With MWC Barcelona taking place this week at the Fira Gran Via, Ariana Lynn, Principal Analyst at The Fast Mode spoke to Matthieu Bourguignon, Senior Vice-President of Network Infrastructure Europe Business at Nokia on the company's participation at the event.
Ariana: What are some of the key themes of this year's MWC?
Matthieu: This year, our company strategy for the Network Infrastructure division at Nokia is focused on utilising our technology leadership to further engage with service providers and enterprises. MWC is, as always, a brilliant event for networking with existing and potential customers in this space.
Overall, we’ll be talking to stakeholders about our global delivery of fixed access, IP routing, data center networks, and optical transport for both terrestrial and subsea applications. But beyond this, we are looking for opportunities from sectors outside of mobile devices to deliver Nokia’s IP, and we’re continuing to invest in R&D for Nokia Technologies.
Automotive is one sector where we’re already seeing significant interest - we have already closed license agreements with many companies, and MWC gives us the opportunity to explain to potential customers what we can deliver for them. Other industries showing a keen interest are coming from the rail and utilities sectors.
Ariana: What are some of the events that Nokia has lined up? Any showcases?
Matthieu: Whether they are well-established CSPs; new networking players or organisations managing mission-critical network infrastructure, our customers have much in common. First, they are determined to grow their business. At MWC, we will showcase innovations - including in fixed wireless access for sub-6 and mmWave and broadband experience software - that enable customers to do exactly that.
Second, the more vital networks become, the more important it is to protect them from everything from outages to the threats posed by criminals. We will show how our unique Deepfield offering provides faster, more accurate DDoS mitigation, and demonstrate Nokia’s quantum-safe networking: protecting customers against fast-emerging threats.
Finally, our customers want all this while optimising operations to reduce cost and power usage. We will demonstrate how our PSE-6s and WaveSuite solutions are already delivering these objectives and how we are harnessing the power of AI to help simplify operations.
We will also show the results of joint research into AI-interoperability technology that boosts wireless capacity and performance; announce developments with regards to energy power savings and also unveil the industry’s first multi-access edge slicing innovation with e& UAE. Watch this space for more!
Ariana: What's the outlook for telecoms, specifically the mobile industry in the next 12 months?
Matthieu: The main concerns we’re seeing from our customers are around how they can grow their business and networks; protect their networks from outages and threats, and optimise their operations to reduce costs and power usage. The biggest investment from CSPs is going to go into making their networks ‘more consumable’ - this is what we call “Network as Code.” We’re going to see the market shift to accommodate these needs.
Innovations in silicon; extension of bandwidth capacity; development of more sophisticated DDoS mitigation, and network automation are all going to be top priorities for CSPs and enterprises, and the telecoms industry will need to react in order to meet the ever-expanding expectations from customers.
Over the coming months and years we’re also going to see conversations around sustainability and ESG intensify. It’s not enough to promise sustainable outcomes for customers - they want to see their providers embedding sustainability into their corporate strategies, finance frameworks, and business operations.
