Interview with Michael Axelsson

Opening the Mobile World Congress 2024, Ericsson affirmed its ambition to put network relevance at the centre of digitization. In the next five to ten years, we will see an acceleration of some major trends, from energy transition to AI. The change taking place will result in new high-performance use cases of the network, which will converge the physical and digital worlds in real time: we are talking about the digital twin, but also remotely guided drones beyond the pilot’s view. Ericsson brought various use cases of its 5G applications to Barcelona, for example, TV production, which exploits streaming with almost non-existent latencies, to Toyota’s innovations, which open the door to the future of self-driving cars, thanks to artificial intelligence. This will place new demands on networks: ubiquitous coverage with high-performance, flexible, and programmable networks will be needed.

We are entering a new era in which 5G plays an important role because it offers new capabilities in terms of speed, latency, quality of service, and localization. All of this will be used concretely for the digitization of businesses. Ericsson said that the characteristics and capabilities of 5G, such as speed and latency, are well suited to create the kind of differentiated network experience needed to digitize businesses and harness innovation. Capacity alone is not enough. The outcome also depends on how we expose and make functionality available to the network user. This is where network APIs come in, enabling mobile networks and applications to communicate with each other in a standardized way. By exposing and monetizing these network APIs, Ericsson wants to create a new monetization model for creating new applications, exploiting the network’s capabilities.