A week in telecoms: Softbank, AIS, IoT, and energy efficiency

Welcome to the Inform weekly news round-up, where we take a look at a selection of recent telecoms news and how it impacts the wider industry.

SoftBank Corp announced a collaboration with graphics processing unit (GPU) specialist Nvidia on a new platform for generative AI and 5G/6G applications that SoftBank plans to roll out at new, distributed AI data centers across Japan.

The platform will be based on new Nvidia MGX reference architecture and the Nvidia GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip that in turn uses Neoverse technology from SoftBank subsidiary Arm. Worth remembering here is that Nvidia previously tried to buy Arm from SoftBank, but the deal was terminated in early 2022 and Arm is now being prepared for an IPO.

Generative AI has been in the news recently, in large part owing to the interest in chatbots such as ChatGPT. In an interview with Yahoo Finance, Atul Goyal, Managing Director at Jefferies, suggests that SoftBank is dressing up part of the Arm business as an AI play for data centers.

Invidia, however, has recently seen a big increase in demand for GPUs that can be used to train and deploy AI applications. As for SoftBank, it wants to build data centers that will be capable of hosting generative AI and wireless applications on a multi-tenant common server platform, which it says reduces costs and is more energy efficient.

As explained by Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia, “demand for accelerated computing and generative AI is driving a fundamental change in the architecture of data centers.”

Tanapong Ittisakulchai, Chief Enterprise Business Officer at Advanced Info Services (AIS), comments that SMEs have been identified as one of the “crucial sectors” for national economic growth. “Thailand now has over 3.18 million small and medium-sized businesses, which make them one of the key economic drivers of the country, generating 34.2% of national GDP,” he says.

As Inform has reported, AIS sees untapped opportunity in the country’s small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) market as a driver for business-to-business (B2B) revenue growth. In an interview with Inform, Navachai Kiartkorkuaa, Head of Enterprise Marketing and SME Business Management Section at AIS, said the operator counts roughly half of the country’s SMEs as customers, but there is “room to improve.” Although AIS has strengthened its portfolio and simplified sales and services for SMEs, Kiartkorkuaa does not think the operator successfully serves the segment yet, saying the biggest challenges are understanding this fragmented group of business customers and creating the right services for them.

Up to 3.3 billion connected devices will be trading directly with each other by 2030, according to new research by STL Partners carried out on behalf of Vodafone. The consultancy is predicting “meteoric growth” of so-called Economy of Things (EoT)-enabled devices that can independently and securely trade together, with just 88 million expected to be in place in 2024.

EoT is defined as a world in which vehicles, devices and machines can interact and transact with each other via a secure digital platform. The research suggests that EoT will account for more than 10% of the overall Internet of Things (IoT) market, representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 68%.

Vodafone is one CSP that intends to exploit this new B2B opportunity. It entered the EoT market in 2022 with Digital Asset Broker (DAB), its new EoT platform.

The idea is that businesses across multiple sectors will be able to connect new products to the DAB platform, rather than build their own systems. According to STL Partners, around 75% of the data currently generated by connected IoT devices cannot be shared across different devices and systems, which it suggests is a vast untapped resource of value that is yet to be realized.

India does not plan to follow in the steps of European countries such as France and Germany by reserving 5G frequencies for mobile private networks set up by enterprise users.

According to a report from The Economic Times, the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) has decided against giving spectrum for what are called captive private networks in India, citing that fact that it won’t be feasible to directly allot spectrum to enterprises for private networks under the current legal framework. India’s Attorney General R Venkataramani has advised the DoT to prioritize auctions for 5G spectrum.

The decision by the DoT will come as welcome news to India’s CSPs, which had opposed DoT’s initial guidelines on private networks that stipulated that firms looking to set up their own private networks could lease 5G spectrum from telecom operators or get it directly from the DoT.

Over 20 Indian companies had https://www.rcrwireless.com/20221118/5g/over-20-indian-firms-show-interest-set-up-5g-private-networksreportedly applied to secure 5G spectrum for private networks including Infosys, Capgemini, GMR, Larsen & Toubro, Tata Communications, Tata Power and Tejas Networks.

Network energy efficiency is such a key topic in the CSP industry right now that it dominated the entire afternoon of day two at TelecomTV’s DSP Leaders World Forum in May. In a write-up of the sessions, it was highlighted how Alex Depper, Head of Energy Optimisation at Virgin Media O2, identified the importance of good data management practices as key to achieving energy-efficiency goals.

“We can’t optimize what we don’t really know is there. There’s a lot of assumptions at the moment, so making data accessible, making it available, making it interoperable with operations support systems, element management systems, business support systems so that we can bring it into one place rather than having to fish around – that will speed up our workflow and our decision-making massively,” Depper said.

Indeed, sustainability and green networks are at the top of CSP agendas, as highlighted in latest TM Forum reports. Inform also recently reported how CSPs are seeing a clear shift in the way enterprise customers are addressing sustainability requirements in RFPs, with sustainability emerging as a key strategic pillar over the past few years. To be sure, there has been a marked uptick recently in CSP communications about their efforts to improve energy efficiency and reduce carbon emissions in recent months.