Rakuten recently launched their long-waited and highly-anticipated 5G network service. Despite a Covid-19 induced delay, Rakuten has managed to put up a 5G network in a very short time. The jury is out as to whether they have succeeded but one thing is for certain, Rakuten has proven that an industry outsider can put up a compelling offering with the help of new cloud-based and open technologies.
Tag: Digital Transformation
SMB Resilience Amid COVID-19
You are a small or medium-size business in the midst of a global pandemic that is constricting your business as governments order "non-essential" businesses to shutdown and growing consumer angst crush business activity and demand. What do you do? What can you do to survive and thrive? For many industries, surviving will require businesses to dramatically rethink the notion of business model, go-to-market approach, supply chain, sales channels, people and modality of work. All of this needs to happen with the consideration of the health and safety of employees and customers against the persistent threat of the coronavirus pandemic.
The 5G Autonomous Edge: The Next Frontier of Digital Business Innovation
5G, AI, and the cloud are intersecting to unlock real-time autonomous capabilities at the edge. This evolution represents an inflection point for edge computing and a new frontier for business innovation and reinvention. Discover the potential of ubiquitous intelligence, edge cloud computing, and autonomous infrastructure to transform our world from the age of digital business to autonomous enterprise.
Industry Insight: Jio Platforms and Facebook Driving Digital India
Facebook's recent investment and partnership with Jio Platforms was met with a great deal of media and industry excitement. This move was widely touted as a coming of age of Digital India. The largest US tech companies such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft are looking to expand their global fortunes in the new digital economic frontier that is India with its 1.32 billion large consumer market. What is really at stake here and what does it mean in the broader context of India's economic digitization?
Industry Insight: AT&T’s Alliances with Microsoft and IBM/Red Hat – A Tale of Two Clouds?
July has been a watershed month for AT&T as it enters into two major "cloud deals", one with Microsoft and another with the newly merged IBM and Red Hat. At first glance, the two deals seem oddly contradictory - a collision of proprietary Microsoft cloud (although about half of Azure workloads run on top of Linux) with open source cloud from the combined IBM and Red Hat. But why two cloud deals? What makes them different? What does it mean for the companies involved?
Hybrid Approaches to AI for Realizing Intelligent Networks in the 5G Era
You can't blame technology vendors and service providers for pushing the limits of marketing hype with Artificial Intelligence (AI). After all, it is hottest buzzword since cloud computing. But digital service providers in the emerging era of 5G need practical, real "AI" solutions to cost-efficiently scale their operations and deliver the quality of service that will deliver the promise of 5G to themselves as well as their customers. Hybrid approaches to AI are needed to accelerate return on investment as operators evolve their infrastructure and operations for a 5G future.
Digital Transformation World 2019: Key Takeaways
neXt Curve was in Nice, France attending the premier global event for digital transformation in the telecommunications industry held from May 14th through May 16th and hosted by TM Forum. Leading vendors and operators converged to discuss what it will take help the telecom industry reinvent itself and aid telecom service providers in becoming digital service providers. Now that 5G has arrived in select markets around the globe, the pressure is on for telecom operators to transform their operating models to capture the value promised by the next generation network.
Crossing the 5G and IoT Connectivity Chasm with SDR and SDN
The 5G promise is broad and ambitious, but business leaders need to recognize that we are at the very beginning of this journey, and emerging technologies under the 5G umbrella are creating new opportunities for new entrants to fill the gaps as the world moves toward the promise of 5G such as 5G-enabled IoT, new shared spectrum resources, hybrid multi-cloud services brokering, network slicing on demand within mobile computing nano-data centers at the carrier edge.
The Fight for 5G Superiority will be Fought in The Cloud
Since the term "Cloud Computing" was coined, CSPs (Communications Service Providers) have had a tremendous challenge developing viable cloud capabilities and offerings for their enterprise clients that compete with emerging digital infrastructure players such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. With 5G on the horizon it is ever more critical that traditional telco operators find their cloud mojo lest current cloud leaders and new intermediary entrants make a move to the middle to take the great 5G promise away from them.
The Democratization of 5G Everything
The original telco central offices of the past had legacy mainframe-like telephone switches with legacy voice features, which was ideal in the 1980’s and 1990’s but are archaic today. With VoIP over LTE in the cloud, these local offices can be re-architected into 5G nano-datacenters that provide very low latency fixed and mobile access and distributed edge computing that will enable new and innovative hyperconverged IT/CT applications and services that avail new business models and network monetization opportunities for operators.
