MWC 2025 Ericsson Booth Tour (with Oliver Buschmann)

neXt Curve's Leonard Lee was invited on a tour of Ericsson's booth at MWC 2025 Barcelona with VP of Strategy, Oliver Buschmann. Oliver takes Leonard on a journey from the Aduna, network APIs, differentiated connectivity, to programmable networks, to the topic of 5G monetization.

Many thanks to Ericsson for the booth tour and inviting neXt Curve to share our insights into the future of the industry and the opportunities amassing behind 5G SA.

Transcript

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Oliver Buschmann 0:00

great to see you here. Uh, Congress Leonard.

Leonard Lee 0:03

Hi. How it

Oliver Buschmann 0:04

going?

Leonard Lee 0:05

Very good.

Oliver Buschmann 0:06

how was

Leonard Lee 0:06

your show so far? exhausting. I think that's the only word you can use when you reach the fourth day of MWC.

Oliver Buschmann 0:13

yeah, I'm have to be honest, I'm a bit more introvert, but I think it's really energizing. It is. It is people. It is seeing everything at life real.

Leonard Lee 0:23

I'm pretty excited. there's just so much for analysts to absorb. when we come here, we're roaming the halls, we're having briefings and meeting people. And I think one of the highlights this year definitely is, the interactions that I've had with, Ericsson and, some of the observations that I've made. in terms of key trends that we're seeing in the industry, it's just a lot to absorb, it's great to have an opportunity to kind of cap things a little bit. Maybe let's,

Oliver Buschmann 0:48

let's go through it.

Leonard Lee 0:49

I need a little bit of time to synthesize stuff in my brain here,

Oliver Buschmann 0:53

let's have a chat. It's good. Let's start. Maybe was just talking a bit about what's becoming real now? Like last year we talked about proof of concepts. Yeah, you showed, for example, like a video broadcasting more devices coming online now. It seems like it's coming real, right? Yeah. Now we see cameras actually using it. What do you think?

Leonard Lee 1:11

You can only regard it as a positive thing, right. And, especially as, operators, especially pioneering operators start to make that transition to 5G Se I think they're really Discovering. Finally, wow. We have all this technology that's backlogged right behind this 5G SA wall, and as you start to. transition to the other side, there's all these, possibilities, especially as you start to broaden your deployment. Yeah. And then you start to capitalize on the densification of the network that you've, implemented in the run up to your transition. yeah. I think we're starting to see the potential. And that's the interesting thing is we're kind of in early. Days Of realizing a broader, realization of the benefits of 5G.

Oliver Buschmann 2:02

Yeah.

Leonard Lee 2:03

Yeah,

Oliver Buschmann 2:03

I agree. I mean, we've seen of course in the past, like pixel, Alexa, whatever there. Pretty, pretty good use case. super successful. very good money for operators. we see on the back actually here on the camera is all the enterprise, work that seems to be going from POCs to production as well right now. You see manufacturing, forest, all this stuff coming alive. That's good. And I agree that's probably the next thing that will happen. Like how do we do real differentiated services, differentiated connectivity. We do quite a few examples here.

Leonard Lee 2:31

Yeah.

Oliver Buschmann 2:31

Yeah.

Leonard Lee 2:32

And I think the possibilities are even broader and I think deeper. And have a potential to be more transformative, especially as we start to see, more of the 5G. features start to exempt themselves through not only the network, but also in the applications and use cases. Right? So, you know, that's something that I'm always keeping an eye out for. And it is good to see the adoption and the traction that's being made. but I will have to say, there's a lot more to be done, right? Again, how do we trigger that transition to 5G sa. And, I'll keep saying it over and over again. Yeah. we need to figure out how to get operators to realize that benefit. And, what I think is very positive this year Is there seems to be a realization of the need to do that. Right. Especially in the context of, Competitiveness. Right. National or region more competitiveness.

Oliver Buschmann 3:32

I agree. I mean the anecdote that, like what's, what really needs to happen now to make this real? I think you mentioned 5G SA kind of, that's the baseline. everybody has to have. Then we are building on top of it. You've probably seen programmable networks. So how do you actually make the network programmable in the sense of it can actually be one network differentiate. Opposite. we may wanna look at, autonomous networks. So that's gonna, and key enabler and then like how do you bring it to developer? Like you mentioned, like how do you build an ecosystem around it? Right. And maybe we can look at the Aona demo and the area to see like, how did it really work? Yeah. What do you think? Do it. Should we move over? Yeah. Okay. So I thought we have a look at, how it really works with Aduna. But you wanna have a look at our, what we call Hall of Fame here. Oh, is this the Hall of Fame? Yeah, it's the Hall of Fame. Okay. Wow. So you see we have now, on the operator side, Katie DI also joined right? Recently. Ian joined very recently and on the platform side we had info joining. Yeah. we had Cinch joining just recently. Yeah. And, we have a, do you know or partnership now with the Bridge Alliance. So the ecosystem seems to come together here. Yeah. So we're getting really good momentum, really good tailwind, to really make it happen. Yes. So why does this matter? I think if a developer really wants to get into like a function, let's say a fraud prevention. Yeah. They want to have a global application. Right. And how do you do this? You can only do it if you have like all operators or laws of operators joining. And really global coverage and otherwise it's gonna be difficult For developers to use it. I think we should. Be at a developer platform with the developers and not build something separate. I think the developer should be there while he always has Programming and just get use of it.

Leonard Lee 5:15

Yeah. Obviously I've, written quite a bit about, network APIs for quite some time. Right. And like your framework follow

Oliver Buschmann 5:23

put end-to-end framework.

Leonard Lee 5:24

It was sort of necessary because I think. especially what you guys are doing with the douna tends to be a little bit different. And, this year at MWCI I've, gotten some confirmation that there was a need to clarify exactly what the role of a douna is, what it is that the JV is really trying to do. Right. and I've seen that as like a progression, you know. Network APIs have been a thing forever. Right. And, yeah. It's not like you guys decided one day, hey, let's do network APIs and, establish an exchange and I call an exchange like aduna. this is a progression there. There's, been a significant effort to create. A standard set of, API deviations. Yeah. Right. I agree. So that developers can access exposed network capabilities. And now we're in a place where exactly to your point we're looking at a future where different, what you guys call differentiated connectivity Is really going to be a thing. We've heard of network slicing. We've heard of all these great. 5G capabilities. You mentioned the programmable network and how now the infrastructure itself is becoming software defined, increasing the software defined and cloud native.

Oliver Buschmann 6:48

Yeah.

Leonard Lee 6:48

Having these things now fall into place, we're looking at a different scenario where these network APIs can really take a role. it's like a continuum, right? It wasn't, it was never like, Hey, you. Flip a switch and all of a sudden you go from, no, it's a journey. Right? A long journey. Yeah. That's something that, the industry really needs to be reminded of. Yeah. just simply because, is such a long time scale for these things to evolve and then hit inflection points. And I think Aduna comes at a point where, it can really, catalyze the industry.

Oliver Buschmann 7:23

Yeah.

Leonard Lee 7:24

And really take the industry to that place that I think we were talking about, 5G Being sort of this, innovation platform. Yeah. Especially for businesses, right? Yeah. You going transcending connectivity. Transcending, what operators traditionally, um, we're providing in terms of capabilities and services.

Oliver Buschmann 7:44

Oh, I agree. Well, I thought it was also interesting that we're now going really beyond connectivity. And, it has been always just, basically best effort. Right now we're getting differentiation. Then we are adding also new capabilities like quad prevention, like location information. Like a lot of her ABIs are coming to live that are actually going beyond. No, I like that point

Leonard Lee 8:02

I've written, years ago about the inevitable. changing nature or the evolving nature of what we call the network infrastructure, right? And if you look at the 3G PP roadmap, we have things like integrated sensing. All these new capabilities are related to quite honestly, iot Yeah. That make the infrastructure quite different from what Yeah. Uh, we thought of it before where, like you were saying, we're just, providing best effort connectivity now. Now it's all of a sudden more, more, right? Yes. All this data can come off of the network and be leveraged in, business applications. And I think, the, these, security related Yeah. Functions. And, um, information that can come off the network to support, let's say authorization, authentication, I think before start. Right. Very, very exciting things. I mean, it sound, they sound pedestrian. But they're gonna become essential, I think. Yeah. You know, it's so much

Oliver Buschmann 8:57

easier to do, right? You don't need to type in numbers anymore. It's just, it's just, no. You know what,

Leonard Lee 9:01

you gotta start off with high value, low hanging fruit. You know, low hanging fruit, there's nothing wrong with it. Yeah. As long as it's high value. Yeah. Go with it. You know, and because the ecosystem needs, it needs to be able to, convey that, value to the end markets. So that the ecosystem grows from the top line. Up.

Oliver Buschmann 9:24

Then we, your differentiation, right? And then I like your comment on the sensing side. Yeah. The better answer. Quite, quite excited about it. I think this is, the network has completely new capabilities that it sends around. Can like, discover drones, no flight zones and discover even parking lots. people on tracks or border controlling it. That's quite exciting. It could be an API.

Leonard Lee 9:44

Exactly, exactly. Or collections of APIs. And I think that's one of the mindset shifts that, folks need to make it is just not just individual APIs, I've seen in the halls, of. MWC here at Fiera, several examples of companies that are actually working on compound applications that tap a number of different network APIs as well as communication APIs and Oh, okay. Cloud APIs to create, Yeah. Right. And so, these network APIs, create a infrastructure. Management or interface. Right. Yeah. That allows you to then take advantage of the differentiated conductivity capabilities as well as information and do really complex things. Yeah. Right. Because each of the network APIs suggests something very simple. But in the hands of a developer, these network APIs can do some very powerful things.

Oliver Buschmann 10:38

Yeah. So location, APIs that's already in store. Yeah. we have the authorization fraud APIs already in store. The sim spot number ade. So verify to do, for example, park prevention. Yeah. For, for banks. Mm. or for retailers mm-hmm. also think like KYC match that, that s know what, what retailers use, so they kind of get information of their customer. Mm-hmm. So even if your customer entered the store, kind of knows what the customer needs. So it can actually, use that. And then also network insights like, like sim count, even in rain for weather conditions or for an insurance company that wants to know this kind of information. So those are already in store. And then of course there's a roadmap behind it, to bring this alive.

Leonard Lee 11:17

Yeah.

Oliver Buschmann 11:17

Yeah.

Leonard Lee 11:18

I think that's a good start. Actually. That's a starting point. It's a good starting point. And I think it's just a matter of developers understanding number one, the capabilities are there. the information, the contextual information augmentation is there. and I think that's exactly what's happening with a lot of the fraud, prevention applications, which actually I'm quite a fan of, I think is just. a great example of how just information off of the network, can create some very important capabilities to businesses in, building more robust, trust capabilities and applications. Services, yeah. If you will, that they can then plug up into their business applications.

Oliver Buschmann 12:00

So, Good. So then now we're like kind of, on top of the architecture, right? so how do we build the ecosystem? So you mentioned like we need 5G SA, we need programmable networks for this to make we differentiated. Okay. maybe we have a look at the, what this really takes for the network. Let's do it. So why don't we have a look at how, what it really takes the network to, to make this real Yeah. Growth opportunities, differentiation, but also automation. Yeah. How did automation really work? Yeah. So we are here at the, the center of it. So you see AI in Ron that's essentially building AI into the, embedded, into the radio access network. Yeah. So that's like, mainly energy savings, like for example for predicting workloads and sleeping cells. Massive MIO, like, and lowering kind of the energy consumption quite successful already. we have intelligent automation. That's essentially the layer on top of it. Yeah. So how do you do, orchestration of the operations? much, much, more efficient. Yeah. And on the other side we have, what we call, Ericsson Intelligent Automation Platform. Yes. Essentially it's kind of the SMO, like a service dimensional orchestration, but it's allowing others to build our apps and of course Ericsson as well. I like to build our apps on top of it, and that's really generates a lot of, growth right now. So we have what. 60 of them mixed application already. A lot of them are AI based. one and a half thousand BOL was, so that's really growing quite fast. And that's a good thing to just talk about the automation and ecosystem that we're building around it.

Leonard Lee 13:25

Yeah. Well, you know, I'm a big fan of SMOs and then Yeah. And, you know, the, Ericsson, automation platform.

Oliver Buschmann 13:32

Yeah.

Leonard Lee 13:33

And, I think it also has another purpose, Which is to help operators, not only, manage the network, right? But because there's like this, uh, Multi-Tech, multi-vendor integration layer on the bottom, it can also serve as a very important, migration tool or, um, that's true. Middleware, right? That's true. And so as you're looking at, Transforming network. Yeah. And making this transition, you know, moving along the modernization path. it can be a really important tool and I think a lot of operators are starting to realize that, Because you're not gonna switch over your entire, network overnight and you're entire, portfolio overnight. And in fact, it could take. A long time. And so having a tool like that, a framework like that, that helps to do

Oliver Buschmann 14:24

Yeah, exactly. It's even both, right? It says multi-vendor, but also multi-domain, right. This is also on, and then it goes across the network itself.

Leonard Lee 14:32

Yeah. And I remember when you guys announced it. Yeah. And I wrote about it. That's exactly what I tuned into. And I thought, Hey, you know what, in order to. Get the ball moving or grease the wheels to what we talked about earlier, the 5G essay transition. This could be a really important tool. And then, it, it's interesting to see now years later, everyone's kind of getting excited about it. Yeah. But we're still kind of early I thought. You know, X app's probably a little too early. Our apps, that's probably gonna be the starting point that's still over skating, especially if, you know, operators start to find value in, an SMO type. a platform and tool

Oliver Buschmann 15:11

and we have two big installations already. So you've seen the at and t. that's what's already happening. We have a number of others in Europe, also in Asia. Yeah. Coming to live now. That's the time where it's really gets exactly. Scale.

Leonard Lee 15:22

Yeah. It's gonna be interesting to see how they leverage, uh, that tool and that platform in their modernization efforts. Right? And as much as it's going to, help with the automation. We have the network and progress their capabilities in, being able to handle actually the complexity of, uh, of 5G Network. Right. Especially as they make the transition to a standalone.

Oliver Buschmann 15:46

Yeah. So we went, through a whole lot of things, right. We went 5G yesterday. We went through networks, went through autonomous, automation. Yeah. Automative networks. The whole ecosystem on top of it. Yeah. So that's kind of how the whole thing comes together. Yeah. I'm remembering your frameworks. I guess that's kind of the pool.

Leonard Lee 16:02

Yeah, but you forgot something. Oh, which one is it? The topic that everyone was talking about and continues to talk about, which is the monetization piece. Oh, that's even on top. Oh, come on. You gotta make money out. You better money investments. Right. ROI. It's all about ROI. Yeah.

Oliver Buschmann 16:19

Yeah. And as everyone, it's interesting like how it develops. Right. I would like to hear your view as well, like I can see this going in like some use, like fixable access is obvious, right? Yeah. It's already money. Yeah. Enterprise obvious ranking money is scaling on the differentiation? I would say we have the enterprise part. Mm-hmm. I think we've seen that like, broadcasting point of sales terminals. I think that's now clear, clear value proposition. clear pricing, monetization of edge. Yeah. on the consumer side is probably something that will take a little bit longer. Yeah. but I do see things in the US like there are some premium offerings that actually get quite well, into the market. in China you have these, uh, influencer, kind of micro segments Yeah. That we're addressing, which works quite well. women in Singapore, so it looks like there's some honest now coming together. And what are you allowing us to, to differentiate in the consumer side.

Leonard Lee 17:10

Yeah. And my view is this, is that as you're modernizing your network you need to modernize your operations as well. Right? that will enable you to modernize your business and afford you the flexibility to basically not only deliver the services, but ultimately you have to be able to transfer us the entire stack. Right. So. You have the infrastructure. Composable, programmable, Infrastructure. That translates into services. Right. Network services that can be both informational and connectivity related. And then you have to now, interface with your customers or the enterprise, and that's where you need to have that modernized operations. Right. And this is something that I. Wrote about emphasized two years ago. It's really good to see that. Focus on that now, you know. Uh, so O-S-S-B-S-S-C-P-Q-I think is really important. So that, your CFO is not telling you, no, we can't bill for this service. The way that is structured, you have that flexibility to actually monetize. these new services that are literally kind of like off script, for a lot of operators. And so there's this whole new frontier of opportunities that can be tapped, but you need to have that full stack kind of capability. And I know that you guys have, you guys are up and down the stack.

Oliver Buschmann 18:30

I think it's also interesting how now operators use this opportunity to change their own business model. I think because think of now we have best effort, basically it's dollar per gigabyte. Essentially. That is right. But how does it evolve? Like in the, airline industry. You say there's an economy class, there's a premium class, so there's a first class, Or more dynamic models. Like you do it for an event, like for like an segment, like, influencers. You do that waiting more dynamic business models. So I could imagine that's going towards that direction or we see much more kind of differentiated, segmented and also more dynamic business models come forward.

Leonard Lee 19:06

I also see it. As multimodal, like, so you have different ways get to point A and B. Right. So what we're looking at in the future with, this 5G future, especially as you make the transition to sa Is different ways of getting to point A to point B and everyone wants to go in different, destinations. They may be like services, but the thing is you can get there different ways and those. those are adjacent and net new services and, that are enabled by new capabilities that are gonna be part of the 5G infrastructure. Yeah. And network. And so I think that's really the, again, the mindset shift that the industry needs to make and do it in a material practical way. as these capabilities and networks become realized, through modernization efforts, You can head a lot of the thinking. Yeah. ahead just by thinking practically about, market use cases and, really getting down to. The practical technical level, How are we changing the mobile computing or the fixed wireless computing

Oliver Buschmann 20:15

Yeah.

Leonard Lee 20:15

model for a particular use case. And then I think a lot of exciting things can happen, and we realize, right?

Oliver Buschmann 20:23

Yeah, I agree with That. So that's gonna be interesting how this turns out. Right? So basically the whole thing has to come together from everything yesterday, probably into a business model, like you said this. Yeah. This is gonna be a interesting journey ahead. I'm curious what we see the next year in Mobile Law of Congress.

Leonard Lee 20:41

I think that we're going to see an essential and, urgent need to focus on moving the law. And I think it's already starting here. in this conference where it says there's more of a practical, how you go this. Yeah. How do we, get to that next step in the 5G journey, which I quite frankly think has lost the spotlight over the last few years The industry really needs to put that spotlight back on 5G so that we're talking about it more. Yeah. And we're now, getting prepared for this frontier that's right in front of us. Like again, there's a backlog of technology and there's a lot of opportunity behind that backlog. And so this is where the industry really needs to start thinking about, how do we get to that point where we unlock. and start to digest. Yeah. And, you know, put into the field these really great capabilities. I mean, pretty significant changes that, we can anticipate, but also a lot of opportunities as well. and readiness is gonna be a big thing, right? And that means you have to get up the maturity curve. Up and down that stack that we were talking about.

Oliver Buschmann 21:57

Yeah, I agree. And I think that the turning point is really that, that you have five GS area there. You have everything, all the layers in play that we destroy went through. And then hope next year we'll see like hundreds of implementations let's keep our fingers chain being real. Yeah. All right then. Uh, let's do it. Great to see you. Great. Having this chat with you was a nice journey across The whole stack. That's a whole stack, whole stack journey. when do we do, the guitar playing then on by June

Leonard Lee 22:26

next week. How's that? That, okay. All right. I'll see you on the other side of the pond.