The theme of this year’s Mobile World Congress in Shanghai was: Discover the Future – and the future of 5G and AI featured prominently throughout all of the opening keynote sessions on the opening day of the industry-leading event, which attracted thousands of key influencers from all over the ICT world.
One of the other main talking points from Day 1 of MWC Shanghai was the criticism levelled at regulators from GSMA Director General Mats Granryd, who said it was critical that for a regulatory framework to be designed that was ‘fit for the digital age’.
It has been projected that telecommunication operators all over the Asia Pacific region are planning to invest nearly $190bn in mobile capex between now and 2020. However, the Director General of the GSMA insisted that this will not be possible until regulators implement a framework that is fit for purpose and can facilitate the needs of operators in the region.
In a fiery opening keynote, Granryd highlighted a number of key measures that needed to be addressed to accelerate the commercialization of 5G networks, and they included how crucial the timely release of harmonized spectrum with the right conditions were; policies that helped the deployment of next-generation infrastructure; the application of the same rules for equivalent digital services; and the need to determine appropriate privacy and data protection rules.
In addition to this, the GSMA Director General insisted that moving forward 5G and AI would be setting the stage for our mobile future.
He pointed out network slicing is a key 5G technology for delivering smart capabilities to enterprises and that operators will be able to create multiple virtual networks, addressing different market segments and use cases on a single 5G network infrastructure.
He added, “To be truly life-changing, artificial intelligence requires hyper-connectivity, offering ultra-high speed and ultra-low latency. These two mega trends, combined, are ushering in a new era for our industry, an era of intelligent connectivity.”
His sentiments were echoed by representatives of AT&T, Huawei, China Mobile and China Telecom.
Huawei’s rotating chairman Eric Xu stressed the need for 5G to be developed with privacy, encryption and regulation of personal data firmly in mind, and is confident that the technology will be safer than its 4G predecessor.
Xu suggested that after four decades of mobile development, it was clearly indicative that there were now two business models that urgently needed to be addressed, which were according to the rotating CEO of Huawei, the mobile network and the mobile internet, stressing that the latter faces the biggest threat in terms of privacy and security.
However, Xu declared that the Chinese telecommunications behemoth would not ‘blackmail partners’ with licensing costs for 5G, and stressed its commitment to the Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory (FRAND) principle, which is typically described for patent terms.
Xu said, “Huawei will strictly follow FRAND and provide support to reduce costs for patents as well as present a transparent patent framework to connect hundreds of millions of devices. “With 5G, we can satisfy the requirement for volume. 4G quality in China is declining in heavily populated areas. The spectrum is not enough to support traffic consumption and the speed is also not good enough.”
