MWC is almost over, and it’s been a mixture of the “Old Telco” and the “New Cloud.” The combination could have possibilities, but I think the show was almost two shows because the combination was either absent or at least trivialized. I blogged yesterday about the GSMA API initiative, and that’s only one example of the fact that, as the song goes, “Two different worlds, we live in two different worlds….”
According to Omdia as quoted HERE, “5G has disappointed pretty much everybody—service providers and consumers, and it has failed to excite businesses.” I wonder how much any of these groups really expected from 5G, frankly. What I think we had, in the end, was the only budgeted telco infrastructure initiative, and you either believed in it as a vendor or telco, or you started looking for another job. Well, reality is. But the point here is that while 5G has failed to live up to the hype, it’s going to take time (and maybe 6G) to move on from it. Meanwhile, the telco community is trapped in a fading delusion.
Also meanwhile, players who haven’t traditionally figured in MWC have shown up and are making waves. It’s not that Intel or Microsoft or Google or Amazon were pushing a story that was totally disconnected from 5G, but that they were trying to influence the whole “moving on” thing. Don’t fall into the “G” trap yet again, dear telcos, lift your eyes from the traditional muck at your feet and see the sky!” For those who find this satire a bit too obscure, I mean that these players are putting one foot in the “hosting and API” piece of 5G, and just hinting a bit at where that might take telcos if they elevated their planning out of the realm of simple connection.
The GSMA APIs that were announced are trite, proven failures. The concept of APIs, the promise of APIs, is perhaps the only way that operators can move on. APIs mean software components assembled to create features. That means hosting, the cloud. Since operators have demonstrated that they really don’t want to deploy their own “carrier cloud”, the New Cloud players are looking at promoting hosted features and offering a place to host them.
If you look at the offerings that the Big Three cloud vendors made, you see that they’re far from futuristic in service terms. I’ve touted my notion of the “digital-twin metaverse”, and there’s nothing that even approaches that in terms of defining what might be a broad and credible service model that adds to the top-end revenue pie because users want it bad enough to pay. Instead, what we have is a series of things that add up to “take a baby step in this direction, and eventually you’ll See the Light.”
In a way, this makes a lot of sense for all concerned, because telcos wouldn’t have let themselves become so mired in delusional 5G if they weren’t deathly afraid of anything that wasn’t an evolution of things familiar to them. Facilitating services assembled from APIs? Give them a Valium! A few harmless, familiar, OSS/BSS services exposed as APIs? Yeah, just a brief nap will let telcos recover from that. Add in the “You don’t need your own cloud” and you have something that might even raise a cautious smile.
So what’s the problem? Isn’t the MWC story proof that cloud and data center vendors are leading telcos out of the dark ages? No, just that they’re trying to lead them away from a 6G rehash of 5G disappointment. Why? Because 6G won’t come along for three or four years, and nobody wants to wait that long for a revenue kicker in these challenging economic times. We could easily see the “G” delusion replaced by the “API” delusion, a different but familiar telco dodge-change maneuver.
There are some signs, even at MWC, that at least some players may recognize that something real and different needs to be done. Evolution is good if it leads you to a state better than the one you’re in. Revolution is faster and may, in the end, be less painful, so who might be the most capable of creating a revolution? It would have to be the cloud providers. Of the cloud providers, the one I think could be the most influential in breaking the “G” deadlock is Google. While Google didn’t announce any specific new service/benefit target either, you could infer that their GDC Edge and Nephio stories could be designed to evolve into a platform for that next big thing. It’s harder to pick out a path to that happy destination in either Amazon’s or Microsoft’s story, though both might also have something in mind.
Among the network vendors, I’m watching Nokia here because they may well be the only player at the whole show that actually sees how different the future of telecom must be. But look at all the qualifiers I’ve had to use regarding Nokia. They are committed to transformation, and they’re a player whose business model is clearly threatened by the “G” delusion. I think they’ve shown that they realize that, but do they have a specific plan, a target approach, a new benefit model in mind? That’s hard to say.
The risk that the cloud provider approach of one-foot-in-the-G might present is that it might simply facilitate telcos’ putting both feet there. APIs and hosted carrier cloud are still a general strategy, one that could be seen by operators as enough progress and enough discomfort. What gets them to pull the anchor foot out and step forward instead? A clear promise, and that is not being offered by anyone at this point, not Google or even Nokia. We’ll watch for signs, though, and with hope.