Building networks for the digital future
By 2030, limitless connectivity will be anywhere—and the global mobile network will be the critical infrastructure of the digital society. Are you ready?
By 2030, we foresee large parts of the legacy IT network infrastructure will be replaced with a new, trusted mobile digital infrastructure; the backbone of the digital society and industry 4.0.
The network's capabilities will extend far beyond what we see today in terms of design, distribution, operation, management, and security.
Most importantly, the future global mobile network will play a supporting role in addressing the sustainability challenges our world faces—by accelerating climate action.
How to secure long-term relevance and revenue?
Around the world, new ecosystems of successful global and local businesses will emerge from the capabilities of the new mobile digital infrastructure. And you have a strategic role to play in the evolution of future networks.
As a service provider, realizing and monetizing the arising opportunities will be dependent on three actions:
- Identify business opportunities, define and claim your role.
- Establish strategic collaborations while securing core business value.
- Learn and scale from current relationships in digital ecosystems.
The first step towards the digital future starts now
The decisions you make today will impact your long-term results. With us as a partner, you are guaranteed accurate guidance—no matter the strategy you choose. Today, and all the days ahead.
We help you:
Grow with incremental investments and low risk
Our modular and scalable network solutions empower us to optimize your network with precision. This will ensure you address any short-term concerns effectively—while establishing a robust future-ready foundation.
Expand into new business areas with confidence
Together—with you and partners—we explore the emerging opportunities. This assures you deliver on evolving needs of consumers, enterprises, and your business.
Secure your long-term network evolution
Our technology leadership ensures that you can navigating increasing network complexity and add the right capabilities when and wherever they are needed. Today and tomorrow.
Our strategy to evolve the mobile network for a digital future
Rather than attempting to present a rigid roadmap for the long-term network evolution (that will invariably become obsolete), we prefer to break down the complex journey into three different—but parallel—time horizons: Foundation, Exploration, and Research. As each horizon contains its own discussions and considerations, this philosophy allows us effectively address short- and long-term trends while steadily guiding us towards our vision.
Even if it is vital to see what the future holds, focusing on what matters now is just as important. The first step towards the mobile digital infrastructure is to establish a solid base from which the network can evolve; a foundation that amplifies your existing strategies, supports your short-term goals, and enables future business growth.
We have identified three key areas, those we believe will have the greatest impact on your short-term concerns—while generating value in the long run.
How to establish a future-ready network:
Modernize with cost-effectiveness
Make a smooth and cost-efficient transition into 5G while making use of pre-existing investments. This includes optimization of current spectrum assets, lowering cost per bit, and breaking the energy curve.
Expand into new business opportunities
Expand your 5G network and business in tandem and get coverage and capacity in the right places to support growth. Act now to establish a foothold in new business areas—and acquire the capabilities to monetize them.
Manage increasing complexity
New types of business mean new services and new levels of complexity. Managing the rapid evolution, with multiple network generations deployed, is crucial.
Let's take action today to build the future
Although the future offers immense opportunities for innovation, we need to explore the fundamentals that will take existing networks to that level. The exploration horizon deals with issues from a slightly longer perspective than today's offering; the emerging technological, operational, business, and ecosystem-related possibilities—beyond the hype.
Exploring possible avenues to set the direction
Our primary purpose is to provide the right building blocks for taking the next step towards a mobile digital infrastructure. We have identified five key areas where the entire industry needs to develop a clear and common approach.
What we explore:
Edge computing in networks
As enterprises digitize with 5G, you need to decide which role to adopt in the edge ecosystem. And you need to establish a strong foothold and a thought-out strategy on how to partner with cloud players. Delivering SLA-based network and computing services at scale will be key to capturing the emerging low-latency market.
AI in networks and operations
A broadened use of AI will be a strict necessity for managing future networks. Not only to handle the complexity and increase the speed and agility of operations and service delivery, but also to enable new business models for advanced use cases.
Openness and innovation
To broaden your role in enterprise digitalization, supporting network-based innovation is critical; the upcoming network-enabled applications, services, and devices will be completely dependent on a standardized and open platform.
Resilient 5G systems
To become the trusted mobile digital infrastructure of the future, enterprises and governments must feel confident in relying on the network for critical applications. Building trust is key to securing a common network evolution.
Breaking the energy curve
Although network digitalization brings accelerated traffic growth, this must not be accompanied by escalating costs or carbon footprint. Instead, a mobile digital infrastructure will be the foundation for cost-efficiency and the most powerful tool for companies and societies to achieve sustainability goals.
This time horizon provides the long-term direction for our technology and everything its networks need to deliver, throughout and beyond the journey towards a digital society.
Research for the future
Already today, we are looking into what key requirements will enable networks to fully transform into a recognized, secure, and energy-efficient backbone of the digital society. We drive this research internally and in collaboration with industry and academia to guide, inspire and curate a long-term and joint technological development.
What we research:
Limitless connectivity
Limitless connectivity is our vision for 2030, where mobile networks will deliver unlimited performance for all applications—allowing anyone to connect anywhere at any time. This vision is dependent on expanding the coverage, performance, and efficiency of networks.
Trustworthy systems
On the journey towards transforming mobile networks for future requirements, the trustworthiness in networks must elevate to serve as the backbone of a highly advanced digital society.
Network compute fabric
To support the advanced future use cases, the lines between the device, the network edge, and the cloud need to dissolve. That requires a compute fabric built on a common theme; a unification of telecom and IT allowing networks and clouds to become one single, centralized execution environment for distributed applications.
Cognitive network
The expected network transformation also stipulates a need to raise the level of network intelligence. The key to create automated network operations will be to enable rapid introduction of a broad range of requirements—without escalating costs and complexity.
Why you should choose us as a partner
Because we invented the technology that first connected people and will soon connect everything. But our role as an orchestrator of evolving network technologies also means more—from establishing the open standards that enable our industry creating new innovative solutions, to driving global partnerships that scale the positive impact of technology.
