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Welcome

Annie Turner, Editor, Mobile Europe 

KEYNOTE: Edging closer to greater value

Marc Overton, Managing Director Division X, BT

We’re over looking at 5G in isolation to generate new revenue streams for telcos – edge is where it’s at, although that can be a number of places. Operators’ cloud-based 5G infrastructure can help them add value by bringing them closer to applications and their orchestration, or operators can meld their cloud-edge platforms with those of public cloud providers. Success is all about interoperability and adaptability.

Have we got the fibre model right?

Timothy Creswick, CEO & Founder, Vorboss

Network providers have been building out fibre at unprecedent rates in Europe since the pandemic, but does infrastructure-based competition work or result in too much overbuild and not enough capacity elsewhere? What new technologies and approaches – operational and business models – are operators using to make sure this isn’t the case? 

PANEL: Techco versus telco – what’s the difference?

Jesús Villacorta, Strategy, Business Development & Transformation Director, Orange
Luis Anaya, Technology & Strategy Manager, Vodafone
Nemanja Ognjanović, Technology & Strategy Director, Telekom Srbija
Stephen Beadle, IT Chief Architect, Three UK
Moderator: Andrew Collinson, Executive Director & Chief Research Officer, STL Partners
  • What are the key differences between telcos and techcos?
  • How can telcos adopt the best techco practices while maintaining their own strengths?
  • What outcomes do telcos expect from becoming a techco?

The Role of the Telco Cloud in the evolution of Telcos

Ignacio Gonzalez, Business Development Media/Telco EMEA, Red Hat

Over the last years, many operators decided to deploy a telco cloud as part of their technology evolution, but face many challenges. They include: how to evolve from virtual machines to containers; how to integrate public and private clouds into the telco cloud; and how to build an end-to-end automation framework? This session includes insights and customer references about how telco hybrid cloud is helping operators modernise and develop new business opportunities. Implementing telco hybrid cloud can be complex, but the business and operational advantages can boost telcos’ businesses.

Comfort break

Case study: How to build open, scalable and saleable platforms

George Njuguna, CIO, Safaricom PLC

Led by its CEO, Safaricom is on a mission to transition from a region-leading  telecoms operator into a purpose-led technology company by 2025.  This is anchored around being customer focused and collaborative innovation. There have been progressive, systematic shifts in the company’s operations from initially adopting Agile ways of working across the business, then moving into areas of new growth. Safaricom is now in the third year of moving towards its vision by scaling technology solutions, as this session will demonstrate

 

Fireside chat – GitOps are us – Why this coding platform is making inroads into ops?

Philippe Ensarguet, CTO, Orange Business 

Why are telcos are increasingly turning to githubs, code-hosting platforms for version control and collaboration, to create GitOps?  Getting DevOps methods closer to the delivery pipelines is one answer, but how big an impact does this really have? 

PANEL: Providing the network as a service is the future for telcos

Gaudensia Chepkonga, Senior Manager Technology Strategy and Architecture, Safaricom Plc
Alexandre Harmand, Head of Network Platforms, Telefonica
Claire Chauvin, Director Strategy Architecture and Standardisation, Orange
Moderator: Mark Cornall, Technical Director, GSMA

Why NaaS – exposing network capabilities to third parties through APIs – is the only way to go. The next big question is how to get there: where are we now and what do we need to do to enable the NaaS vision?

KEYNOTE: How far advanced are we with O-RAN’s radio intelligent controller (RIC)?

Mojdeh Amani, Head of Quality of Experience, Wireless Research, BT

RIC was developed by the O-RAN Alliance to give AI and machine learning-based ML-based access to the radio elements, split onto near-real-Time RIC (Near-RT RIC) and non-real-time RIC (Non-RT RIC). Then there’s interfaces for them, also defined by the O-RAN Alliance.

Wrap up and end of day 1