While 5G is a big focus area for Ericsson at the moment, it is not just looking at developing the standard but also various ways in which 5G can transform businesses. In an interview with BusinesLine , Erik Ekudden, CTO, Ericsson Group, talked about how enterprises would play a big role in 5G deployments even as the 3G and 4G deployments have so far only been driven by consumer applications. Ekudden believes that 5G will create new business opportunities for companies like never before.

What are Ericsson’s top technology priorities in the coming year?

We are not only providing products, for radio and applications and advance systems but we also do significant managed services for our customer networks around the world.

The other areas that we believe are important is automation in term of products and operations. And there we are having a good dialogue with our customer when it comes to using machine intelligence, machine learning to automate their processes and create efficiencies. But true machine intelligence and that is something that we make intensive use of across the company right now.

We are in a phase now where there is much focus on what we do on IoT access, what we do with narrow band IoT or CAT M. These are really important enablers for every industry every enterprise to transform. They may have gone through and enterprise transformation to digitalise but now they are going through a mobilisation stage where they are actually connecting devices over wide area of network and they can get data up to central point and, therefore, keep control of it. So, going from local system to wide area system – that is a fantastic opportunity for our customers, but it is also one of those things that is transformational for whole industry. We are simply doing IoT in a new way, that practice is a key area right now.

What are you doing in the space of virtual reality?

We do quite a lot of things in this space with partners and what you may know is that we are leading the world when it comes to 5G technology. When it comes to both consumer and enterprise application, we are driving the 5G initiatives around the world — 5G for US, 5G for Europe, for Asia and many other regions and specific industries, and in those collaborations, we are showing together with the partners e.g. how you can use 5G in transportation and logistics sector. For many years we have shown how you can use VR and AR technologies together with remote picking e.g. you have construction site and you are able to move the brake of the driver of the digger to the central place or braking with VR and AR gear, those are some examples of what or where we need the collaboration of AR and VR technology.

What’s the role being played by your India development centre in future platforms?

India is very important market for us both business-wise and from a technology side. Much of what we are doing in distributed IoT platform and the cloud platform that’s also very much in India where we have competence centres very much under the managed services side but also for IT in general. I would say that also be combination of machine intelligence and what we do in security, these are very important areas in India as well.

Can you talk about the work being done by Ericsson on 5G technology?

We have taken an industry leading role ever since we started to research on it many years ago into standardisation where we are leading work all into early test systems and now we are into pre-commercial systems with customers.

But 5G is both the technology we call it new radio technology where we provide really high capacity and very high band with low latency down to 2-4 milliseconds that’s what the technology can enable. But since we are talking about frequencies all the way low from 600Mhz to to 30Ghz, it is possible to use 5G both for those very critical high bandwidth application such as fixed wireless serving home with TV and other content all the way down to IoT and mobile broadband reaching basically full coverage of countries and regions. That is on the network side, but perhaps more important part of 5G is that it is a transformation tool also for enterprises and SMBs.

So, it’s not only consumer play with virtual and augmented reality, mobile phones, tablets and head mounted display, but also really transformation tool for enterprises. We have very solid dialogue with our customers but with also many industries specially with construction transportation all the car companies, companies doing building equipment, company such as General Electric and similar companies doing process automation.

Do you mean that enterprises will be playing a big role in 5G deployments?

We have number of consumer electronics device manufacturers which are ready to build 5G devices. But we are seeing equally strong interest from eenterprises which we didn’t have in 3G and 4G days and the reason for that is that they now see the value of this kind of technology to save cost and drive more efficient operations. But it is also enabling them to drive new business.

You can see them in terms of collecting data, you can see them in terms of being a part of new service delivery ecosystem. There are so many business changing aspects that are happening at the same time as we are now about to launch 5G. So, I believe 5G will be transformative for eenterprises.

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