Ericsson Technology Review 2021 issue 2
There is much greater awareness today than there was just a few years ago of the essential role that mobile networks play in the digital infrastructure – particularly when it comes to ensuring availability, reliability, sustainability and affordability. In places where 5G networks have become the norm, our vision of mobile networks as the spinal cord of the digital infrastructure is well on its way to becoming reality.
Ericsson CTO Erik Ekudden’s view on the essential role of mobile networks
There is much greater awareness today than there was just a few years ago of the essential role that mobile networks play in the digital infrastructure – particularly when it comes to ensuring availability, reliability, sustainability and affordability. In places where 5G networks have become the norm, our vision of mobile networks as the spinal cord of the digital infrastructure is well on its way to becoming reality.
At Ericsson, our long-term goal is to transform the network platform into a powerful innovation platform designed for an intelligent, sustainable and connected world. One important aspect of this work is figuring out how to support use cases that are blurring the boundaries between physical and digital realities. With 5G, we have made significant progress toward enabling physical and digital worlds to converge into an augmented reality that serves communication needs for humans and machines. But expected 6G use cases such as cyber-physical systems and the Internet of Senses will require even more advanced network technologies and capabilities.
With that in mind, this year’s technology trends article focuses on the theme of digital representation in future network development. Accurate digital representations of humans, physical objects and surrounding environments are absolutely critical in the convergence of physical and digital worlds. Creating digital representations of sufficient quality to meet the needs of future use cases will require limitless connectivity, trustworthy systems, cognitive networks and what we at Ericsson call the network compute fabric. To learn more about these trends, check out my article on page 36.
This issue of the magazine also includes six other articles highlighting progress in important research areas including extended reality (XR), zero-trust networks, 5GS roaming, data ingestion and energy efficiency. In addition, we have a whole article dedicated to the topic of the network compute fabric, in which the authors explain how we can support distributed intelligence and simplify deployment across heterogeneous infrastructure and administrative domains with the help of unified data access, real time infrastructure and developer-friendly services.
While all the articles in this issue are worthy of your attention, I want to highlight the XR article in particular. XR technologies have enormous potential to transform both industry and society in the not-so distant future. Our article explains how mobile network operators can leverage the time-critical communication capabilities in 5G networks to support enterprises that want to launch XR-based applications on a large scale, something that has simply not been possible previously.
We hope you enjoy this issue of our magazine and that you will pass it on to your colleagues and business partners. You can find both PDF and HTML versions of all the articles here.
