MWC 2015: A Tale of Three Technologies

Two new phones were released by Samsung, for example – the Samsung Galaxy S6 and the S6 Edge – with a third unveiled by HTC in the shape of the One M9. Meanwhile, proving that telecoms is indeed more than just phones, Huawei showcased its first smartwatch and Sony declared the “world’s lightest and slimmest 10-inch tablet” with the Xperia Z4.

 

Receiving even more attention than the gadgets, though, was the technology behind them. So what were the most talked about network trends this year? 

 

Grabbing more than its fair share of the spotlight was 4G’s successor, 5G. With research starting about 16 years ago, some might find it surprising that the concept is not further along, but the message at Mobile World Congress was clear; when operator s, technology vendors and service providers talk about 5G, they are not just simply talking about network evolution. 

 

Firstly, to achieve the advances in speed and capacity desired for 5G, far more than a network evolution is needed – it has to be a complete network transformation. The European Commission’s Digital Economy and Society Commissioner Günther Oettinger highlighted this as he spoke about the topic. 

 

“This new era requires a new network of communications which is not just about more speed and more capacity,” Oettinger said. “It’s about the network infrastructure becoming as easily available and as pervasive as the air that we breathe. It needs to be ready at all times.”

 

The second noteworthy factor to come from 5G discussions among industry visionaries is that the focus is on much more than just the network. Whereas 4G was all about faster, better connectivity, 5G is not. It encompasses everything, as highlighted by everyone who spoke about it, with terms like “industrial revolution” and “connected generation” appearing in almost every presentation. 

 

Ken Hu, Deputy Chairman & Rotating CEO of Huawei, for example, said: “We believe three key actions are needed: open collaboration, heavy investment in innovation and an evolutionary commercial strategy. The new world of digital industrial revolution presents enormous opportunities for the telecom industry and technology innovation will help us get there faster.”

 

Meanwhile, Chaobin Yang, Chief Marketing Officer of the Wireless Network Product Line at Huawei, used his presentation, titled ‘Business Cases for a 5G World,’ on Day 3 to speak about Huawei’s vision and unveiled a whole set of 5G air interface technologies, including new multiple access, wave form and channel cod ing.

 

Away from 5G, another top trend was Cloud. Despite already having been on everyone’s lips in previous years, hundreds of new solutions involving cloud computing to enhance networks were demoed at the show, proving the longevity of the concept. 

 

Most, of course, have already accepted the cloud as a given, so was there anything left to talk about? 

 

According to Huawei, the answer to this is: “absolutely!” The ICT solutions provider dedicated a presentation to the topic and revealed its hybrid cloud solution, FusionCloud Omni. And the vision of cloud as hybrid was a commonly held one with many solutions providers now trying to elevate their position from being one of many cloud providers to being a cloud broker. 

 

“In order to explore more business opportunities, we believe cloud data centres which sit at the very top of three critical sections of the digital ecosystem will turn telcos from big pipe providers into creating a digitised service market place and this is a crucial next step for telco carriers,” said Dennis Gu, Chief Architect of Cloud Computing Solutions at Huawei. “An open cloud operating system makes it possible to consolidate resources of networks into one unified system running on top of cloud platforms. This enables lower total cost of ownership and much higher agility, always in alignment with business requirements.”

 

Gu went on to outline Huawei’s FusionCloud solution which enables interconnection among heterogeneous public and private clouds on a single hybrid cloud. The ICT solutions provider claims the service is different to most other hybrid cloud solutions on the market because they tend to be isolated, homogeneous solutions. Public cloud within hybrid cloud is also prone to security and network instabili ty risks. Therefore, customers face challenges when deploying or migrating their service applications on a hybrid cloud. Huawei’s FusionCloud Omni solution features openness, security and agility, to resolve these hybrid cloud issues.

 

“Only by being open, secure, and agile, can a hybrid cloud bring the maximal benefits to enterprise customers, help telecom carriers seize strategic opportunities arising from public cloud development, as well as increase carriers’ end-user loyalty,” concluded Gu. “Open, secure, agile hybrid clouds will become the mainstream development mode in the future ICT industry.”

 

Other topics in the spotlight for a second year included SDN and NFV. Like Cloud, showcases of these solutions have evolved from discussion and initial test cases to a full range of proven technologies available now for deployment. The age-old dilemma of interoperability has also started to be addressed. 

 

Huawei’s history of developing NFV provides an example of how it has evolved.  In 2012, the company unveiled its SoftCOM strategy and joined OpenStack and ETSI NFV ISG. Standards organisations like these have been responsible for accelerating NFV development, with open source communities and Proof of Concept (POC) use cases. While the last two years have produced a number of POCs and field trials, there were still only a few commercial use cases. 

 

By 2014, however, more than 30 POC projects with leading global operators working with Huawei were underway. In the same year, the company also joined OPNFV, and deployed the first commercial use of VoLTE based on NFV architecture. According to Huawei, commercial deployment of NFV will start this year, with larger-scale deployments expected in 2016. 

 

“We expect to see widespread comme rcial NFV in 2017, and NFV will be a mainstream application by 2020,” said Yin Dongming, Chief Mobile Broadband Network Specialist of Huawei Wireless Product Line. “To achieve this, we launched an NFV open lab in Xi’an, China, earlier this year. With initiatives like this, we are confident we can achieve NFV success.”

 

Huawei’s development of SDN tells a similar story, with numerous reference cases of operators which have already deployed Huawei’s technologies, including ones in China and Japan. Particular attention has also been paid to the issue of interoperability and Huawei has selected the open source SDN Open Networking Operating System (ONOS) as its platform on which to develop its SDN technologies. 

 

Ayush Sharma, Strategic Vice President and Head of Carrier IP BU, at Huawei, outlined the benefits of ONOS. 

 

“Firstly, ONOS is a community of service providers working on solutions for service providers which means the problems and the solutions being developed are very practical,” he said. “Secondly, the development is very controlled and the decontamination issues associated with other models are eliminated in ONOS. In a nutshell, we will use ONOS, develop use cases and run trials with these carriers and continue to contribute.”

 

With so many plans in the pipeline, then, these three trends are not just the top takeaways from this year’s show – they are also the building blocks of future connectivity and are very much here to stay.