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Telenor's Sandberg Faces 5G, NFV DilemmaTT: Where is Telenor on this digital journey? BTS: We are not done. We have definitely started on that journey and we are going to be investing in digital services and in digitizing the whole telco, which means that instead of having digital on the side of the telco business it's going to be part of the telco business. The way we are organized now is to have a CMO [chief marketing officer] and CTO [chief technology officer] as part of the whole business and they have digital as part of product development initiatives, such as WowBox in Bangladesh, which is basically a portal. All of that is in the CMO organization and he is being measured on the success of these new digital products. It's becoming a part of our DNA. We need to change our way of working -- if not become a software company then become a software-ish company and that means taking best practices from OTTs and startups to speed up the telco. We have started that journey but are far away from completing it. TT: Is it going to require a big investment to get to where you need to be? BTS: It will be a big investment but we are saying we need to find the money for that in the business. The task is for the traditional access business, through transformation, to find ways of cutting legacy costs to make room for the new. That is the message. TT: When you look at OTTs and startups, are you learning about the operational improvements you can make from investing in digital services? BTS: That is one way. Another is to hire people with the right experience. But we are a company with 33,000 employees now and we're not going to replace all those people so we need to add to expertise and retrain a lot of people. We will need lot of new competence in Telenor and that is competence in machine learning, software and methodology -- how to work differently. Telenor Research, the unit I have, started talking about this a few years ago. We said we could spend all our time and everyone in research could be doing machine learning and we would still have more work than resources in a few years, for sure. It seemed obvious we were going that way. We said the same thing about service design -- we need to find new ways of designing the customer journey to think mobile and digital rather than physical when it comes to serving customers, even in markets like Asia. TT: How is digital transformation affecting your services strategy when it comes to pricing and the provision of services? BTS: Here there are different views. One view is that the 5G logic and approach will succeed and we'll be able to launch access products that are differentiated on latency and speed. Why not have your camera upload photos [for a lower fee] at night when the pressure on network might be less. Why should it be against regulation to offer such a service? That is an example. In one line of thinking we'll be able to differentiate basic access products a lot more than is possible today and have two-sided business models and charge an app developer for guaranteed bandwidth. If that becomes possible then telcos have an opportunity to have several tiers of pricing -- much more than today. It won't just be one way to end customers and it will be very diversified. With machine learning we could tailor offers to small groups and individuals based on actual needs. There is lots of opportunity for smarter pricing that gives value both ways. If that is not possible, then that avenue will be more limited. You will need to succeed through your optimization agenda, by cutting the cost base in your core access business a lot. We'll do that anyway but it will be more important and it will be more important to succeed with new services. Most telcos will place bets in both camps. They will work on costs and ways of pricing data that are more intelligent than today and on getting footprints in new service areas.TT: When you talk about new services do you mean new types of access product? BTS: Not necessarily. Right now we have typical OTT services such as WowBox in Asia and we are now looking at how machine learning could personalize that more. In Asian markets in particular it's not necessarily divvied up yet and we believe that local content and local solutions are going to be important next to big OTTs. We will have social sites better tailored to Thais, perhaps, than Facebook. There are opportunities to play the OTT game. TT: Because you have the local presence a Google or Facebook might not have? BTS: Yes, and because at least in this phase of their development it might not be possible or profitable for them to exploit that, while for someone like us or a startup it could be. Then we have the digital verticals and we're investing into companies we believe will be important. They are sort of left alone, not being integrated into the telco business, but we will be looking at synergies over time.TT: Do you get rights to intellectual property? BTS: I don't think that's a big thing for us but it could be. And obviously with the last position we made -- Tapad -- we spent $360 million on an acquisition. That's a move into ad tech for us and we'll run that as a separate business. But probably over time we'll look at ways of using that in our business. That is one example. Another example is financial services. We are the biggest payment provider in Pakistan. We are growing in several other markets with different models for financial services. We are also into classifieds. There, we are in markets where we're not a telco at all, like in Latin America. The other thing is buying into startups and looking to develop them further. If we are successful with a number of digital services we are building, like WowBox, they might be spun off as verticals down the line. In 10 years, maybe the verticals will be Telenor and the telco business will be a vertical. — Iain Morris, , News Editor, Light Reading, Editor-in-Chief, Telco Transformation < Previous Page 2 / 2 |
In part two of this Q&A, the carrier's group head of network virtualization, SDN and NFV calls on vendors to move faster and lead the cloudification charge.
It's time to focus on cloudification instead, Fran Heeran, the group head of Network Virtualization, SDN and NFV at Vodafone, says.
5G must coexist with LTE, 3G and a host of technologies that will ride on top of it, says Arnaud Vamparys, Orange Network Labs' senior vice president for radio networks.
The OpenStack Foundation's Ildiko Vancsa suggests that 5G readiness means never abandoning telco applications and infrastructures once they're 'cloudy enough.'
IDC's John Delaney talks about how telecom CIOs are addressing the relationship between 5G, automation and virtualization, while cautioning that they might be forgetting the basics.
On-the-Air Thursdays Digital Audio
ARCHIVED | December 7, 2017, 12pm EST
Orange has been one of the leading proponents of SDN and NFV. In this Telco Transformation radio show, Orange's John Isch provides some perspective on his company's NFV/SDN journey.
Special Huawei Video
Huawei Network Transformation Seminar The adoption of virtualization technology and cloud architectures by telecom network operators is now well underway but there is still a long way to go before the transition to an era of Network Functions Cloudification (NFC) is complete. |
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