Ericsson Technology Review, Issue 2/2018
Transforming to fit the future reality
Technology development keeps getting faster and more interconnected, with new innovations appearing every day. As a result, we’re swiftly moving toward the realization of the “Augmented Connected Society” – a world characterized by ubiquitous internet access for all, self-learning robots and truly intuitive interaction between humans and machines. But how can our industry best prepare for this future? In my role as CTO, I have the challenging and exhilarating annual task of identifying the five technology trends of the future that are (or will be) most relevant to our industry. You can find my insights and reflections on this year’s trends on page 30.
The augmentation of human intelligence is one of the key themes in this year’s trends article. Creating the highly automated environment that network operators and digital service providers will need in the future requires the support of intelligent agents that are able to work collaboratively. The two proofs of concept presented in the Cognitive Technologies article in this issue demonstrate how the combination of machine reasoning and machine learning techniques makes it possible to create intelligent agents that are able to learn from diverse inputs, and share or transfer experience between contexts.
I believe that fixed wireless access (FWA) is likely to play an important role on our journey toward a world characterized by ubiquitous internet access for all. Already today, LTE and 5G New Radio are opening up significant commercial opportunities for operators to use FWA to bring the internet to many of the more than one billion households around the world that are still
unconnected, as well as to many small and mediumsized businesses. The FWA article in this issue highlights the key principles for combined mobile broadband and FWA deployments, and presents a use case that illustrates the recommended deployment approach.
In my discussions with people from different industries this past year, I’ve noticed a growing awareness that telecom infrastructure can bring significant value to the digital transformation of industries. However, many providers need help to understand the requirements of this new market and to create solutions for it. The Digital Connectivity Marketplaces article in this issue explains our concept for a platform model in which capabilities from many providers can be effectively packaged and exposed in attractive ways to buyers from different industries.
There’s no doubt that operations support systems (OSS) have a critical role to play in the future of our industry. Check out the OSS article in this issue to learn about our future OSS concept, which is built on a solid implementation architecture that enables the use of industrydefined interfaces and open-source modules, as well as integration with full component compatibility.
Finally, I want to encourage those of you who are concerned about bufferbloat to check out the Virtual Active Queue Management (vAQM) article in this issue. In our innovative concept, vAQM is centralized and applied per user and per flow, adapting to link rate fluctuation and considering the current bottleneck link bandwidth to the user. Our testing has shown that when vAQM is centralized upstream, rather than being deployed in the bottleneck nodes as it is in classic AQM, there is a substantial reduction in bufferbloat.
I hope you get a lot of value out of this issue of Ericsson Technology Review, and that the articles can serve as the basis for stimulating future-focused discussions with your colleagues and business partners. If you would like to share a link to the whole magazine or to a specific article, you can find both PDF and HTML versions at https://www.ericsson.com/en/ericsson-technology-review.
Erik Ekudden
Senior Vice President and Group CTO