Navigating an era of perpetual change: a fresh perspective for telecommunications

Every year, new innovations and emerging technologies bring us closer to a fully connected society. As the industry is hard at work to meet the demands of constant connectivity, telecommunications service providers face the challenge of standing out in a crowded market. They must navigate a surge of new solutions and technologies that promise lucrative opportunities, while balancing the need to reduce costs on existing services with the imperative to drive meaningful business outcomes by investing in innovative applications, technologies and services.

In recently taking on the role of chief technology officer of telecommunications at Red Hat, my continued focus is on delivering value to our customers through tangible business outcomes, optimizing solutions that connect society and enhance the quality of our lives. In the years ahead, service providers will take deliberate steps to embrace emerging technologies with a focus on operational efficiency, resiliency, security, sustainability and cost. In this blog, I’ll share insights from many conversations on these critical considerations, offering a fresh perspective on how service providers can navigate the challenges ahead.

Embracing AI amidst the chaos

Artificial intelligence (AI) is well suited to benefit from the deployment flexibility of the distributed nature of service provider networks as well as helping to drive their operational efficiencies. Open source is working to help create bite-sized AI models, which can help lower cost and compute requirements while powering up an organization's existing applications and processes. And by leveraging these smaller AI models in the radio access network (RAN), core and more, service providers will be able to tackle a growing number of business and operational challenges.

So there are more AI opportunities for service providers than ever before. But we know this can lead to more complexity, especially as the number and size of AI applications increases. Red Hat is working to simplify this growing complexity with data engineering efforts and reliable solutions like Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI and Red Hat OpenShift AI that enable faster data processing, real-time decision-making and enhanced performance for applications.

Service providers will be able to leverage AI to enable intelligent automation of lifecycle management. It will provide deeper insights across multiple network and IT domains, including every device and service to improve business and resource efficiency. And we’re seeing this play out already. Many service providers have moved past the initial trial phase of AI, implementing a diverse set of cognitive assistants, customer care and business operations use cases as the business benefits of these can be easily quantified. Some service providers are also offering those AI capabilities as-a-service to their enterprise customers. Other AI-enabled use cases are currently being tested for use across their network landscape, especially within the AI-RAN, to achieve sustainability objectives, and for building autonomous intelligent infrastructure.

While there are substantial gains to be made with AI, the return on investment (ROI) may not be obvious right away. This means service providers should identify a realistic goal for increasing productivity and operational efficiency through AI and implement it across their business accordingly. By leveraging AI with clear goals and strategy in place, service providers can take their AI projects into production faster and come out on top.

From telco to techco

In the past few years, we’ve seen an increase in the telco to techco movement – i.e. the journey of telcos to expand their business model to become a techco: a digital service and technology provider. As this transition happens, service providers face challenges such as regulatory constraints, cybersecurity threats and cultural shifts within their organizations. However, by embracing open source technologies and methodologies, they can overcome these obstacles while unlocking new growth opportunities, innovative business models and market strategies. To help accelerate this process, here are a few suggestions and learnings from working with our customers:

• Focus on realizing business outcomes in phased execution
• Empower your cross-functional teams to successfully collaborate and execute together
• Select partners and integrators that understand and align with your business goals
• Complement your teams with skilled members and training from your partners
• Automate everything to offset operational complexity and gain agility
• Set clear success criteria and monitor progress of projects
• Lead integration and ongoing governance efforts
• Start small and make continuous adjustments as needed

Virtualization is back (but also never left)

Virtualization has become a renewed focus with a fresh perspective across the telecommunications industry. While service providers have been leveraging virtualization at scale around the globe for some time, they are taking a closer look at their investments in legacy solutions. This is a result of increased commercial costs and a rapidly changing business landscape.

As service providers explore alternatives to their existing virtualized infrastructure, they’re discovering new quantifiable business results from modernizing that virtualized infrastructure to a common cloud-native infrastructure. Telcos are also looking to transform their environments to combine their business critical applications with a growing number of AI models and tools.

Service providers work with Red Hat to save money, and also to transform their business while extending the life of their virtual machines (VMs). They are gaining operational benefits from a unified approach to managing  legacy virtualized applications and modern cloud-native workloads.

Common cloud architectures turn the corner for open RAN

Open RAN deployments have been progressing more slowly than traditional RAN but have now achieved the economics and performance needed for large-scale adoption. The ecosystem has matured, supported by common cloud platforms and operational tools that streamline automation and lifecycle management across many RAN sites.

Service providers that have operationalized multi-vendor 5G core applications on a common cloud-native platform have applied these learnings to open RAN, accelerating time-to-market. Open RAN is gaining more momentum for its ability to enable service providers to differentiate from competitors while improving security, operations and edge service delivery.

Private networks are emerging as key adopters, leveraging open RAN for customizable and reliable enterprise solutions. Service providers are also using open RAN with fixed wireless access (FWA) to expand broadband to underserved areas. Meanwhile, commercial low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite offerings integrating non-terrestrial networks (NTN) are set to extend mobile broadband to remote regions.

Harnessing observability to drive an autonomous intelligent infrastructure

Observability is a data-driven approach to automating infrastructure across hardware, software and cloud deployments. Accessing that data and analyzing it at scale is the new service provider differentiator. Using data, and combining predictive analytics, generative AI (gen AI) and open APIs will help service providers generate deep insights and operational recommendations to build an autonomous intelligent infrastructure. One example of autonomous intelligent infrastructure is AI in RAN that can dynamically manage frequencies, sectors and base stations, improving efficiency, power consumption and performance metrics. Similarly, gen AI and AIOps are enabling predictive maintenance, precise root-cause analysis (RCA) and smarter decision-making with guardrails for privacy and compliance.

Laying the foundations for 6G and what’s next

Service providers are taking a more cautious approach to the next generation of mobile architecture (6G) with a focus on improving business outcomes. Defining 6G involves more than just infrastructure — it requires the participation of a broader ecosystem of industry players, demanding structural and cultural shifts across the value chain. This collaborative approach will be key to driving innovation and ensuring the technology meets the demands of the future. 

Over the coming year, using modern 5G core and RAN network applications on common cloud platforms, the telecommunications industry will focus efforts on:

• What key aspects of 6G differentiate from 5G’s capabilities
• Distributed architectures with AI-driven autonomous intelligent infrastructure
• Open APIs to streamline multi-system interactions and offer new services
• Evolution of network slicing with AI inference to enable intelligent connectivity
• Integrating all photonic and NTN technologies

As part of these efforts, we’ll also see service providers explore new use cases powered by 6G, from immersive AR/VR/XR experiences and advanced autonomous vehicles (V2X) to precision positioning and integrated sensing. This exploration can also help lead to more energy efficient Internet of Things (IoT) integration, which furthers how we deliver services at remote and far edge operations.

Open source will play a pivotal role in addressing the adoption of innovation by providing necessary flexibility, managing unpredictability and maintaining independence in our rapidly evolving world. The road ahead will focus on harnessing AI combined with closed-loop automation to unlock new data-driven services,  meet ambitious sustainability goals and realize a better world. In the face of constant disruption, a service provider’s journey will require constant tuning, empowerment of teams to change the way they work and to stand out from the crowd, whilst fueling business value and operational efficiency.