Hosted by Huawei, the 2022 Global MBB Forum took place at the Queen Sirikit National Convention Centre in Bangkok, Thailand. The event included a slew of CEO/CTO-level speakers from around the world, examining the 5G direction of travel, both from a consumer and industrial perspective.
The event opened with the company’s rotating chairman, Ken Hu, talking about the “opportunities” presented by next-generation broadband, and the ways in which society and business can “make the most of them”.
He began by giving an overview of 5G roll-outs across the world, suggesting that it has “grown faster than any previous generation of mobile technology”. He backed this with a claim stating that in the past three years, more than 200 5G networks have been rolled out across the globe. This, in turn, he said, “was driving new shifts in consumer behaviour”.
Even more exciting than this, said Hu, are the 5G-influenced changes which are being seen across verticals such as oil and gas, mining, manufacturing, and so on. “Applications such as autonomous mining trucks are not practical without 5G,” he said.
For society to fully take advantage of 5G, said Hu, there are several things which need to be accomplished on an ongoing basis, including the building out of more networks in order to increase global coverage. At the same time, he said, user experience also needed to be pushed “to the next level”, specifically via the development of the burgeoning 5.5G standard. (For more on this, see below).
The next presentation came from GSMA chief marketing officer Lara Dewar, who continued on the topic of ‘Building a smart 5G world together’.
Describing GSMA’s role in the deployment of next-generation broadband, she said: “Our vision is to unlock the full potential of connectivity so that people, industry and society thrive. And as we continue to face ever-more complex global challenges, we believe firmly that the mobile industry has a role to play in bringing about true change.”
Discussing the global conditions which need to be in place in order to “build an ecosystem that works for everyone”, she said that there are three fundamentals “that will get us the future we all want”. These included investment, innovation and partnership.
Focusing on innovation in particular, Dewar said: “We need [it] to empower digital transformation across sectors. Last year we saw 5G expand commercially into verticals, opening up potential, thanks to economies of scale.
“But to achieve these economies of scale, we need application scenarios that move 5G from an optional to a ‘must have’ technology. From boosting industrial productivity and transforming sport for spectators, to turbo-charged wind farms, all of these are frontier areas of growth.”
She continued by suggesting that no progress will be possible without partnership across the industry and between other stakeholders, including government, which she referred to as the “third fundamental”. Elaborating on this theme, she said: “They say, if you want to go quickly, go alone. But if you want to go far, go together.
“As we head into the future, we need to make sure that we’re working quickly and together as a global community. The solutions to the many global challenges we face and the limitless opportunities to be unlocked rely on our ability to break free of the old industry silos.”
Moving on from the general strategic and business context, the day’s remaining presentations shifted the focus towards use of the technology within specific industries and customer segments. Following on from Dewar, for instance, was the Thai operator True’s chief commercial officer, Tanaphon Manavutiveth, discussing ‘Real use cases and future development’.
“4G moving to 5G, we can cover every type of use-case for our customers,” he said. “If people buy 5G devices just for voice calls or using WhatsApp, that’s not a good use-case – they don’t need 5G. So, we put together pillars that we offer to customers. These include live concerts, training programmes, sightseeing, and cloud gaming taking advantage of low latency.
“Regarding business and enterprise, we’re seeing improvement and progress in healthcare, education, agriculture, manufacturing and also smart cities. Healthcare is one of the most important things in the world right now, particularly with [trends such as] an ageing society.”
He continued: “As with the consumer side, with business, you have to have a strong network, with low latency. And, of course, it also has to be reliable. You also have to have applications which are suitable for those industries.”
The focus moved entirely onto the health vertical later in the day, with a presentation by Professor Doctor Apichat Asavamongkolkul, who is the dean at the Faculty of Medicine Siriraj Hospital, Mahidol University.
He discussed the process through which the latter became Thailand’s first ‘smart hospital’. Speaking to Land Mobile later in the day, he explained the smart hospital concept in this way: “We will see a lot of healthcare challenges in the next 10 years, for instance because of things like the ageing population. Likewise, with the low birth rate in Thailand, we predict that the cost of healthcare will go up in the next decade because the resource [to pay for healthcare] will not increase.
“We thought that with disruptive technology, such as IoT, cloud computing, with 5G connecting everything, we could create new services to create the healthcare that people need.”
A key concept within this is what Asavamongkolkul calls “healthcare everywhere services”, manifesting in something like remote diagnosis/monitoring, otherwise known as ‘telemedicine’. A key requirement for roll-out, he said, is the accessibility of data, acquired through the harvesting of user information, collected by user devices such as smart watches.
“We connect the user device to the application, while at the same time developing the AI to look at patients’ behaviour,” he said. “For instance, what kind of food they eat.”
He continued: “For people with diabetes, meanwhile, there are things like continuous glucose monitoring, where we can measure the blood sugar every five minutes.
“In the future we can connect with the genomic database, which means we can have individualised prevention, prediction and treatment. Prevention is better than treatment.”
Moving on from preventative medicine, Asavamongkolkul also mentioned the development of AI for the treatment of other pathologies, for instance specifically in relation to prostate cancer. He said patient slides have undergone a process of digitalisation, with AI in turn becoming trained to interpret the images.
“During the night,” he said, “the AI is working to interpret the slides. In the morning, the doctor will confirm.”
Utopian impulse
The beginning of the second day echoed the beginning of the first, with another presentation from Huawei itself, delivered this time by executive director of its board, David Wang. Building on the context provided by the previous day’s content, he focused directly on the development and anticipated roll-out of what the company refers to as 5.5G.
For those who aren’t aware, 5.5G is what Huawei is calling “the next level in the current 5G network”. It will, again in the words of the company, “deliver 10Gbit/s experiences, support hundreds of billions of connections”, and help achieve what it refers to as “native intelligence”.
Wang said that the progress of the next generation of 5G would be dependent on a variety of factors, beginning with the standardisation piece.
The industry, he suggested, needs to work to ensure that 3GPP Release 18 is frozen (that is, with work items signed off) by the first quarter of 2024. Regarding “Release 19 and beyond”, meanwhile, he urged the industry to come together to explore requirements needed in order to “support new services and scenarios”.
From standardisation, he moved on to spectrum, suggesting that the full utilisation of sub-100GHz will be necessary. To quote a press release issued by the company to coincide with the event: “mmWave is a key frequency band for 5.5G. Operators will need to acquire over 800MHz of spectrum from this band if they are to realise 10Gbit/s experiences.
“6GHz is also a potential ultra-wide band for 5.5G. When 6GHz is promoted as an IMT band at WRC-23, it is likely that countries will need to auction off the 6GHz spectrum. We can also re-farm the sub-6GHz spectrum to achieve ultra-large bandwidth.”
Lastly, Wang addressed the hardware side, along with the need to develop what he called a “thriving 5.5G ecosystem”. The former, he said, will depend on EELA technology that can support multiple antenna arrays, with massive MIMO also being required.
Concluding his presentation, he said: “The communications industry is constantly evolving. 5G has been kicked into high gear. Looking ahead, our task is to tackle these five new areas – standards, spectrum, products, ecosystems and applications. Together, let’s stride to 5.5G and build a better, intelligent world.”
There were numerous pertinent themes highlighted across the Global MBB forum’s two days, some of which have been touched on above. Perhaps the most interesting, however – at least from a societal perspective – is the increasingly utopian tone being adopted by the industry when discussing 5/5.5G and its potential.
This was apparent as early as the conference’s second speaker, Lara Dewar, who spoke about it as a tool “to help us push the boundaries of what we thought might be possible”.
Those in attendance will also recall any number of mentions of ‘The Metaverse’ across the two days, which in itself is a quintessentially utopian idea, at least in the mind of its creator. (And one that can’t help but remind Land Mobile of the literal meaning of the word, as derived from the Ancient Greek – ‘no place’).
Perhaps the best example of this tendency, however, was a panel discussion on the second day, focusing on the idea of how a ‘dream city’ might be facilitated via the roll-out of massive bandwidth/low latency technology. The session – which was titled ‘How does 5G empower a dream city?’ – included representatives from GSMA in China, China Unicom, Zain KSA in Saudi Arabia, and others.
Maybe the most interesting question in relation to the above came towards the end of the session, when the panellists were asked what their 5G-enabled ‘dream city’ would look like. The answers revealed a variety of overriding societal concerns, symbiotically linked, as might be expected, with the IoT-based ‘smart city’ concept.
Discussing his ideal city, vice-president of research and co-founder
at Counterpoint Research, Neil Shah, said: “I would like to wake in a city which is very safe and secure. Once I wake up, I need to be hyper-connected, receiving messages, which should be more predictive.”
He continued: “Once I reach the office, it should be ‘smart’, which will help to make me more productive. Once I’ve finished work, I want to go to a restaurant and already know about the noise levels, whether the food is good, and whether it’s organic.”
Responding to how a ‘dream city’ might be achieved, meanwhile, CTO of HKT, Sheldon Yau, said: “To achieve this target in, maybe, five years, we will need to change a lot of things. First of all, we will need to be able to build sites more easily. The operators and the governments need to work together to build these cities.
“I truly believe in the next stage of 5G development. We need higher speed, as well as low latency and performance.”
The Global MBB forum 2022 was an important event for the business communications industry. In the first instance, it delivered a valuable overview of the direction of travel from a strategic perspective, and therefore what we can expect to see over the coming years in terms of ambition and investment.
At the same time, it outlined and delineated numerous operational, concerns, parameters and ambitions, both in the Far East and across the rest of the world.
