Every year, innovations and emerging technologies bring us closer to a fully interconnected society. In this landscape, telecommunications service providers are compelled to stand out in a saturated market, where the constant arrival of new solutions promises lucrative opportunities while demanding cost reductions in existing services. The challenge lies in finding the right balance by strategically investing in innovative applications, technologies, and services that have a real impact on the business.
As the new Chief Technology Officer of Telecommunications at Red Hat, my main goal is to generate value for our customers through tangible business outcomes, optimizing solutions that connect society and enhance our quality of life. In the near future, service providers will strategically adopt emerging technologies, focusing on operational efficiency, resilience, security, sustainability, and cost optimization. In this blog, I will share key insights derived from numerous conversations about these essential aspects, offering ideas on how service providers can tackle tomorrow’s challenges.
Embracing AI Amidst Chaos
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is well-positioned to benefit from the deployment flexibility that the distributed nature of service providers’ networks offers, as well as to help drive their operational efficiencies. Open source is working to help create smaller AI models, which can help reduce costs and computational requirements while enhancing an organization’s existing applications and processes. By leveraging these smaller AI models in the Radio Access Network (RAN), core, and other areas, service providers will be able to address a growing number of business and operational challenges.
The opportunities in AI for service providers are greater than ever, but so is the complexity, especially as the number and size of AI applications grow. Red Hat is working to simplify this increasing complexity with data engineering initiatives and reliable solutions like Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI and Red Hat OpenShift AI, which enable faster data processing, real-time decision-making, and improved application performance.
Service providers will be able to harness AI to enable intelligent automation of lifecycle management. This will provide better insights from multiple network and IT domains, including every device and service, to enhance business and resource efficiency. We are already seeing this development unfold. Many service providers have moved beyond the initial testing phase of AI, implementing a diverse set of cognitive assistants, customer service use cases, and business operations, as the business benefits 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 environment, particularly within AI-RAN, to achieve sustainability goals and to build an intelligent autonomous infrastructure.
While substantial benefits can be realized with AI, the return on investment (ROI) may not be immediate. This means that service providers need to identify a realistic target to increase productivity and operational efficiency through AI and implement it across their organization accordingly. By leveraging AI with clear objectives and a strategy, service providers can put their AI projects into production more quickly and achieve better outcomes.
From Telecommunications Companies to Technology Companies
In recent years, telecommunications companies have evolved into technology companies (Telco to Techco). This means that, in addition to providing connectivity, they now also offer digital services and solutions. This shift brings significant challenges, such as regulations and cybersecurityCybersecurity solutions are essential in this era and transformations within the companies themselves. However, by adopting open-source technologies and methodologies (software that anyone can use, modify, and share freely), telcos can overcome these challenges and uncover new growth opportunities, innovate in their business models, and enhance their market presence. To accelerate this process, we share some suggestions and lessons learned from working with our clients:
- Focus on delivering business outcomes through phased execution.
- Empower cross-functional teams to collaborate and execute successfully.
- Select partners and integrators who understand and align with business objectives.
- Complement teams with qualified members and training from partners.
- Automate everything to offset operational complexity and gain agility.
- Establish clear success criteria and monitor project progress.
- Lead integration and ongoing governance initiatives.
- Start with small projects and make continuous adjustments as needed.
Virtualization is Back (Though It Never Really Left)
Virtualization has returned to the spotlight with a new perspective across the telecommunications industry. While service providers are using virtualization at scale globally, they are scrutinizing their investments in certain business areas due to rising commercial costs and a rapidly changing business landscape.
As service providers explore alternatives to their existing virtualized infrastructure, they are discovering that modernizing it toward a common cloud-native infrastructure produces quantifiable business results. Additionally, telcos are looking to transform their environments to integrate their critical applications with an increasing number of AI models and tools.
Service providers are working with Red Hat to save costs while also transforming their businesses while extending the lifespan of their virtual machines (VMs). They gain operational benefits through a unified approach to managing both legacy virtualized applications and modern cloud-native workloads.
Common Cloud Architectures Mark a Turning Point for Open RAN
Open RAN deployments have progressed more slowly than traditional RAN, but they have now reached the profitability 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 put multiple vendor 5G core applications on a common cloud-native platform have applied this learning to open RAN, accelerating time-to-market. Open RAN gains momentum by allowing providers to differentiate from the competition, enhancing security, operations, and service delivery at the edge.
Private networks are leading the adoption of open RAN, leveraging it to provide customizable and reliable enterprise solutions. Service providers are also using it with Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) to expand broadband to underserved areas. At the same time, commercial offerings of low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites with non-terrestrial networks (NTN) are poised to extend mobile broadband to remote regions.
Leveraging Observability to Drive Intelligent and Autonomous Infrastructure
Observability is a data-driven approach to automate infrastructure across hardware, software, and cloud deployments. Accessing and analyzing that data at scale becomes a key differentiator for service providers. Accessing and analyzing this data at scale, combining predictive analytics, generative AI, and open APIs, allows for generating valuable insights and operational recommendations to build intelligent and autonomous infrastructure. An example of intelligent and autonomous infrastructure is AI in RAN, which can dynamically manage frequencies, sectors, and base stations, improving efficiency, energy consumption, and performance metrics. Similarly, generative AI and AIOps are enabling predictive maintenance, accurate root cause analysis (RCA), and smarter decision-making, with privacy and compliance assurances.
Laying the Groundwork for 6G and the Future
Service providers are taking a more cautious approach to the next generation of mobile architecture (6G), focusing on improving business outcomes. Defining 6G involves more than just infrastructure: it requires engaging a broader ecosystem of industry players, necessitating structural and cultural changes across the value chain. This collaborative approach will be key to driving innovation and ensuring that technology meets the demands of the future.
Over the next year, using modern 5G core applications and RAN networks on common cloud platforms, the telecommunications industry will focus its efforts on:
- Key aspects that differentiate 6G from the capabilities of 5G.
- Distributed architectures with intelligent autonomous infrastructure driven by AI.
- open APIsAn API, which stands for Application Programming Interface, is a set of rules… to streamline interactions between multiple systems and deliver new services.
- Evolution of network slicing with AI inference to enable smart connectivity.
- Integration of all photonic technologies and non-terrestrial networks (NTN).
As part of these efforts, we will also see service providers exploring new 6G-driven use cases, from immersive AR/VR/XR experiences and advanced vehicle-to-everything (V2X) to precision positioning and integrated sensing. This exploration may also help achieve more energy-efficient Internet of Things (IoT) integration, driving how we deliver services in remote operations and at the farthest edge. Open source will play a crucial role in adopting innovation by providing the necessary flexibility, managing unpredictability, and maintaining independence in our rapidly evolving world. The way forward will focus on leveraging AI combined with closed-loop automation to unlock new data-driven services, meet ambitious sustainability goals, and create a better world. In the face of constant disruption, service providers will need to continually adapt, empowering their teams to transform how they work, differentiate from competition, and drive business value and operational efficiency.