Artificial Intelligence was the dominant buzzword at MWC25, for sure. No more so than in the radio access network technology. SoftBank, Ericsson, and Nokia all reported increased performance and efficiency from the use of AI in the RAN.
But the industry’s current alignment with the AI-RAN Alliance’s view of AI RAN, in reference to RAN efficiency, has Stephane Teral, Teral Research, concerned.
With the RAN market down nearly $9B and with stagnant carrier revenues, Teral was looking for something more. He told AGL Information & Technology that AI-RAN Alliance’s focus on RAN efficiency is not a big enough step forward from the efforts to increase efficiency that were begun with self-optimizing networks back in 2010. “AI for RAN is simply a self-optimizing network,” he said. “Self-optimizing networks have been using machine learning since 2015.”
Tier One carriers in Europe, who are currently very interested in reducing their electricity costs, have been telling Teral that AI for RAN is “a lot of noise,” because it requires expensive, power-hungry GPUs.
Teral noted the contradiction of the economy depending on telecom infrastructure, which is struggling to make money. “Basically, with no infrastructure, there is no internet, and if there is no internet, there is no economy,” he said.
Many in the industry believe that the development of application programming interfaces (API) is one of the keys to monetizing carriers’ 5G infrastructure and spectrum and bringing back profitability. Teral found a reason for hope at MWC25 in several announcements by an organization formed by Ericsson, known as Aduna, which includes América Móvil, AT&T, Bharti Airtel, Deutsche Telekom, KDDI, Orange, Reliance Jio, Singtel, Telefonica, Telstra, T-Mobile, and Vodafone.
In one announcement in particular, Aduna said that AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon have developed the Number Verification and SIM Swap API for launch in the United States, improving security, fraud detection, and user experiences for developers and enterprises. “This is very important, because it’s the first time in history that the U.S. rivals actually joined forces for a good cause and also to make money with their 5G networks,” Teral said. Because of the expense and prevalence of fraud, he believes the API will be very popular.
By combining network APIs from multiple operators globally under a unified platform based on the CAMARA open-source project, Aduna provides a standardized platform to foster collaboration, enhance user experiences and drive industry growth. While Aduna provides the infrastructure, others — such as Vonage, Infobip, and Google — build applications and services on top of it.
Aduna has been in expansion mode since it began last fall. During his keynote at MWC25, e& Group CEO Hatem Dowidar announced his company’s partnership with Aduna. The pairing of Aduna and e& will add operations in multiple countries in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and Central and Eastern Europe.
A strategic partnership with Canada’s EnStream, penned late in February, will enable access to telecom network APIs from Bell, Rogers, and TELUS — Canada’s three leading nationwide operators. Another agreement in February with KDDI brought Japan into the fold.
“They have made significant progress over the past six months or so. They made lots of announcements that apparently are about to lead to something tangible, and that is by the end of the year,” Teral said.
To get access to these APIs, a carrier must have a 5G Standalone network because of the 5G Network Exposure Function, which securely exposes the 5G network’s capabilities to external applications and services. So far, many carriers are still using their legacy 4G LTE cores. The work being done by Aduna and the resulting APIs may push more carriers to install 5G cores, according to Teral.
“With the network exposure function, a carrier can then get on board with Aduna and take advantage of all the use cases we see at the moment,” Teral said. And those use cases will, hopefully, generate additional revenue for the carriers.
