In The Arena by TechArena - 5G MED’s Cross Border Service Resiliency with Cellnex’s Jose Lopez Luque

Episode Date: February 26, 2024

TechArena host Allyson Klein chats with Cellnex’s Jose Lopez Luque about the EU funded 5G MED project testing service resiliency across borders to fuel low latency use cases like autonomous driving, and how his company is poised to deliver efficient and scalable services for broad deployments in 2024.

Welcome to the Tech Arena, featuring authentic discussions between tech's leading innovators and our host, Alison Klein. Now let's step into the arena. Welcome to the Tech Arena. My name is Alison Klein. And today we are coming to you from Mobile World Congress. And I'm so excited to be interviewing Jose Lopez Luque from Cellnex. Welcome to the show, Jose. How are you doing? Hi, Alison. Thank you for having us with you in the Tech Arena. Yeah, we're excited to have this conversation. I'm telling you a bit more on what we are doing in Cenex regarding innovation.

So why don't you just introduce your role at Cenex? And for those who didn't listen to our episode last year from Mobile World, just tell us a little bit more about the company. So, yeah, Cenex is our company, it's the biggest player in Europe. We have around 140,000 telecom towers in 12 different countries all around Europe. And basically what we do, our main business is to provide the space and the infrastructure for the mobile network operators to install their equipment on their antennas. This is our core business,

and besides that, we provide other services like we provide the fiber to the tower and different kinds of connectivity solutions. Also, we build the data systems for stadiums, for example, some stadiums, for example, some stadiums and hospitals. So, yeah, this is the main business. So Linux was on the program last year, as I mentioned,

and we talked about 5G and, you know, the amount of towers that you have is just so impressive. Okay. Today we're going to dive deeper into your 5G Med project. What is this? project is to provide an infrastructure or a mental technology architecture to be able to provide seamless C-CAM services along cross-border between different European countries. In our case, 5G MET is between Spain and France, but this will be the blueprint for final deployments in other countries. So basically, the European Commission has identified several main transport corridors.

There are 10 big transport corridors in Europe. And this one where 5G might be supplying infrastructure is one of them. What are the unique challenges of deploying 5G in this use case? Why did the European Commission take this one on in particular? And what have you learned thus far in working with the cross-border team? Yeah, here in the project, what we want to show is that 5G technology, not only 5G, but 5G together with edge computing and other technologies, are foreshadowing the requirements that CCAM services need in the cross-border and which are these requirements.

Basically, the usual problem you have when you're crossing the border between countries and you change from one operator to the other is that you have a call drop. If you're having simply a normal phone call, the call is dropping or you have a call drop. And if you're having simply a normal phone call, the call is dropping or you have a data service, you get out of data. And normally the device takes one minute to attach to the other network.

So really in this period of time, you can also have services like, for example, remote driving. This is one of the use cases we are testing in PepsiMet. So we have an autonomous car which is supported by remote driving, which means that if the autonomous car has some problem and it can't continue driving by itself, a remote driver from the central,

from a control center, from a central office of the car operator, takes the car remotely and is driving the car to a safe location. And in order to do this between cross borders, when you cross from one network to another, this interruption time, what we call inter-PLM handover, because it's a handover between two networks, has to be less than or less than 100 milliseconds. Wow.

And this is something that is not implemented commercially in any network yet. And this is something we have successfully tested with IG technology. It's interesting. You know, when I was preparing for this interview, I was thinking about use cases and I've experienced that on trains or driving across Europe where my phone will drop and then, you know, you'll get a little text that says you're now on Telefonica or whatever it is. Obviously, autonomous driving can't afford that minute. What other use cases are there that are critical and how will consumers benefit from the 5G med technology holistically? Basically, we are here dealing with four different use cases. The first one, as I said, is the remote driving use case. Then we have two more

referring to the automotive sector. One of them is like competitive awareness for traffic situations. For example, if there is an accident, if there is an obstacle, the car seeing the obstacle will report to the other cars

around him, not report only about the obstacle, but it will send different traffic strategies for the other cars are on him, not report only about the obstacle, but it will send different traffic strategies for the other cars. If the other cars are autonomous cars, so that they can change the lane automatically, they can accelerate, they can brake. Or if the car is driven by a driver, the system will send recommendations, same as before, reduce the speed, change the lane,

the lane, et cetera. And also we have entertainment or what we call infotainment use cases, which applies both for automotives and for railways. You can imagine in a car, someone is watching a movie on streaming or a concert, even with VR glasses, together with friends. And he wants to, for this, you always need very low latency. So what we are doing also, we have deployed edge computing, so different servers in each country. And when the car is crossing the border, by geolocation, the application server is also

changing the physical server. So in that way, we are always assuring the minimum latency possible to, yeah, so that this service is possible and available for the user in both countries. So there's a handoff of that video transcoding from one server to another. Exactly. Nice. At the beginning, I was talking not only about connectivity continuity, but really service continuity. We provide this continuity at the network level, but also on the application level.

It really does expose some complexity in edge services that need to be thought through. And what a great place to test it at a cross-border situation where it's absolutely required, right? Now, I do want to know what is unique about Cellnex's role within this program. And how does it fit into the broader purview of technology delivery for the company? So here we are leveraging our business model as a neutral host. Basically, a neutral host is an infrastructure provider like Shell Next that enables different mobile network operators to share the infrastructure in order to reduce cost, to reduce capex, to reduce opex. So what we are doing is like we are offering the infrastructure as we

were discussing before, we offer the tower and not only one operator can use this tower, but maybe two or three operators. First of all, in this way, we are covering with less capex, normally highways or areas that are not covered by mobile operators because they don't have any benefits or not enough benefits, let's say, in these areas because they're all in city of population. And for them to cover a highway nowadays is not a good investment. So that's why we build infrastructure and we go to the operators

and we tell Telefonica, Orange, Vodafone, you can share this infrastructure so you will be able to provide this network coverage to provide SIGAM services at a lower cost. This is one of our propositions. And then also to implement this, what we call this inter-telemetry over this seamless connectivity between countries, the network configuration is quite a complex one. So, CEMEDGE is present in 12 different countries in Europe, and it's much

easier to configure the network in the same infrastructure countries in Europe, and it's much easier to configure the network if the same infrastructure provider is behind the same network in the two countries. Sure, that makes a lot of sense. We're at MWC. This is a fantastic show to understand what's the latest in networking technology, both from a standpoint of

the mobile space, but also from network infrastructure. What is exciting at this show this year? And what are you looking forward to hearing about from others in the industry? So I'm looking forward to see the latest developments in open RAN, because, you know, of course, open RAN, it's much more about active RAN equipment, but it also has an impact on infrastructure. Because with a new centralized RAN architecture, we'll need new places to install new servers. So this is really impacting Zenex's business.

And yeah, so really looking forward to have a look on that. And then, of course, we are also interested in AI and the evolution of all these technologies, of course. I think that AI is going to be huge this year. I mean, it was definitely present last year, but I don't think that we really understood how much generative AI was going to invade across all use cases and technology. I'm excited to see what vendors are talking about. What's next for Cellnex in 2024? So, yeah, basically we will go along with which our clients, which are the mobile operators, are demanding from us in order to provide

connectivity in these places where nowadays we have covered as much like the cross borders. So basically we will deploy all the infrastructure needed for micro-sites like big towers or also small cells for densification in the cities or distributed antenna systems to be able to bring to real life all these use cases I was describing before, like the remote driving, for example. I'm really excited for that. I mean, you think about the potential of autonomous driving and this is just a key use case that needs to be worked out before we can

safely deploy that at scale. I'm really excited about the work that you shared today. How can listeners engage with Cellnex and learn more about what we talked about today? Yes, so you can check out our website, cellnex.com. And also, if you want to know more about the project, the 5G MET project, you can check our project website. It's 5gmet.eu. You will find there all the information about all the different use cases we are deploying and testing. Fantastic. Well, Jose, thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule to be on the Tech Arena.

It was a real pleasure. Thank you for having us. Also a pleasure. Thanks for joining the Tech Arena. Subscribe and engage at our website, thetecharena.net. All content is copyright by the Tech Arena.