As the industry works to meet the requirements for constant connectivity, telecom service providers face the challenge of standing out in an overcrowded market.
Ian Hood
They must navigate amidst the rise of new solutions and technologies that promise lucrative opportunities, while balancing the need to reduce service costs with the imperative to generate meaningful business outcomes by investing in innovative applications, technologies, and services.
Here's a fresh perspective on how service providers can navigate the challenges ahead.
AI adoption amid chaos
Artificial intelligence (AI) is ideal for leveraging the deployment flexibility offered by the distributed nature of service providers' networks, as well as boosting their operational efficiency. Open source is helping to create small-sized AI models that can help reduce costs and computing requirements, while powering an organization's current applications and processes. And by leveraging these smaller AI models across the radio access network (RAN), core, and more, service providers will be able to address an increasing number of business and operational challenges.
Today, AI presents more opportunities for service providers than ever before. However, we know that this can bring greater complexity, especially as the number and size of AI applications increase. Red Hat is working to simplify this growing complexity through data engineering initiatives and trusted solutions, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI and Red Hat OpenShift AI, that facilitate faster data processing, real-time decision-making, and optimized application performance.
Service providers will be able to leverage AI to achieve intelligent lifecycle management automation. AI will provide deeper insights across multiple network and IT domains, including all devices and services, with an eye toward improving business and resource efficiency. Many service providers have passed the initial phase of AI testing and deploy a diverse set of cognitive assistants, customer service use cases, and business operations use cases, because the business benefits of these cases can be easily quantified.
Some service providers also offer those AI-as-a-Service capabilities to their enterprise customers. There are other AI-based use cases that are currently being tested across the network, especially within AI-RAN, to achieve sustainability goals and build smart, autonomous infrastructure.
While AI offers significant advantages, the return on investment may not be immediately apparent. This means that service providers must identify a realistic goal to increase productivity and operational efficiency through AI and implement it across their enterprise accordingly. By leveraging AI with well-defined goals and strategy, service providers can bring their AI projects into production mode faster and succeed.
From telco to techco
In recent years, telecommunications companies have transformed, expanding their business model to become a technology company: a provider of digital services and technology. Throughout this transition, service providers face challenges, such as regulatory restrictions, cybersecurity threats, and cultural shifts within their own organizations.
However, by adopting open source technologies and methodologies, they can overcome these obstacles while also generating new growth opportunities, innovative business models, and market strategies. Here are some learnings taken from working with our clients that can speed up this process:
● Focus on delivering business outcomes from incremental execution.
● Empower interdisciplinary teams to collaborate and execute together successfully.
● Choose partners and integrators who understand and link to business objectives.
● Complement teams with qualified members and partner-provided training
● Automate everything to counteract operational complexity and achieve agility.
● Establish clear success criteria and track the progress of projects.
● Lead the integration and governance tasks in progress.
● Start small and make continuous adjustments as needed.
Virtualization
In the telecommunications sector, virtualization has regained its importance with a renewed perspective. While service providers have been leveraging large-scale virtualization around the world for some time, today they are taking a closer look at their investments in traditional solutions. This is due to rising business costs and an ever-evolving business landscape.
As service providers explore alternatives to their current virtualized infrastructure, they discover the potential for new measurable results from modernizing that virtualized infrastructure to a common cloud-native infrastructure. Telcos are also looking to transform their environments to combine their critical applications with an increasing number of AI models and tools.
Service providers work with Red Hat to save money and also to transform their business while extending the life of their virtual machines (VMs). The unified management approach to legacy virtualized applications and modern cloud-native workloads enables them to generate operational benefits.
Common Cloud Architectures Pivot to Open RAN
Open RAN deployments have been progressing more slowly than traditional RAN, but they have achieved the cost-effectiveness and performance needed for large-scale adoption. The ecosystem has matured thanks to the support of cloud platforms and common operational tools that streamline automation and lifecycle management across many RAN sites.
Service providers that have deployed core 5G applications from multiple vendors on a common cloud-native platform have applied these learnings to open RAN, accelerating time to market. Open RAN is gaining more and more momentum for its ability for service providers to differentiate themselves from the competition while improving security, operations, and service delivery at the edge.
Private networks are emerging as the primary adopters, leveraging open RAN to create trusted customizable business solutions. Service providers are also using open RAN with fixed wireless access (FWA) to bring broadband to poorly served areas. Meanwhile, there are already offers of commercial low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites that integrate non-terrestrial networks (NTNs) to bring mobile broadband to remote regions.
Smart and autonomous infrastructure
Observability is a data-driven approach to automating infrastructure across hardware, software, and cloud deployments.
The new differentiator for service providers is access to and analysis of that data on a large scale. The use of data and the combination of predictive analytics, generative AI (gene AI), and open APIs will help service providers generate deep insights and operational recommendations to build an intelligent and autonomous infrastructure.
An example of this type of infrastructure is AI in the RAN, which can dynamically manage frequencies, sectors, and base stations and thus improve efficiency, power consumption, and performance metrics. Similarly, generative AI and AIOps facilitate predictive maintenance, accurate root cause analysis (RCA), and smarter decision-making backed by security measures in terms of privacy and regulatory compliance.
Laying the groundwork for 6G and what comes next
Service providers are taking a more cautious approach to the next generation of mobile architecture (6G) with a focus on improving business outcomes. Infrastructure is not enough to define 6G: it requires the participation of a broader ecosystem of industry participants, with the consequent demand for structural and cultural changes along the entire value chain. This collaborative approach will be key to driving innovation and ensuring that technology meets the demands of the future.
As part of these initiatives, we will also see service providers explore new use cases powered by 6G, from immersive AR/VR/XR experiences and advanced autonomous vehicles (V2X) to precision positioning and embedded sensing. This exploration can also lead to more energy-efficient Internet of Things (IoT) integration, contributing to how we deliver services in remote and remote operations at the edge.
By providing the flexibility required, managing unpredictability, and maintaining independence in an ever-evolving world, open source will play a critical role in addressing the adoption of innovation.
The future will focus on leveraging AI in combination with closed-loop automation to enable new data-driven services, achieve ambitious sustainability goals, and enable a better world. In the face of constant disruptions, the path for the service provider will require constant adjustments, empowering its teams to change the way they work, while boosting business value and operational efficiency, while standing out from other competitors.
Text written by Ian Hood, Chief Technologist, Global Telco / ICT Business at Red Hat.
