Before many of the promises of 5G-driven technology can become a reality, the industry — including OEMs, networks, and developers — must collaborate on applications. To encourage those relationships, Ericsson held a hybrid in-person/online event, Imagine Possible Santa Clara, CA this week. The two-day event featured sessions on everything from extended reality (XR) and the metaverse to enterprise transformation, augmented reality and autonomous mobile robots.
“We held Imagine Possible Santa Clara to discuss the new use cases that can bring in new revenue to the market both to service providers for public networks, but also to enterprises, known as Industry 4.0 or the digitization journey,” Jan Söderström, Ericsson VP and Head of Advanced Technology and Industry, U.S., told Inside Towers. “To the degree that these metaverse or XR capabilities can be made available across the networks, the operators will have to invest in technologies that use those high data speeds and low latencies.”
Why It’s Important: With 5G technology being rolled out around the world, RAN manufacturers, like Ericsson, are expanding their focus to include facilitating the next-generation applications that will be run on their high-speed, low-latency networks. In essence, encouraging the monetizing of those assets by increasing their use.
“The carriers have 5G coverage, but they have yet to see all the payback from that,” Söderström said. “They would like to see the applications that will provide the traffic that actually generates more revenue.”
Catch Up Quick: Ericsson launched an incubator lab in 2019 in Santa Clara, known as D-15, to work with customers, partners and the Silicon Valley ecosystem community on how their products and services will be affected by 5G technologies. It covers edge computing and distributed cloud, automation and intelligence, 5G radio evolution and global IoT connectivity. The Imagine Possible conference was born out of that effort.
“We realized when we were doing those experiments at D-15 and doing some really Earth-breaking new use case work that there was no real good industry conversation, or conference, to discuss how to share this knowledge with enterprises, developers, cross service providers, semiconductor providers, tech providers,” Söderström said. Because of the COVID pandemic, the conference was held online the first two years.
The Toolbox
Today, thanks to the 4G LTE API environment, web developers have the tools they need to develop new applications that can work over wireless networks, using cloud storage, compute resources and databases. 5G, however, is a new world for application developers.
“We haven’t yet cracked the code for network assets,” Söderström said. “So, we are now gradually making toolkits available in private networks for the developers and enterprises to, actually with a fairly easy integration, make new applications.”
The toolbox allows the developers to create the applications that allow robotics on the manufacturing floor, automation of drones and the development of XR applications, for example.
“Ericsson’s Private 5G is our contribution to that market, but we must be able to transmit industrial protocols over wireless so we can cut the cords in factories and have a rearranged shop floor for flexible production, as well as other applications,” Söderström said. “Ericsson and other vendors sit at an important middle point where we can orchestrate the industry and blueprint a solution together. We know there’s a great chance that we can roll this out globally.”
By J. Sharpe Smith, Inside Towers Technology Editor
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