Viewpoint
As we move towards a better connected world, it is not just the technology which is changing in order to keep up with visions of the future. Telcos, which have in the past been viewed as closed and siloed, must also adapt their business models if they are to thrive in the new digital economy.
Open Ecosystem
It is exactly this issue which emerged as a common theme at Huawei’s booth in Hall 1. Split into different sections – with dedicated areas for Smart Cities, Video Everywhere and IoT, to name a few – the demos and technologies on show were vast and varied but the message was the same: Operators can no longer do it alone and must collaborate and form partnerships in order to succeed.
Reflecting this message are the three major open ecosystem programmes Huawei has introduced and developed. The ICT solution provider believes these are essential for the success of future telco business transformation and in creating an open, collaborative and sharing digital economy. Its ‘Open Labs partner programme’, for instance, consists of more than 10 globally-distributed open labs, with 600 established partners to facilitate the interaction among the operators, various different providers and independent service vendors in a multi vendor environment.
Huawei’s CTO Dr San-qi Li explained: “Among them, we can provide and facilitate the inter operation, the integration, solution certifications, co innovation, testing, and so on. This is very much carrier driven, deepening our early engagement with lead carriers for joint innovation and early solution validation through agile and lean management. The emergent solutions formed through this program at Open Labs include ICT, IoT, IoV, SDN/NFV and so on.”
Huawei calls its second programme Open Developer Ecosystem Platform Programme, or eSDK. This programme is based on the philosophy that the future success of the telco business transformation primarily relies on how carriers can build a strong developer ecosystem to attract and empower a large number of developers for new service creation and value chain extensions.
“When we talk about the ‘digital economy’, to a certain extent, the digital economy, i.e., its openness, collaboration and sharing nature, is captured as the so-called API economy,” continued Li. “Our eSDK developer platform uses well-defined open API and SDK to empower the developer ecosystem world to participate and engage with each other, given the nature of the great uncertainty and unpredictability of disruptive innovations moving forward.”
Finally, Huawei’s Business Ecosystem Enrichment Programme has been developed to address various disruptive business models which are emerging as a result of innovative new solutions. It looks at how this business transformation can translate to commercial success for operators and uses ICT infrastructure to empower business partners to have key value creation around applications, services and data driven analytics, etc.
Video Everywhere
While the theory of this sounds impressive, how can these open ecosystem programmes actually be utilised in a way that creates real value for operators? Li suggests there are several methods, with one of the primary ones being video.
“With cloud-based architecture and data-driven analytics, our open video platform is built to enable various video applications services across consumer, industry and enterprise,” he said “The success of video solutions for telcos is much about new business innovations, especially for the creation of high value position in the digital content ecosystems beyond high quality video delivery.”
As an example, Sichuan Telecom partnered with Huawei to adopt video as a basic service and devote its network infrastructure to providing the best 2K/4K video solution experiences across fixed and mobile connections, as well as focusing on content aggregation enrichment, including IPTV, digital video, 4K, HD and 4G.
Li continued: “More importantly, new business value propositions were created through digital bundling and revenue sharing, with new business value chains being formed with all partners. As a result, over the last couple of years, they have added 4.1 million Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) subscribers, as well as 6.9 million new IPTV subscribers. Meanwhile, fixed broadband ARPU increased by 14%.”
Other benefits Sichuan Telecom experienced included a substantially reduced monthly churn rate and the addition of 4.3 million more mobile subscribers.
Smart Cities
Another area which Huawei is calling for collaboration in is Smart Cities. The rise in public safety incidents is behind Huawei’s growing focus on this area and Huawei’s Safe City Solution leverages new ICT to enable “visualisation” and “collaboration” – two elements that Huawei believes will be critical to building safe cities.
At its booth in Hall 1, Huawei partnered with Hexagon to demonstrate its capabilities in this area, showcasing the industry’s first Visualized Converged Command Solution. This supports the visualisation of accidents and emergency response teams to allow unified commands based on a geographical information system map. In addition, the solution enables collaborative management across different departments through cross-terminal seamless interconnection of video, for example, surveillance or conferencing.
This partnership with Hexagon, a global leader in Safe City application software with a leading global market share of Intergraph and CAD systems, is just one example of the sort of collaboration that Huawei believes is needed in this area.
Joe So, CTO of Industry Solutions, Marketing & Solution Sales Department, Enterprise Business Group, Huawei and a Smart Cities expert, said: “At Huawei, we can open up a lot of opportunities but we are fully focused on the ICT infrastructure and we cannot do it by ourselves. No one in the world can create a safe city through one company. It has to be shared; it has to be collaborative.”
IoT
Linked closely to Smart Cities and another area in which Huawei is urging operators to cooperate is the Internet of Things (IoT). Here, Huawei’s activity in NarrowBand(NB)-IoT provides a clear example of the sort of activity it is involved in.
In May 2014, Huawei and Vodafone collaboratively applied for the approval of the Study Item of the NB-M2M technology in 3GPP GERAN meeting, where it was approved. In October of the same year, Qualcomm submitted a proposal for another version of the Narrow Band IoT technology with the name NB-OFDM. In May 2015, the air interface technologies that had been proposed by Huawei and Qualcomm were merged together, resulting in both parties agreeing to use FDMA in uplink and OFDMA in downlink, the name as at then was changed to NarrowBand Cellular IoT (NB-CIoT).Other vendors, including Ericsson, then increased the pace of their research of the NarrowBand IoT technology and later submitted the NB-LTE (NarrowBand LTE) concept during the August 10, 2015 GERAN meeting. In September 2015, 3GPP accepted both NB-LTE and NB-CIoT as Work Items in R13, changing the name to NBIoT,
Dr San qi Li added: “Again, in NB-IoT, openness, collaboration and sharing are foundations of the digital economy. We are proactivity building the corresponding ecosystem for network operators and service providers across the industry, consumer and enterprise world but we need innovation beyond technology and system integration and this can only be achieved through new business models built around partnerships.”
Conclusion
Whether looking to launch IoT services, improve the safety of a city or upgrade their networks to be video-centric, collaboration certainly looks set to be key in a telco’s journey to success. Furthermore an open digital ecosystem is strategically important to the industry’s future.
As Zou Zhilei, President of Carrier Business Group at Huawei, concluded: “In the pursuit of openness, collaboration and shared success, we will continue to expand our business partnerships, make greater contributions to the industry, and partner with industry players to create open roads to a better connected world. Through successful digital transformation, we believe carriers can lead the value chain and accelerate the transition towards tomorrow’s digital economy.”
