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Ericsson’s focus on 5G, IoT and cloud

In a post-Mobile World Congress briefing, Head of Ericsson Malaysia and Sri Lanka Todd Ashton said, “We are already working closely with various industries to create a truly Networked Society here in Malaysia through collaborations with our local 5G and IoT (Internet of Things) partners with whom we are working on building a 5G roadmap and connecting industries such as agriculture.”

Notably, two of these initiatives are the Connected Mangroves project by Lumeiwah. Lumeiwah’s Managing Director Shamry Mubdi said, “Innovative IoT applications are increasing the quality, quantity, sustainability and cost effectiveness of agriculture. It allows is to leverage ICT for livestock tracking, detecting soil moisture, air temperatures and much more, and adapt our practices accordingly to increase yield.”

The second notable initiative involves working with Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) on a 5G rodmap, in the area of antenna and propagation. Besides researching and developing antenna technology that will allow mobile users to enjoy high throughput when on-the-move, UTM and Ericsson are also researching characteristics of new frequencies, in anticipation of a future spectrum crunch.

Ashton explained that there is not enough spectrum in the lower frequencies, so the work is to research the viability of higher frequencies like 100GHz in Malaysia and other similar tropical countries that have high rain rate and abundant flora and fauna.

Mobile World Congress 2016

Ashton described how the event has grown over the years. “It used to be only an industry event, but now it is attended by so many different companies that are trying to tap into what’s happening in the world of connectivity.”

He also shared major announcements that Ericsson made at the recently ended Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona. These were divided into three broad categories, namely 5G, IoT and Cloud.

In the area of 5G, Ericsson has agreements with over 20 major operators to work on 5G. It is also actively aligning industry time plans like 3GPP and ITU-R, research for 5G pre-standardisation, as well as improving current 4G networks by delivering 5G concepts like Ericsson Lean Carrier, Elastic RAN and Massive IoT.

For IoT, Ericsson announced a collaboration with AT&T to bring the latter’s Digital Life solution to service providers outside of US, while in the area of cloud the Swedish company plans to form business, tech and services alliance with public cloud provider Amazon Web Services (AWS), to accelerate cloud adoption for telcos. This would see Ericsson helping AWS identify telco-based apps that can be moved to the public cloud.




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