Why buy today’s model when you can drive the 2028 version?
"We’re ready to embrace the future of telecom": TELUS CTO
Global Content and Social Media Manager Rakuten Symphony
September 7, 2023
In telecom, geographic or population coverage can make or break a mobile operator’s success. Canada, the world’s second largest country spans almost 8,000 kilometers from east to west yet is home to only 40 million people. Its size provides a unique challenge for Canadian network operators, including TELUS, who are challenged with keeping customers connected with thousands of kilometers of fiber and cellular base stations. The company’s Chief Technology Officer, Ibrahim Gedeon, sat down with us at Rakuten Optimism 2023 in Yokohama, Japan, and summed up Canada’s complex situation: “That’s a lot of base stations needed with a small amount of people…especially now with 5G,” he said.
Speaking virtually from Edmonton, Canada, Gedeon joined Rakuten Symphony’s Chief Operating Officer, Hideyuki Hirama and Chief Business Officer, Rabih Dabboussi, at Rakuten’s annual marquee event. Gedeon explained that while the challenge of population density coverage in Canada is poles apart from the densely populated cities of Japan, Canadians are similar to the Japanese in their high expectations of network quality.
TELUS and its competing Canadian operators, Bell Canada and Rogers, are tasked, just like Rakuten Mobile, with ensuring that customers experience uninterrupted coverage and negligible call drops. To meet this challenge, TELUS is looking to the future of telco technologies to get ahead of its peers.
Rakuten Symphony’s Hirama remarked on the similarities between Rakuten and TELUS, that both companies have expanded business services to meet the needs of large and diverse customer bases. Gedeon agreed, noting how he’s optimistic about being able to bring more relevance to clients as an industry because TELUS, like Rakuten, has a strong presence in multiple industries and sectors like healthcare, agriculture and television. “For this, we are partnering with Rakuten in other areas, not limited to Open RAN and Rakuten Symphony,” he said.
Dabboussi shared Gedeon’s enthusiasm, adding, “I am optimistic about what we're doing together with Ibrahim [Gedeon] and the TELUS team in Canada — we're looking forward to seeing great results there.” Dabboussi detailed Rakuten Symphony’s journey over the last four years disrupting and transforming the telecom industry. “I have seen the expansion in interest and the increased appetite in adopting the new and forgetting the old. I'm not just optimistic. I am very confident that this will only continue,” he commented. The future, according to Dabboussi, will be based on open architecture that is software-defined, to serve customers at reduced costs and improved efficiencies.
Why buy today’s model when you can drive the 2028 version?
While developing Rakuten Mobile, the world-first cloud-native telecom network built with technologies using open RAN specifications, industry experts expressed concerns about the feasibility of the open architecture and network quality. They claimed it wouldn’t work in densely or sparsely populated areas, that it would not be secure and unsustainable. Rakuten proved these myths to be wrong.
It’s taken four years for skeptics to have finally believe. Gedeon noted a marked change in industry sentiment experts at Mobile World Congress Barcelona 2023 where he says global telecoms suppliers finally said: ’Yes. ORAN works.’
https://symphony.rakuten.com/blog/...-the-future-of-telecom-telus-cto
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