications service providers to capture the full value of connectivity. The company’s portfolio spans Networks, Digital Services, Managed Services, and Emerging Business. It is designed to help our customers go digital, increase efficiency, and find new revenue streams. Ericsson’s innovation investments have delivered the benefits of mobility and mobile broadband to billions of people around the world. Ericsson stock is listed on Nasdaq Stockholm and on Nasdaq New York.
www.ericsson.com/us
Ericsson_RCR-Verizon_8.5x11.indd 1Ericsson_RCR-Verizon_8.5x11.indd 1 4/6/21 6:44 PM4/6/21 6:44 PM
F E A T U R E R E P O R T
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themselves, it’s perhaps not surpris-
ing, the extent to which the compa-
ny is both an enabler and an explor-
er of the technology.
Across three different locations
in the U.S., the scope of the compa-
ny’s strategy becomes clear: Its D-15
lab in Silicon Valley; its Distributed
Innovation Network at its North
American headquarters in Plano,
Texas; and its new 5G smart factory
in Lewisville, Texas.
These are not internal company
R&D facilities — Ericsson has other
labs for that — but each one in its
way focuses on an aspect of tech
co-creation, from an idea of a use
case that 5G could enable, to demon-
strating the technology in a live net-
work, to how the company is using
its own and others’ advanced tech-
nology on a factory floor to produce
5G equipment.
“Drinking your own champagne”
is how Arvinder Anand, VP Ar-
chitecture, Technology and E2E
Solutioning for Ericsson’s North
America Digital Services division,
refers to how the company is both
producing and using 5G tech.
The first sip, one might say, comes
at D-15 Labs, the first of Ericsson’s
two major innovation centers in
North America. D-15 looks at use case
ideation beyond enhanced mobile
broadband – beyond 5G just being a
faster G – but that need to be validat-
ed with partners such as hyperscal-
ers or enterprises, and that involve
either commercial or non-commer-
cial software, Anand explains.
“The goal is really to make sure
that there is a commercial roadmap
and that the use cases can scale glob-
ally, starting with our North Amer-
ican pioneer operators,” says Meral
Shirazipour, director of innovation
engagements at D-15. The Silicon
Valley location is key, because it
fosters relationships with industry
partners – longtime collaborators
such as Qualcomm and Nvidia, or
startups, or enterprises themselves,
such as automotive manufacturers
who have innovation centers there.
One of the projects to come out of
D-15 to date includes a collabora-
tion to test augmented/virtual real-
ity in 5G, using a reference headset
from Qualcomm, Ericsson’s radios
and core and Nvidia’s cloud-based
edge solution. This particular proj-
ect was triggered by questions from
a Tier 1 CSP that indicated interest
in the use case, Shirazipour says.
Those are the kind of conversa-
tions that are meant to coalesce at
D-15: Ideas about how 5G could en-
able value in new products and ser-
vices, bringing partners together
and working out both the techni-
cal and business issues. The con-
versations are about evenly split
between technical and business,
according to Shirazipour – after all,
technology problems can almost
always be solved with sufficient
resources, it’s the business issues
that can be more constrained. One
frequent challenge in that process,
Shirazipour says, is what she calls a
chicken-and-egg issue: An end-cus-
tomer or enterprise wants to see
the value of a new solution before
they invest in it, but the partners
who are developing the technolo-
gy don’t want to invest in it unless
they have a customer commitment.
Having rapid prototyping labs like
D-15 helps to break through the
hesitation on both sides. “In a sense,
you show the value to the end cus-
tomer who can sign up and say, ‘yes,
we are interested’ and then have
all the parties really invest and do
the commercial version of the solu-
tion,” she adds.
“If you look at our service provid-
ers, they have a lot of assets and
they want to use their assets when
they get into this platform econo-
my, as we are calling it these days
for enterprises,” Anand says. When
a network is a platform, how do you
monetize it? The D-15 lab doesn’t
F E A T U R E R E P O R T
13
just look at technical issues, he says,
but opens up conversations about
revenue share, the value chain and
how various companies can partic-
ipate in those. It also can prompt a
look at modernizing legacy systems
– perhaps OSS/BSS solutions, for in-
stance -- in order to capitalize on a
new enterprise opportunity.
Trials and proofs-of-concept at
D-15 can mean that features get
picked up by Ericsson’s product
roadmap team for inclusion, but
Anand says that the most import-
ant thing is the competence build-
up. “All this cutting-edge technol-
ogy requires new competence, and
that has been a key focus … to cre-
ate a pool of strong subject matter
experts to take this cutting-edge
technology and work with our part-
ners in the ecosystem,” he says.
To take 5G, MEC and other tech-
nologies into the real world, Er-
icsson decided in 2019 to make its
Plano, Texas headquarters a 5G
campus. The 5G playground on the
38-acre campups, which includes
multiple buildings and a lake, went
live last year. It has about 30 of Er-
icsson indoor and outdoor radios, a
transport network and a core net-
work. Ericsson uses a combination
of mmWave, midband and CBRS
spectrum there, acting essentially
as its own operator of an end-to-
end network that consists of both
NonStandalone and Standalone 5G.
Farzad Lak, senior solutions man-
ager with Ericsson, says that the
idea was to create a distributed 5G
network on-site, with a data center
and central office as well as edge
sites to push computing even clos-
er to users. In an award-winning
demonstration last year, Ericsson
put together 5G network slicing
in a multi-vendor environment at
the Plano campus by enabling a
cashier-less grab-and-go beverage
vending machine. On a regular ba-
sis, Lak explains, there may be up
to half a dozen different trials or
demonstrations going on, each with
its own SIM-based access to the net-
work and dedicated resources: Net-
work slicing at work. “We are very
happy that the concept is actually
proven, and we are leveraging that,”
he says. “Slicing and segmentation
of the resources of the network tru-
ly is practiced there.”
In another record first, Ericsson
used the Plano campus to demon-
strate the readiness of its C Band
products, with a test that achieved
5.4 Gbps download speed using
MU-MIMO, and another, single-user
MIMO test later in the year. Such
demonstrations enable the company
to answer detailed questions from
customers about both 5G in gen-
eral and specific questions about,
say, C Band deployment, behavior
and potential interference issues,
according to Erin Liao, head of E2E
5G systems, who focuses on the RAN
aspects of the Plano campus.
“To answer these questions -- not
“All this cutting-edge technology requires new competence, and that has been a key focus … to create a pool of strong subject matter experts to take this cutting-edge technology and work with our partners in the ecosystem.”
Arvinder Anand, VP Architecture,
Technology and E2E
Solutioning for Ericsson’s North
America Digital Services
F E A T U R E R E P O R T
14
just on a piece of paper -- that’s
why we have this network,” Liao
explained. “We bring in our newest
products and then we integrate it,
make it work, demonstrate how
well it works and then we invite
customers or independent analysts
to evaluate, see it for themselves. …
This in many cases will help them
to envision how they could use this
functionality or product to improve
and enhance their network, or de-
ploy their next level of network
rollout.” For operators who want to
see how 5G SA works and its perfor-
mance, they can come to see it first-
hand in Plano. “Seeing is believing,”
she says. “Then you have a better
idea about how to design your
network.” Ericsson has integrated
with multiple SD-WAN providers
and hyperscalers at the site, both
in order to demonstrate use cases
and because its North American
operator customers expect such
capabilities. When Ericsson has to
demonstrate technology readiness
for an RFP, Anand says, it uses the
multi-vendor, live network in Plano
to do so. “This has really created
some openings or opportunities for
us to close the deals in North Amer-
ica,” he says.
Ericsson’s 5G factory in Lewis-
ville, Texas, is in many ways a man-
ifestation of the company’s hopes
for a 5G future: Sustainable and
smart, sleek and airy. Last February,
the newly built facility began pro-
ducing Ericsson’s Street Macro mil-
limeter-wave 5G product – the same
equipment that is deployed within
the factory, using 28 GHz spectrum
in a private network that also utiliz-
es LTE frequencies and additional
wireless technologies and advanced
data processing to realize the poten-
tial of Industry 4.0.
Erik Simonsson is the head of Er-
icsson’s 5G factory. The equipment
vendor has developed a number
of advanced technology use cases
there, including connecting auton-
omous mobile robots, which are
fairly common in warehousing and
production environments.
“We’ve equipped them with 5G
modems so that we can connect to
our own 5G network. Where 5G is
helping us there, is that in these
mobile robot environments, you
typically have different handover
points in Wi-Fi, and you have a lit-
tle bit of lag,” he explains. 5G helps
to solve that with faster reactions
and the ability to “see” around cor-
ners in the factory.
“These are technologies that will
develop over time, and I think we
will see more and more speed and
productivity from that type of equip-
ment, versus what you would have
without that technology,” he added.
Simonsson says that as Ericsson
has worked with mixed reality in
the factory for remote support, it
has seen the parallels with gaming Ericsson’s 5G factory in Lewisville, Texas
Ima
ge c
ourt
esy
of E
rics
son
F E A T U R E R E P O R T
15
in the consumer space and learns
about what is important in the ex-
perience of interacting with people
at other sites: Increased video qual-
ity, high-speed video transfer, low
lag. “In Covid, this has been and will
continue to be important,” he notes.
In addition, Ericsson has been
working both with manufacturers
of the mobile robots on how that
use case can continue to both be
developed and be adopted, through
getting the 5G connectivity built
into the robots themselves. While
the pandemic has limited the com-
pany’s ability to physically bring
visitors to the site, Simonsson says
that video and virtual tours have
been held. The tech in play at the
factory is helping Ericsson to fig-
ure out how to get more out of its
machinery, how to integrate sen-
sors and sensor data into its opera-
tions and enabling the company to
avoid having to pull cables or add
Wi-Fi hot spots.
“In manufacturing, you have a lot
of problems to solve – that’s kind of
the nature of our business,” he says.
“But what we see now when tech-
nology like these 5G are becoming
more and more available, is that
we can get a lot quicker at solving
problems. We get a lot more flexi-
ble in how we can move equipment
around. That’s what excites me,
especially when you have produc-
tion facilities that need to move a
lot of equipment around and need
to be able to have this speed in op-
erations. … It also brings this joy
of technology development into
manufacturing – so when you see
engineers working with this and
solving these problems, that’s super
exciting to me.”
The biggest learning, Simonsson
says, is the partnerships that have
to be part of such deployments.
“Technology is moving so fast,” he
says. “Everyone is trying to stay
ahead, but it also becomes a game
of keeping up,” he added. In addi-
tion to the typical vendors of man-
ufacturing equipment and services,
new companies are coming in and
staying up to speed means keeping
an eye on what other companies
and industries are doing.
“It’s completely different, this
learning by doing. When technolo-
gy is moving fast, you can’t really
have a three-year project plan and
then execute, and wait for some-
thing to happen at the end. You
need to work in very fast incre-
ments,” he said. “That’s something
that we built into our organization
as well, it’s a more agile approach.
You define what are we going to de-
liver the next quarter, you focus on
that, you learn, you re-adjust, you
Ericsson’s 5G factory in Lewisville, TexasIm
age
cou
rtes
y of
Eri
csso
n
F E A T U R E R E P O R T
16
adapt and then you take the next
step. That’s been fundamental also
for what we build, and what we
will see in the coming years as well
in this site.”
The factory is “very airy, and it
feels very vibrant,” he says. There’s
a high roof and a modern feel, but
“walking around, you really feel
the vibe” that employees are there
to put new technology together and
send it out into the world. Perhaps
even, to change the world as we
know it. And the factory, too.
Google Cloud: Leveraging its edge
Google Cloud spent much of 2020
ratcheting up its focus on supporting
telecom players’ computing needs,
particularly when it comes to edge.
Part of Google Cloud’s strategy
for serving telcos is developing
solutions that the carriers can both
use in their own business, and that
they can sell to others, according
to Amol Phadke, managing direc-
tor of telecom industry solutions
at Google Cloud. “The way we are
looking at it as Google Cloud is, we
really need to start to build tech-
nologies that serve both of those
purposes,” he says. Each of its port-
folio items “can be used both by
our CSP partners and clients, and
also by their end customers that
they want to serve, whether that’s
businesses or consumers.”
In March of last year, the compa-
ny made an announcement about
its overarching Global Mobile Edge
Cloud (GMEC) strategy, aiming to
deliver a “portfolio and market-
place of 5G solutions built jointly
with telecommunications compa-
nies’; its Anthos multi-cloud plat-
form for developing those solutions,
and underlying both of those, its
global distributed edge computing
infrastructure.
At the same time that it an-
nounced that strategy, Google
Cloud also touted a new collabora-
tion with AT&T in which the telco
would utilize Google Cloud’s edge
computing, AI/ML and Kuberne-
tes capabilities along with AT&T’s
network connectivity, with the two
companies testing 5G edge solu-
tions for enterprises such as retail,
manufacturing and transportation.
Ima
ge c
ourt
esy
of G
oogl
e
F E A T U R E R E P O R T
17
“Combining 5G with Google
Cloud’s edge compute technologies
can unlock the cloud’s true poten-
tial,” said Mo Katibeh, EVP and
CMO of AT&T Business. “This work
is bringing us closer to a reality
where cloud and edge technologies
give businesses the tools to create
a whole new world of experiences
for their customers.”
In terms of services which telcos
are both consuming and selling,
Phadke cites the example of Google
Cloud’s Contact Center AI – which
Verizon has announced that it is
using, with the goal of resolving
contact center inquiries faster and
making more efficient use of the
digital channels to which customers
have turned during the pandemic,
in lieu of visiting stores in-person.
Phadke says that other operators
that Google Cloud is working with
are not only using Contact Center
AI in their operations, but are then
packaging it to enterprise custom-
ers such as travel agencies.
But for Google Cloud itself, edge
computing is a salient example of
the company is leveraging a tech-
nology for itself and its customers.
“Google has built a strategy … of
really building out and leveraging
our existing edge computing foot-
print that’s there locally, and using
that as a business monetization
platform on which our CSP part-
ners and clients can innovate and
build applications to drive reve-
nues for themselves,” Phadke says.
The three building blocks of Goo-
gle Cloud’s strategy start with that
existing compute infrastructure.
He points out that Google had thou-
sands of locations worldwide that
were used as part its global infra-
structure that the company has
built, to serve applications that ev-
eryone around the globe uses: Con-
sumer applications, YouTube and
so on – an edge, before edge really
became a thing for telecom.
“One advantage of having that
planet-wide infrastructure was
that we could really use the edge
infrastructure to also offer edge
computing,” he continues. “When
we are partnering with our CSP
clients and partners, it meant we
didn’t have to ship out or roll out a
new footprint for edge compute. We
just leveraged what we had.”
The company has made that in-
frastructure the basis on which it
has layered its Anthos multi-cloud
software development environ-
ment, followed by the resulting ap-
plications -- which, as evidenced by
the telco collabs, are ideally a result
of co-creation.
Service providers often approach
the applications part in phases,
Phadke says: First in taking ad-
vantage of Google Cloud’s edge
computing infrastructure for their
own retail or customer experience
Among Google Cloud’s other publicly announced telecom deals centered on 5G and/or MEC: • A July 2020 partnership with Orange fo-
cused on “advanced cloud, edge comput-ing and cybersecurity services that will open up business opportunities for both Google Cloud and Orange.”
• A 2020 deal with Telefonica that includes plans for Google Cloud to launch a cloud region in Spain that leverages Telefonica’s Madrid regional infrastructure; for Tele-fonica to use Google Cloud to support the carrier’s own digital transformation; and for the two companies to develop a joint portfolio of 5G solutions that use Google Cloud’s edge.
• A ten-year agreement with Canada’s Telus to help the carrier deliver 5G and MEC ser-vices, struck in February of this year.
“[There is] a lot more openness now, because of the possibilities, and because there is no one player that has the whole answer in mind, so it’s really about creating that answer with an ecosystem.”
Amol Phadke, Managing Director of Telecom Industry Solutions, Google Cloud
Featured CompaniesF E A T U R E R E P O R T
18
operations, and then figuring out
which verticals they want to sell to
and which services fit. “This is an
example where we are putting edge
computing infrastructure inside
operators’ environments, for them
to harness edge computing as a way
to look at their customer efficien-
cy and [total cost of ownership],”
Phadke said. “To drive revenue,
they would repackage these and
sell it -- with us, to their customer
segments, in partnership -- in order
to drive specific industry vertical
solutions, like retail.”
As telecom providers seek to mon-
etize 5G, edge computing is broad-
ly recognized to be an important
part of that. Phadke says that the
conversations with telecom cus-
tomers around the relationships of
networks, computing resources and
applications are changing signifi-
cantly, to reflect an approach built
on partnerships.
“There is an appreciation and a
recognition that we are to work in
an open ecosystem together, with
cloud players, to really build this to-
gether,” he continues. “And it’s not
really any more a ‘here is what we
need, can you supply it or not’, it’s
more about, ‘how can we leverage
this to drive growth to change cus-
tomer experience radically, to help
our customers and is there a way
we can look at efficiently running
our businesses through TCO.’ Those
are the imperatives, and it’s more
about working collaboratively to
solve those imperatives, bringing
others in the mix,” he adds. “[There
is] a lot more openness now, because
of the possibilities, and because
there is no one player that has the
whole answer in mind, so it’s really
about creating that answer with an
ecosystem.”
Key takeaways:
• The rapid development of 5G,
MEC and virtualization and high
interest level among customers
have been drivers for the com-
panies who produce these tech-
nology solutions to also adopt
them, both for R&D, testing and
operational purposes.
• Firsthand experience with an
new technology can change
both product roadmaps and cus-
tomer conversations.
• Partnerships are key: Com-
panies are collaborating and
co-creating, from technical is-
sues to business strategy, rather
than a go-it-alone approach.
19
Featured Companies Featured Companies
Dell TechnologiesDell Technologies is ready to serve communications service providers (CSPs) around the world as they roll out 5G technologies and introduce new edge network services. We offer the expertise, telecom solutions and services to help CSPs transform their operations, modernize their networks and enhance their services portfolio..
IntelDell EMC and Intel jointly invest in tangible, business driven products and solutions; as it relates to transformative technology waves such as 5G, there is a realization that a variety of investments must be made across various aspects of the network, compute and storage infrastructure in order to explore and anticipate improvements that will prove useful to Dell EMC’s customers.
EricssonEricsson enables communications service providers to capture the full value of connectivity. The company’s portfolio spans Networks, Digital Services, Managed Services, and Emerging Business. It is designed to help our customers go digital, increase efficiency, and find new revenue streams. Ericsson’s innovation investments have delivered the benefits of mobility and mobile broadband to billions of people around the world. Ericsson stock is listed on Nasdaq Stockholm and on Nasdaq New York. www.ericsson.com.
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UPCOMING 2021
EDITORIAL PROGRAMS INCLUDE:
APRIL 2021
Private enterprise 5G NOCs – the emergence of regionally distributed operator-run NOCs for industrial grade cellular
Digital Factory Solutions | Industrial 5G OPC-UA over TSN in industrial 5G networks. Why URLLC-grade 5G won’t cut the mustard without it.
MAY 2021
The role of hyperscalers in industrial 5G – will they usurp carriers?
JUNE 2021
5G-connected venues: A shifting value proposition in a post-COVID world
Making Industry Smarter | Professional Sports Referee!!! RTLS is sports tracking – in football (soccer), hockey, cricket, tennis etc.
JULY 2021
Smarter buildings are safer buildings: Tenant safety as an amenity
Everything-as-a-service: Consumption models when the cloud is everywhere.
AUGUST 2021
Monetizing MEC: What’s the value in the edge?
Is cloud gaming the breakout consumer 5G use case?
SEPTEMBER 2021
Mid-band/c-band–trial, test, trajectory
The Open RAN report
OCTOBER 2021
Creative destruction: How network disaggregation changes everything