Carriers support the Swedish vendor’s vision
5G provides a lingua franca for new and profitable services
And Sweden becomes Switzerland
Ericsson’s analyst and media day at County Hall on the banks of the River Thames last week heralded a significant shift — not just for the Swedish vendor, but for the entire communications industry.
“We are at an inflection point,” Erik Ekudden, Ericsson’s CTO, pointed out in his opening remarks.
After a sticky start, carriers have recognized the value of 5G and are finally starting to successfully monetize it in new ways beyond just selling capacity, moving beyond POCs (proofs of concept) to launching revenue-generating services.
Ekudden says this transition rests on three interdependent technologies: mobile, cloud and AI.
But there is a fourth factor at work here, also: diplomacy, which is at the heart of Ericsson’s success in bringing together a who’s who of the world’s leading carriers to collaborate on developing ways to deploy and charge for new services.
This work takes place in Aduna, a JV between Ericsson and its service provider partners, which houses the APIs Ericsson acquired in its acquisition of Vonage a few years ago. (That deal was widely scorned at the time but turns out to have aged like the reputation of an American president; give it enough time and everyone decides they were amazing).
Ericsson’s ability to act as neutral territory — a communications Switzerland, if you will — tracks with Swedish people’s reputation for being charming and diplomatic. (In contrast, the Fins/Nokia are a bit grumpy but make up for it by being incredibly sincere, and the Americans like to loudly tell everyone how they’re the best at everything and then look perplexed when they don’t get their way).
In a world where much of what happens in the communications industry is now impacted by right-wing geopolitics, Ericsson’s savoir-faire is an essential skillset.
Full Support
Ericsson’s charm offensive produced an event last week that was rammed with Tier 1 carriers all eager to share their enthusiasm for the 5G money mission.
One reason that carriers are so keen on the Ericsson strategy is that it could solve the problem they had with 4G.
“4G was hugely successful in driving video, but the money went to the OTT companies and content providers, not our carrier customers,” Per Narvinger, Ericsson’s SVP for Business Area Cloud Software and Services, told me. “We’re fixing this in 5G.”
In London, AT&T, AWS, KDDI, Vonage, T-Mobile and Google Cloud all spoke eloquently and enthusiastically at length about their collaboration. As ecosystems go, Aduna’s is a doozy. (To paraphrase Pumbaa in The Lion King, “Aduna matata, it ain’t no passing phase”).
It’s still early days, with much work to be done on both business models and technology, including much-hyped AI.
“As an industry, all of our customers are fully involved in deploying AI, but we must make it business relevant and progress beyond chatbots to agentic AI,” remarked Ekkuden.
However, the path is now clear, and Ericsson has a clearly defined blueprint for how both telco and industrial networks should work (see diagram).
Ericsson’s annual event is always a positive affair, but this one was particularly so. The company is on a roll; its stock price has risen by 50% in the past 12 months. It has emerged from the slough of despair that gripped the telecommunications industry a few years back during 5G’s false start. Above all, its plan, which it has been gestating for a few years, is working.
Just about the only thing that could derail this progress would be if it did something silly, like reincorporating in the United States.
Watch my interview with Ekudden here.
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