Author: Bill Best

The internet is older than Azenby. That makes us feel fresh and young. In fact, the internet is old enough to be our father and this year marks the 30^thyear of its existence. The Science Museum in London decided to commemorate this milestone by inviting Sir Tim Berners-Lee to give a talk on how his creation is doing as it approaches middle age. Sadly, we were unable to get tickets for this event as they sold out faster than an Ed Sheeran concert. We even tried Viagogo. No luck!

Like most of you, we therefore had to rely on the media coverage of the event to find out what is on Sir Tim’s mind now.

The headline was that Sir Tim said that we all need to fight for the internet we want. We can’t disagree with that, but we would venture that not all users necessarily want the same internet. He also spent time on Net neutrality, which is a favourite subject of his but, not for the first time, we were left worried that Sir Tim may not really understand the different roles that Internet Service Provider, Communication Provider (CP) and Apps Provider all play in the internet eco-system. Sir Tim sees access to the internet as almost a human right and furthermore he said everyone should all pay the same amount for access to the internet and no CP should be allowed to charge more for offering faster access and a higher QoS. This is the point at which we diverge views with Sir Tim. Putting aside the obvious point that CPs proving access to the internet need to be investing heavily in infrastructure and a healthy ROI is a very necessary prerequisite to this, we can’t help but observe that not all user needs for internet access are the same. Far from it.

Some users will rarely or never want anything other than a simple internet connection capable of messaging, a bit of web browsing and updating their social media pages. When we look at the IoT however, we see use cases that demand a very high speed, ultra-low latency, high QoS connection.

At MWC this year, there was a demonstration of open-heart surgery being assisted over an internet connection. Who wants to be lying on the operating table waiting for the next page to stop buffering! Can all the varying needs of access to the internet ever really be all be delivered at the same price? Absolutely not in our view. This would severely curtail development of applications on the internet. Net Neutrality can, and maybe should, prevent CPs from discriminating access to one application provider from another on a charging basis, but it shouldn’t be about a race to the bottom on a basic service offering. If an application on the internet needs a higher quality connection, we firmly believe that a CP should be able to charge accordingly and then let market forces determine the retail price for access to the internet.

Looking at other aspects of the internet of today and tomorrow, we all know that privacy of our personal data held on-line is now the top story. We all need to feel safe using the internet and our confidence in this regard is being shaken almost daily. Sir Tim told us about something called Solid (from his co-founded company Inrupt). Solid is somewhere that you and I can keep all our personal on-line data. The idea being that we then control who has access to what bits of it. An application provider would need to ask our permission before having access. This all boils down to a matter of trust of course and we will all have different feelings about who we trust with our data on line and who is profiling us for profit. With this in mind having our own safety deposit box in the cloud as a single depository of all our data and being able to control access to it on an application basis sounds rather appealing. But can we trust our ‘data bank?’ It seems worth a go, but we would like to see some competition in this space so that we can make our own selection on who we think may be operating the data bank with the highest integrity. This does also begin to gnaw away at the very business model of the Tech Giants, but that is maybe no bad thing.

What else for the future? Well, as bizarre and as counter intuitive as this may seem, it may be time to think about a regulated version of the WWW. No, we haven’t gone mad, but we do wonder if the uncontrolled, no rules and holds-barred approach to how the internet exists today is really sustainable. There are several ways that his might happen, both good and bad. Let’s start with how we would not want to see the internet evolve.

Russia is planning to close down the internet down for a day except for internal communications. The official rationale is that Russia says it wants this ‘switch’ to defend itself against Cyber-attacks from foreign agencies. Roskomnazor (the Russia regulator) says that all traffic must be routed to their ‘eye’ for evaluation. Scary stuff. We do wonder if this would actually work? Yes, you can cut all ties with the outside world (maybe) but web pages are often made up of content that comes from scores of different sources and places and perhaps even from other jurisdictions. Would crucial financial services, aviation systems, defence systems stop working in this scenario? I guess that is what Russia is trying to find out in their test. Good luck with that!

The DR of Congo tried something similar during its elections to prevent external influence. So, the question is, are we moving away from the utopian, altruistic WWW that Sir Tim envisaged and is his fight being lost? And really is that a good thing or a bad thing?

We think state intervention in the WWW is unwelcome but is the web as it exists today sustainable? Have we reached a point where the WWW actually needs to be regulated? Maybe we allow the wild-west version of the WWW to continue but we create a regulated WWW2 where only registered people and organisations can use it? I am thinking somewhere where financial transactions, health care systems, traffic and aviation systems etc. can be safely deployed. Where users are safe from hackers and from manipulation. Where we can feel confident our data is not shared for profit without our consent and we are not profiled in ways which would make 1984 look tame in comparison. Have we gone full circle and the free, uncontrolled, uncensored, open to all, dream of the WWW has failed? It may make Sir Tim and other founders of the internet shout out in horror but is it time for a safe regulated WWW2 to run in parallel with the open access one? Is that the internet we need to fight for?

If you would like to comment or contact us about this blog please feel free to do so.

Who will look back on 2018 as being a landmark year and who will be glad it’s all over and hoping 2019 will be kinder to them? Azenby is having a go at picking the winners and losers in 2018 in the mobile world. Let us know if you agree with our findings.

Apple

Having brought us the $1,000 smartphone, we can assume that Apple have discovered the outer boundaries of our mobile device spend! Overtaken by Huawei in smartphone sales and facing import bans on older iPhone models, Apple have had an unusually mixed year. It was also a year when their halo slipped, and they had to admit to slowing down our iPhones to improve battery performance. Trouble is, they didn’t want us to know they were doing it. Still this didn’t stop them becoming the first ever company with £1tn market capitlisation and the Apple Watch finally started to find some wrists. And then there is Siri of course. Make your own decision on where that sits on the roller coaster ride.

5G

Surely its been a great year for 5G. Not a week goes by when one mobile operator or another isn’t shouting from the mast tops about a 1Gbps 5G trial. At Azenby we can see the difference between a trial and a commercial deployment, devices in the shop being one big clue! The other rather important prerequisite to launching 5G is of course a bit of backward compatibility with 4G (and 3G and 2G). At Azenby we wondered out loud about the wisdom of continuous backward compatibility in developing new technologies, but we lost that argument. We’ll try again when 6G comes along. With this in my mind we couldn’t help but be fascinated by the comments of Balazs Bertenyi, Chairman 3GPP TSG RA, when he said “3GPP RAN has put extreme focus on ensuring the stability and compatibility of these specifications that are to be used for the first 5G deployments. Consequently, work on components for the ‘late drop’ that address additional architecture options to aid migration from LTE to 5G have been slightly delayed.”

The big question is; has 5G arrived in 2018 or not?  Yes and No is the answer, but nearer No than Yes. In the Middle East we have seen commercial fixed wireless services launched using a 5G radio interface and in the USA, two operators have brought 5G data only products to the market. None of these are full-on 5G mobility services with backward compatibility to LTE and at Azenby we are holding back our award for the world’s first true 5G commercial launch until we see this criterion met.

The consequence of this focus on pure 5G first deployments over legacy support is, we understand, a further delay of three months or more (we bet more) on freezing Release 15. We think 3G could well be a big casualty in the 5G race. One less legacy technology to support will be appealing for both operators and vendors alike and at Azenby we think it’s the big chop for 3G. And good riddance to it, complicated, flaky, useless standard that it is. It won’t be lamented.

Lawyers

A great year for lawyers. When is it never a great year for lawyers! Apple and Qualcomm slug out patent law suits in the US, China, Germany and the UK with Qualcomm asking for $1bn in damages in the US alone. Qualcomm says Apple is a mind boggling $7bn behind in its royalty payments (that’s a very big cheque to be stuck in the post) so the £1bn damages may just be the tip of the iceberg. Apple lawyers counter sue, and you can’t help feeling that lawyers will be the only winners out of all this. They should at least be able to afford one of those thousand buck iPhones. At Azenby we wonder what the Qualcomm’s actions do to their sales pitch. One can’t help but feel that a customer would have to think long and hard about the risks of themselves of being on the end of one of these writs. (Note to San Diego, Azenby is not knowingly infringing any of your 17,000 patents). What we really want to see from Qualcomm is the Snapdragon 855 processor, a perquisite for 5G. We’d rather be talking about that than law suits!

Huawei

If ever a company had a mixed year! Forging ahead in sales of mobile infrastructure, announcing over twenty 5G network deals, test casing 5G, selling more devices than Apple. So, a great year for Huawei on the face of it. Except that, well, the western world is ganging up on it. Banning orders and threats of banning orders from the USA, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Germany and now the UK, have put a bit of a downer on 2018 for the Guangdong giant, not to mention the arrest of its CFO Meng Wanzhou, for allegedly breaking sanctions. We don’t sit in judgement here at Azenby but we would humbly suggest to our friends in China that if they took IP Title a little more seriously, then perhaps they would get a better press.

ZTE

One could argue that Huawei had it easy in comparison to ZTE. The US Government banned all sales from ZTE and imposed sanctions on the company which resulted in a complete shutdown of operations. ZTE breached previous conditions on where it sold US technology and paid a heavy price. $1bn dollars to be precise and a commitment to change out its entire board. Its back up and running now but took a heavy blow in 2018.

M&A

2018 was a continuation of the mania around M&A deals. Qualcomm held a central role here as well, firstly having their sale to Broadcom ‘Trumped’ only then to see its own acquisition of NXP crushed again by US regulators. One deal that finally did get the go ahead was the tie up between Sprint and T-Mobile US, bring the number of major competitors from four to three in this huge market. Talking of T-Mobile, their Netherland venture also got the merge with Tele 2 over the EU competition hurdles. Probably the biggest mobile operator merger of the year though, certainly in market size terms, was the formation of Vodafone Idea in India. Like T-Mobile, Vodafone has been busy in 2018 as well as it also tries to get the go ahead for its takeover of Liberty Global in Germany and beyond. At Azenby we are not at all surprised by any of this as we have long been strong advocates of the need for operators to share infrastructure. Merging companies together is the most extreme form of this of course, but even simple RAN sharing has the potential to radically transform MNOs business performance and their balance sheets.

Blockchain

2018 hasn’t been kind to Blockchain and Crypto currencies. Unless of course you are drug baron or money launderer. At Azenby, we indulge in neither practice, so we waited to see the more legitimate benefits unfold. We searched and search and struggled to see the gold shoots its many proponents have promised. We are not alone. The US Agency for International Development has conducted a study of forty projects where blockchain was supposed to make services more efficient found a success rate of zero. Add to that that one of Blockchain’s darling Crypto currencies, the Bitcoin, has shrunk in market value to the tune of $180bn since the beginning of the year, one might think that the Blockchain Emperor has no clothes.

The year of the hack

It was a good year for hackers. It seems hackers don’t need to try so hard these days to steal personal data. At Azenby, we take the need for proper IT and Network security very seriously, but it seems we are in a shrinking camp. Far too many of the reported ‘hacks’, involved very poor husbandry of customer data. Those of us who chose security for a lifetime career, were proved right once again, and the lessons of the past are still not being learnt. As we have seen, data theft often involves the theft of personal information. This is very serious of course because this is the sort of data that could be used to clone identities. In many cases of reported hacks, the security procedures being employed by organisations have been woefully inadequate. Amongst those just being very careless with customer data were Marriott Hotels, British Airway, Eurostar, FIFA, Google+, Butlins, Exactis, Strava (showing the sensitive military sites where there were keen fitness people), amongst what is sadly, a very long list indeed.

Facebook were fined £500,000, the maximum allowed, by the UK Information Commissioner’s Office in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. This case was worrying because this was not a hack but Facebook allowing access to third parties data without the owners consent. Indeed, the lines of data protection have become blurred for those media companies whose business model is based on selling personal data to advertisers and other bidders. .

Facebook

Talking of Facebook, they have for so long been racing the upside of the rollercoaster and achieving unheralded heights that it seemed rather inevitable that the once over the top of the big riser it might be quite a descent with no brakes. So many of Facebooks much reported and discussed woes in 2018 have been self-inflicted and quite how deep the wounds are only time will tell. Its imaginative accounting practices and its ability to pay less tax then a market stall holder, means it was short of goodwill and credit once the tide turned and 2018 does seem to have been a bit of gamechanger for the hitherto unstoppable monster harvester of data. And what with data being its prime commodity, its big revenue earner and its only real asset, one would have felt that they might have taken better care of it in 2018. Having started the year promising to help us all make more friends, it has ended it being rather friendless.

We don’t have the space, time or the inclination to list all the trials and tribulations that beset Facebook in 2018 but just of the top of our heads we can bring to mind; being clueless on what constituted fake news, providing a platform for Russian meddling in elections, allowing Cambridge Analytica to access data from some 87 million users, the struggles to understand what GDPR actually means, the CEO facing the European Parliament and not facing the UK Parliament, the lawsuit from Six4Three, giving access to personal data to 60 device manufacturers – without our permission of course, the  “security update” that exposed the data of 50 million users , the private photo’s leak that exposed up to 6.8 million people’s private photos…………….. Wow, this is a long short list!

At Azenby we fully expect now to be included in operation Opposition Research but at least we are in good company. At Azenby we won’t be worrying about data leaks from our own Facebook page. We are far too wise for that! We can only conclude that Facebook win the prize for being on the big downer on the 2018 roller coaster.

And the winner is……………..

Let’s finish on a positive note and decide on who we think has had the best of 2018. In terms of news domination, SoftBank were streets ahead. Now a conglomerate with ownership stakes in ARM, Boston Dynamics, Sprint, Alibaba, Yahoo Japan, Brightstar, Uber, Snapdeal, Brain, Fanatics, Nvidia, Slack, WeWork, Compass to name but a few, it has plenty of platforms to work with. Yes, it’s true that SoftBank are much bigger than just mobile but their interest in mobile related companies and their approach to the mobile industry is setting new benchmarks for MNOs to try and follow. SoftBank also runs the Vision Fund of course which is now reputed to be the world’s largest technology fund. SoftBank announced deal after deal in 2018 across geographies and in diverse industries. If what we read is correct, it invested in 35 rounds, totaling over $30 billion. We feel sure at Azenby that it is only a matter of time before Vision Fund knock on our door, but we want to make it clear that that had absolutely nothing to do with our choice of Softbank as the winner in 2018.

I have a nasty feeling that more than one red faced CTIO will be asking this question in the not too distant future. It won’t be the house keys or the car keys that will be missing down the back of the sofa. This time it will be far more serious. Here is the scenario I see unfolding and it may be sooner than you think.

5G promises so much unless of course you are in the same camps as Eric Xu, Huawei’s rotating chairman when he said, “The entire industry and governments around the world have regarded 5G too highly, to the extent it will be the digital infrastructure for everything.” – he then added  “It is a just a natural evolution of the technology from 2G to 3G to 4G and now 5G.”

OK, Huawei realised this wasn’t the greatest sales pitch they have ever come up to promote sales of their products, so they have since modified this stance somewhat to say that “5G should have the performance advantages of 100 billion connections, 1ms latency, 10Gbps throughput to meet the requirement of “Fully Connected World”. That sounds like a better sales pitch.

I didn’t intend to explain the merits of 5G here but if this has whetted your appetite, why not go and take a look at our blog on 5G here.

Faster and higher performing radio access is not to be sniffed at but I don’t think that alone is the 5G game changer. Lower latency and faster data speeds are just part of the natural evolution of radio technology as Eric Wu rightly pointed out. These alone won’t underpin new services. The ability to really begin to integrate 5G architectures into other industry segments infrastructure is the real game changer. And here the philosophy of NFV (Network Functions Virtualization) is a big driver for new business models emerging, alongside network slicing and a new approach to customer data management.

It’s the customer data management piece I wanted to explore further here. Sorry for not using the more conventional nomenclature of subscriber data management but really, I do wish our industry would drop subscribers and talk about customers instead. Now that would be a game changer!

Those with a keen interest in these things will have noticed a radically different approach to authentication in the 5G standards. This change is to better support new concepts, new business models, IoT (which is both of the above) and NFV, as well as the vastly increased demand for network authentication that new 5G related services will bring about.

Let’s stop and think about NFV for a moment. Using standardised hardware platforms and deploying only the functions needed is a very attractive prospect for MNOs. It promises to change the cost of doing business quite dramatically. MNOs in smaller markets may even think about using managed services in the Cloud for hosting and operating the core. This is another game changer for the way they can do business in the future and give their customers access to 5G services much faster than was hitherto possible.

Now I move on to my worry point and I am glad to also say that there is a solution to my worries, but I am not yet seeing a groundswell towards adoption of the solution I have in mind. This is my concern. MNOs have traditionally taken great care to safeguard their keys, algorithms and sensitive business logic. The vital network credentials used during both SIM provisioning and then for network authentication have always been subject to strict security policies and processes. This is for a very good reason because the possibility of having network keys or algorithms compromised is probably the highest risk to business continuity that an MNO faces. So why would anyone risk having their crown jewels in a virtualised function which may even be part of a hosted Cloud solution? I know I wouldn’t. This seems like a deadly scenario which ends where I started and the CTIO asking ‘where exactly did I leave my keys?’ Too late to ask that question now!

There are solutions available and the one I favour most is creating a safe for the crown jewels. Yes, I know falling back on a hardware solution bucks the trend of NFV but there are some things I still really want to see kept safe and sound in a protected, tamper proof piece of hardware. The solution – at least in part – is available today and used in many adjacent industries. Using a Hardware Secure Module (HSM) to store Mobile algorithms such as Milenage, COMP-128 and remote SIM OTA custom key derivation algorithms safeguards crucial data. By also deploying Business logic such as HSS eKi decryption for use with Milenage, contained within the HSM, the Ki is never used in an unencrypted form externally. The HSM can also support the generation of SIM provisioning credentials and transport encryption, from Ki to PIN/PUKs generation, all in one request. Include SIM OTA secured payload assembly for both UICCs and eUICCs for example.

Having adopted this principle, MNOs can even consider the outsourcing support of internal systems used for SIM production containing sensitive material. Very many MNOs have already outsourced their SIM provisioning and in this situation, the use of the HSM provides them with a way of reclaiming control of their keys but still have the production facility outsourced. To put this another way, would you hand your keys to someone else to unlock your house or car on your behalf? Of course not, so having an HSM allows you to do it yourself without sharing your secrets!

Together, these are the security methods which are needed in the 5G NFV environment and maybe its just a matter of time before MNOs arrive at this same viewpoint, but for the current rate of adoption is still worryingly low. The need to secure business continuity is the main driver for the adoption of HSMs into the SIM provisioning and authentication processes but once done it also opens new business and revenue opportunities for MNOs. We all see that a lot of the news items about 5G focus on the emergence of new business models whereby MNOs forge new partnerships with players in other industry verticals to really make IoT happen.

Monetising the SIM as an asset is really important for MNOs in the 5G world and offering a heightened level of security over other wireless access technologies will be a major factor for those organisations developing industrialised IoT applications. Many of these new business partnerships will be deeper and more rewarding, as partners – call them external service providers – can have access to sensitive material but are in a position of elevated trust to do their own provisioning. In the world of remote SIM provisioning (RSP), I think this opens up limitless new possibilities for service delivery which allow MNOs to be serious players in the IoT market. Think of it this way: allowing new partners access to key material outsources trust without the MNO losing control. Smaller, specialist RSP partners, inherit this level of trust and the MNO will know that the integrity of the sensitive data is guaranteed by use of the HSM. Some MNOs are worried about the impact RSP may have on their business. More forward-thinking MNOs will see RSP as a major opportunity to expand their business relationships, just so long as they keep the commercially sensitive credentials safe and sound.

Making this happen isn’t simply just a case of buying a standards compliant HSM. It is firstly understanding how to apply the necessary business logic to the HSM and then to integrate this into current support systems that is more of the challenge. The rewards of doing this though are sufficiently high for it to be worth the challenge. At Azenby we would like to help MNOs and MVNOs of all sizes make the transition towards this new level of security for network credentials and to then exploit the new business opportunities this can open up.

If you would like to learn more about how we can help with this journey, why not get in touch with us today. The sooner the journey starts the less chance of those keys being lost!

Crossed wires isn’t something we often talk about at Azenby, what with us being mobile people and predominantly wireless experts, but the recent news about crossed wires, delays and cost overruns on the Crossrail project got us thinking about why is it that strategic projects so often fail to deliver on time and to budget.

Like many other UK businesses based in London and the south east, we have been looking forward to the opening of the new east-west rail route linking Essex and Kent to Berkshire through central London. Last week’s news that the opening date has been put back by one year, just three months before planned completion, was therefore a nasty shock. A project that started with a strategic study in 1974 and a construction start of 2009 just shouldn’t get to within three months of completion, before deciding another year is needed. Having over 100 consecutive RAG status reports at Green and then to go Red at this very late stage, must be major cause of concern for Crossrail and its customers. How could this happen though when Crossrail claim ’the key to managing a programme of this scale and complexity is the programme controls process. The Programme Controls sets out how Crossrail developed a world class controls function.’

Crossrail’s own account is of delays to fitting out stations and software delays for the new signalling. We are not construction experts, but we can imagine that building huge station complexes 40m below ground in central London is difficult and prone to delays from unforeseen circumstances. As for software delays, this is a 10-year programme of work which does seem plenty of time to develop some software! Doubtless the programme has had a small army of Project Managers working hard and adopting all the latest start-of-the-art project processes and using all the best tools and systems available befitting a £15bn project. Yet still the project suffers problems at the 11th hour. So again, we ask; how can that be? Especially as we don’t doubt the dedication of the team on the ground, the excellence of the processes and the strategic commitment of the leadership.

While we don’t have the inside track on all this, we are pretty sure that at Azenby, we can hazard a good guess! That’s a bold, brash statement to make but we do have many years’ experience of large complex projects in the mobile industry and have the battle scars to prove it. We can honestly say, ‘we’ve been there done that!’ Our own conclusion is that this “last minute nasty” surprise is the result of two factors.

Firstly, programme failure. It isn’t for the want of project management that projects overrun, it’s the lack of real subject matter expertise that underpins the timing and budget assumptions that go into the making of a project plan. Project Managers may have PPM, Prince 2, Six Sigma, PMP or any other of the long list of qualifications behind their name, but without subject matter expertise to really understand the time and costs of delivering the desired outcome, they are really only making their best guess. Good project management alone is not enough. Real depth of experience counts.

At Azenby, we have seen at close quarters many major mobile projects from 1st generation onwards and that is a lot of projects and a lot of learning. Something we are very proud of. Can we say the mobile industry is a role model for others to follow when it comes to delivering projects on time? Well hardly. 2nd generation (Global System for Mobile Communications, as it become known) was a good example. The introduction of GSM was indeed a large and complex project. Roll-out everywhere was plagued by delays. Circumstances outside of our control. Planning permission for the vital infrastructure needed, specification and network equipment delays, billing systems to be designed and built, sales channels to be established, nothing was off- the -shelf or ready-made. We were in unchartered territory. And just when we finally thought we had the networks ready, we looked around and discovered that there were no mobile devices for customers to use. In fact, Mario Sentinelli from TIM produced those now famous badges saying GSM stood for God Send Mobiles. Maybe every project needs divine intervention of one sort or another!

What we at Azenby have learnt over many years of being practitioners in the mobile industry is that good and strong project management is vital, and no one stands above us in the support and appreciation of good project management, but a project plan is only ever as good as the intelligence it contains and that’s where subject matter expertise comes to bear. Thinking about that, we go through our check list starting with understanding what is really involved in each stage of the project; how long will it really take; what are all the third-party dependencies; have the all the costs really been captured; is the critical path missing vital parts; where will plan Bs be needed, are all the resources available when needed, are the subcontractors and their sub-contractors really prepared? Of course, Project Managers go through the same thinking process, but they don’t always know the answers to these vital questions. They are Project Managers, not subject matter experts. The value that Azenby adds is to ‘road test’ the project plan in conjunction with the project manager and project team. We bring an external, independent audit and review to the plan before it starts. We scrutinise and critique the plan and make sure it is robust, realistic, resourced and achievable.

A second crucial ingredient in the failure of large projects comes from the contracts structure. Often little over runs are over looked, swept aside, ‘hidden’ perhaps until the nasty surprise at the end reveals systemic failures in the project. Creating a transparent and communication rich contract structure where 3rd parties and teams at all layers in the delivery can openly and honestly express concerns and challenges is an extraordinarily tough challenge, but time and again we have found excellent programme management can only be fostered when time has been taken to ensure absolutely that the leaders can hear, communicate and act on feedback from all the projects’ actors. We fully realise this is especially hard in large public contracts with political components, but nonetheless needed.

Azenby often act’s as an expert support to the leadership team in large deliverable. A second channel freed of political, departmental, managerial constraints can help gather a more nuanced perspective on a projects progress.

Over the years we have helped many Mobile Operators deliver complex projects such as RAN share and Network merge programmes all over the world. We bring our unique experience of these projects and provide the subject matter expertise to the type of projects that only ever get done once, helping make sure that they get done right first time. There is no second chance with these projects.

At Azenby we have lived and prospered from 1st generation mobile to 4G LTE and now we wait with anticipation for 5G which is just around the corner. We write this article in the earnest belief that we can all learn useful lessons from Crossrail. At Azenby we will be delighted to share and support those successes.

Our CEO Bill Best was amongst four Azenby people at MWC 2018. Here are his observations of the event.

This, we are very reliably informed by Mobile World Live, is the 32nd Mobile World Congress. There are, no doubt, a lot of people who attended the early GSMA plenaries, who still attend MWC
today even though the nature and purpose of the event is totally different these days. I am
not one of those first pioneers, but I have attended quite a few, probably over 20. This year I had the pleasure to moderate a panel session on mobile edge infrastructure. More on that later.

I was one of the 108,000 people attending this year and if I wanted to visit to all the 2,300 companies exhibiting I could have spent 1 second with each (excluding travel time between stands) so I decided to be selective and plan ahead and work out who should have the pleasure of me visiting their stand.

Traditionally, companies would use MWC to announce new products but we see a lot less of this happening these days. I think this is because there is so much noise surrounding MWC that it is hard to be heard unless you are a Samsung and indeed nearly all the talk and certainly the press talk was about their new Galaxy 9 range. This device is all about media, all about images, videos, and emojis. About post picture processing (do I smell the beginning of the end for Photoshop?). I think it supports communication as well. Not sure though, this aspect was never mentioned.

Thanks again to Mobile World Live who reminded me that back in 1987 someone called Nokia turned up and announced their new handset, the Cityman 1320 which weighed one kilogram, had an 8-hour charge time and 30 minutes of talk time. This year Samsung unveiled the new Galaxy 9 with a slightly different specification, but these two devices retailed at about the same price in their relative eras. Amazing that. Just to put a dampener on Samsung’s show, The GSMA the device of the year in the Global Mobile Awards went to Apple X. I read that Samsung sell two Galaxy devices for every one Apple phone sold. You pay your money and make your choices!

Talking of choices, full marks to HMD (those guys who own the Nokia handset brand) who had a good go at grabbing some of the device attention away from Samsung by unveiling five new phones including a remodelled 8110 and the premium Nokia 8 Sirocco. I saw a forecast saying that there will be a growth of one billion mobile connections from now until 2025, mostly in developing markets like Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, and Pakistan, as well as markets across Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. Looking at that new one billion mobile customers, I think few will be Apple X and Samsung 9 buyers, so maybe we might just see the re-emergence of Nokia, at least in those developing markets.

Enough about devices. To more important matters; 5G. There were enough stats flying around MWC this year to keep the most ardent anorak happy for a year. One report said that it will be 2025 before 4G accounts for half of all global connections and that seems a long time to me. We will see commercial launches of 5G this year but whether these will be fully 3GPP compliant is a doubt. In the same time frame – 2025 – 5G will account for less than 15% of connections. I am underwhelmed by these projections. Perhaps this is because Operators were lining up to say ‘no 5G business case’ (intended for the ears of the vendors), and the vendors were saying ‘massive new revenues’ (intended for the ears of the Operators and Service Providers). The business case for an MNO does appear challenging unless they can monetise data and not just shift it.

Maybe the focus is not so much on us humans now and the march of the machines and IOT is catching the attentions of the Service Providers. GSMA Intelligence is forecasting the number of IoT connections (cellular and non-cellular) will increase more than threefold by 2025, reaching 25 billion. So, it is not surprising that 23 mobile operators have commercially launched 38 mobile IoT networks worldwide across using the NB-IoT and LTE-M standards.

With the remarkable claim from last year’s show that roaming charges would be abolished being conveniently forgotten and brushed under the carpet, GSMA Chairman, Sunil Mittal, this time round called on mobile network operators to seriously consider the NetCo model, a consortium-like approach to network building. Now at Azenby we will say ‘great idea but we were there 10 years ago!’ Azenby has been heavily involved in over ten major RAN and Net share projects around the world in the last five years alone.

I think MNOs of all types and sizes are now all fully aware now that infrastructure sharing is a necessity of business life and more than that, their existence depends on it. The final catalyst for this conversion in thinking is 5G and no MNO sees a case for competing 5G network infrastructure. Further evidence of this came from the announcement that five of the world’s largest operators have formed an alliance with the goal of driving forward the development of a more open, smarter generation of radio access network. The ORAN Alliance comprises AT&T, China Mobile, Deutsche Telekom, NTT DoCoMo and Orange, and combines previous groups the C-RAN Alliance and xRAN Forum into a joint, operator-led effort to help shape the next generation of radio access networks.

It’s rare that serious discord breaks out at MWC but this year we witnessed a bit of a dust up. In the red corner was Vittorio Colao and in the magenta corner Timotheus Hoettges. Heavyweight Tim started it by saying he was determined to block any potential deal between Vodafone Group and cable giant Liberty Global. Vittorio weaved and counter-punched saying (I paraphrase slightly) ‘you should never look to shut down one of your competitors – you have to win by fair means.’

I think Vittorio won on points. He finished by saying “here you have a national player who says that a competitor should not buy a regional cable company because this creates some kind of threat to something. If you follow that logic, then DT should be split in two – perhaps an east and west Deutsche Telekom.” Ouch!

What’s really eating DT here? Its my favourite topic that content is king. DT worry about a cable monopoly. Vodafone Germany already owns Kabel and if you add Unitymedia, (Liberty Global’s German cable company) you can see a dominant force in converged fixed-mobile services, exactly the area that DT says they want to own. The cynic in me thinks that if DT want to block it they will need to make only one call to the regulator!

Vodafone expansionism was not confined to cable and TV though. They said they are going to build a base station on the moon. Cue the thousands of tweets saying ‘can’t they build one in [enter your post code here]. They should have seen that one coming! This was interesting though. It’s a mission by German engineering and science company PTScientists, which – together with Vodafone Germany and carmaker Audi – aim to complete the first privately funded moon landing in 2019.

Vodafone said the 4G network will allow Audi vehicles on the moon’s surface to send data and live HD video streams of footage from the area around NASA’s Apollo 17 lunar roving vehicle, which was abandoned on the surface in 1972. The operator expects the network to be able to support 4G using the 1800MHz frequency band. It got me wondering about spectrum license charges on the moon!
Yes, there were 2,300 companies at MWC this year but a few noticeable absentees. The GSMA say that the global value of the mobile industry is $9.1trillion (2013 figures – I haven’t seen them updated since). Let’s call it $10 trillion today. The combined market valuation of Apple, Google and Facebook is $2.89 trillion. These aren’t like for like figures I know but the point I wish to make is that these guys plus Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat, must make up a very sizeable proportion of the globalmobile economy – yet none of them were at the Mobile World Congress. Perhaps the World in MWC excludes the USA!

I’m no longer chairing the judging panel for the GloMos as we now call the GSMA Global Mobile Awards but I did pop in to see some of the award ceremony and Huawei cleaned up at the GloMos. Another sign of the times.

I had the great pleasure to facilitate a session called ‘Owning Edge Infrastructure: Burden or Opportunity’.

I was joined by:

• Ulf Ewaldsson, SVP & Head of Business Area Digital Services, Ericsson
• JP Hemingway, EVP, Product, Strategy & Marketing, SES
• Tiago Rodrigues, Senior Director, WBA
• John Baker, SVP 5G Development, Mavenir
• Gabriela Styf Sjoman, SVP & Global Head of Networks, Telia

The session was very interesting, and it was hard to disagree with the underlying conclusion that with data likely to grow at exponential rates, we need to put more content and more control at the network edge. The very driver for Multi-access Edge Computing. I actually think this is one to watch and throws an additional challenge to be overcome in RAN sharing.

Azenby had four people at MWC this year checking out what’s hot and deciding what’s not so hot. We have vast experience in the mobile world offering consulting and advisory services across the whole industry, so if you have a problem, just call on the Azenby team. Feel free to contact us.