The Global System for Mobile Telecommunications Association (GSMA) has called for more investments in Fifth-Generation (5G) technology for digital transformation across all sectors.
The Director-General of GSMA, Mats Granryd, who disclosed this in his keynote address yesterday, at the ongoing 2023 Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, Spain, said that when considering the future of the industry – Web 3.0, the metaverse and intelligent connectivity – there’s new excitement and conviction that anything is possible.
“I believe we are in the new era of exploration. Those that dare can lead the way; those that dare can build new business models for consumers, businesses and societies. And those that dare can go where no one has been before.”
Speaking about the new era in the industry, he explained it’s making everything digital – from personal lives, business goals and everything in-between.
He noted the industry is poised for a transformation to future-facing tech communication corporations.
Despite all the opportunities, Granryd pointed to some issues that need to be addressed in the industry: investments, spectrum and the usage gap.
He said between now and 2030, operators will spend roughly $1.5 trillion on their mobile capex, to keep up with customers’ demand on the network.
“Over 90 per cent of this (capex) will be towards 5G. I think this is quite remarkable. We’re exploring innovative financial models to make sure we can achieve these investments.”
Already in Nigeria, MTN, Mafab and Airtel are pushing the 5G frontiers. While MTN has started commercial launch and spread to about seven cities, Mafab made a formal launch in January, but Nigerians are waiting for its service. Nothing has however been heard from Airtel.
According to Granryd, 5G technology connections have already breached the one billion mark and continue to grow, saying partnerships are really very important.
Speaking on spectrum, he said it is well-known that affordable spectrum is vital to the industry. “This year is a critical year, with the World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC) holding in Dubai. 5G needs capacity to grow, and as we know, speed and quality are directly linked to spectrum.
“We are working very hard so that the issues raised at this year’s conference will increase harmonisation, allowing us to deliver fast and affordable mobile services to more people.
“We need this year’s WRC to deliver low-band spectrum to decrease the usage gap, 3.5GHz harmonisation to drive affordability and the 6GHz band for the crucial expansion of 5G.
“If we can achieve this, we have an opportunity to put mobile services into the hands of billions of more people across the world and ensure no one is left behind.”
He said the usage gap is one of the biggest challenges the industry must overcome. “We need to work across the whole ecosystem to eliminate the barriers, which are handset affordability and digital skills and literacy, and create relevant content in local languages, to ensure everyone can safely access mobile Internet.”
Going forward as an industry, the GSMA announced a new industry-wide initiative. The GSMA Open Gateway is an effort to harmonise access to operators’ application programming interfaces (APIs), states the mobile industry body.
In addition, the GSMA Open Gateway aims to help developers and cloud providers enhance and deploy services more quickly via single points of access to operator networks. This is achieved via common, northbound service APIs that expose mobile operators’ network capabilities within a consistent, interoperable and federated framework.
The initiative is made up of 21 mobile operators, including America Movil, AT&T, Bharti Airtel, China Mobile, Telefónica, MTN, Orange, Verizon and Vodacom.
The GSMA has already started engaging companies like Microsoft, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, to build this specific ecosystem.
Speaking via video broadcast during the keynote address, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said his company is bringing the Open Gateway initiative to Microsoft Azure.
This will be achieved in partnership with AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, Singtel, Telefónica and others, as part of the Azure programmable connectivity that provides a unified interface across all operative networks, Nadella explained.
