A week in telecoms: Singtel and Ericsson team up on Naas

5G makes progress in Nigeria and Vietnam

Vietnam is building up a head of steam with 5G. Announcements about network builds are coming thick and fast following the government’s move to issue 5G licenses to Viettel and Vietnam Posts and Telecommunications Group (VNPT) in April 2024.

Both Ericsson and Nokia recently said they had secured new deals with Viettel Group to deploy 5G equipment in the nation. Nokia has now announced a new partnership with VNPT to deploy 5G technology.

Huynh Quang Liem, CEO of VNPT, indicated that the operator intends to “rapidly deploy a world-class 5G network and meet the growing demands of our customers in Vietnam” in collaboration with the Finnish vendor.

VNPT and Viettel have committed to deploying a network and providing services no later than one year after receiving the licenses, and investing in 3,000 stations after two years. The 5G service will be launched first in urban parts of provinces and cities, then expanded to the remaining areas.

Meanwhile, over in West Africa, Ericsson has formed a partnership with the Nigerian government to “develop the potential of 5G connectivity in Nigeria,” signing a new memorandum of understanding (MoU).

The Swedish vendor said the purpose of the MoU is to establish a framework of cooperation between the Nigerian government and Ericsson Nigeria spanning 5G technology development, deployment and innovation. It noted that Nigeria is Africa’s largest country by population, accounting for more than 15% of the continent’s population.

According to a report by GSMA Intelligence, 27 operators in 16 markets across Africa had launched commercial 5G services as of September 2023.

In Nigeria, MTN launched 5G services in September 2022 and Mafab and Airtel followed suit in January 2023 and June 2023 respectively. Nigeria is expected to have 12.5 million 5G connections in 2025 and 71.5 million in 2030. 5G fixed wireless access services are also marketed by Airtel and MTN. 

McKinsey outlines telco benefits from responsible AI adoption

A new report from McKinsey has highlighted that artificial intelligence offers enormous potential to drive growth at telcos, but only if they deploy AI in ways that are ethical, safe, transparent, and compliant with regulations.

According to the consultancy group, if telcos act quickly, they can lead the way in deploying both generative AI to improve the customer experience and cut costs and analytical AI to optimize their back-end operations and infrastructure.

However, it warns that telcos cannot transform themselves into AI-native companies without also focusing acutely on responsible AI (RAI). 

“In the highly regulated telecom industry, RAI frameworks that govern accountability and transparency are critical to gaining consumer trust, protecting sensitive data, and safeguarding against security threats. All this makes RAI more than just an ethical exercise for telcos. It is also a business imperative,” the report says.

McKinsey said its analysis indicates that telcos implementing the most advanced RAI practices could deploy use cases that collectively capture up to $250 billion in value worldwide by 2040, equating to 44% of the full industry-wide value created by AI during that period.

It added that an effective RAI framework should include an easy-to-use maturity-modeling tool to help telcos fully understand their baseline AI readiness and identify opportunities for growth and improvement. Maturity models help telcos capture their full AI potential at every stage of deployment, the company said. 

Worth noting here is that the TM Forum has already launched GAMIT — Generative AI Maturity Interactive Tool, in collaboration with AWS.

Singtel and Ericsson team up for NaaS

Singtel and Ericsson have highlighted a new collaboration that aims to simplify setting up new network services through the operator’s Paragon API platform and the vendor’s service orchestration and assurance platform.

The ambition is to make it easier for operators to provision new services such as network slicing and service assurance for enterprise customers, creating monetization opportunities.

As the partners explain, the manual provisioning of network services by CSPs is currently the norm, with a self-service option seen as too complex or costly to develop.

Their combined solution is designed to enable telcos’ enterprise customers to order and manage their own communications services through Singtel’s Paragon platform, where requests are immediately executed in the network via Ericsson service orchestration and assurance.

Manoj Prasanna Kumar, Chief Technology Officer, Singtel Digital InfraCo, said the strategic partnership “will strengthen the joint value proposition and make it easier and faster for telcos to rollout their 5G, edge and network API use cases.”

Mats Karlsson, Head of Solution Area Business and Operations Support Systems, Ericsson, added that the collaboration with Singtel offers the potential for “greatly increased interest, uptake and profitability of 5G services for enterprises.”

The solution conforms to the TM Forum Open Digital Architecture and utilizes industry-standard APIs including TM Forum Open APIs.

Verizon doubles FWA subscriber target

US-based Verizon became one of the first operators to unveil its third-quarter results for 2024, and took the opportunity to announce more ambitious targets for fixed wireless access (FWA) services, regarded as one of the more solid use cases for 5G.

Verizon has now doubled its FWA subscriber target to a range of eight million to nine million by 2028 after ending Q3 2024 with 4.18 million FWA subscribers. 

The operator said it reached its four million FWA subscriber target 15 months ahead of schedule. However, the rate of FWA subscriber growth slowed in Q3 as Verizon added 363,000 FWA subscribers compared to a gain of 384,000 in the year-ago period.

Verizon posted Q3 2024 service revenues of $27.98 billion, up 1.7% year-over-year, and Fios revenues of $2.91 billion, up 0.7%. Business revenues declined 2.3% to $7.35 billion, and FWA revenues reached $562 million, up from $215 million in the year-ago period.

AT&T, meanwhile, added 226,000 new fiber and 135,000 AT&T Internet Air customers in the Q3 period. The operator said revenue dropped 0.5% to $30.2 billion owing to lower business wireline service revenues and declines in mobility equipment revenues driven by lower sales volumes.

T-Mobile US was the last of the three US operators to publish its Q3 results, announcing that it now has more than six million 5G FWA customers. The Deutsche Telekom-owned operator also said service revenue increased 5% to $16.7 billion while net income rose 43% to $3.1 billion. 

A tale of two operators: Rakuten Mobile and China Mobile

Rakuten Mobile and China Mobile are somewhat different in terms of their size and origins, but both operators are closely watched because of their respective impact on the wider market.

China Mobile, for instance, remains the world’s largest mobile operator in terms of subscribers. By the end of September, it exceeded one billion mobile subscribers, of which over half are on 5G. 

For the first nine months of 2024, it generated total revenues of 791.5 billion Chinese yuan ($111.2bn), an increase of 2%. Profits before tax were up by 3.4% to 142.5bn yuan ($20bn) for the nine-month period.

As for the more recently launched Rakuten Mobile, it is one of three mobile operators in the world that are building a cloud-native 5G network from scratch, the other two being 1&1 in Germany and Dish in the United States.

Give its focus on open RAN and cloud, Rakuten’s development is of interest to those also investing in virtualisation and disaggregation. The operator remains small, but its customer base recently hit a new milestone of eight million, of which 7.29 million are purely mobile services customers.

The company is hoping to reach a total of ten million mobile connections by the end of 2024. However, it has a long way to go before it catches up with its rivals. Japan’s market leader NTT Docomo has 90 million mobile connections, for example. 

Also noted…

UScellular has reached a $1 billion agreement with Verizon to sell part of its spectrum holdings.

The GSMA has re-elected Telefonica CEO Jose Maria Alvarez-Pallete as its Chair.