By: Thomas Board, Pipeline

News has been more compelling than usual this month as telcos rushed to share exciting innovations on their stands at this year's Mobile World Congress. Below are the most exciting stories you will find in tech curated by Pipeline summarized in categories that represent some of our upcoming issue themes.

This month’s top industry news stories are summarized below. To view current breaking news in real-time, visit Pipeline’s News Center, follow Pipeline on social media, or subscribe to receive our weekly telecom industry news summary.

Customer Experience News

We'll begin the monthly news roundup with this month's issue theme of Customer Experience. In CX/DX news Juniper Networks released the industry's first AI-Native Networking Platform, purpose-built to leverage AI to assure the best end-to-end operator and end-user experiences. Trained on seven years of insights and data science development, Juniper’s AI-Native Networking Platform was designed from the ground up to assure that every connection is reliable, measurable, and secure for every device, user, application, and asset. Somos made RealAgent available. In line with the Federal Communications Commission's emphasis on consumer protection and fraud prevention in the telecom sector, RealAgent emerges as a solution that helps empower enterprises with the data they need to ensure that their outbound calls and texts are reaching the intended recipient. This solution also aids enterprises in obtaining safe harbor protection from potential Telephone Consumer Protection Act violations.

NTT DATA Business Solutions and IBM established a Center of Excellence for IBM's Watsonx generative AI platform. The joint CoE will focus on the use of the IBM watsonx AI and data platform with watsonx AI assistants for the development of embedded generative AI solutions for clients. The CoE combines the industry expertise of NTT DATA Business Solutions with IBM technology to help NTT DATA Business Solutions clients scale and accelerate the impact of generative AI. Deutsche Telekom will be presenting a visionary AI phone concept at Mobile World Congress 2024 together with Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. and Brain.ai. An assistant based on artificial intelligence replaces the countless apps on the smartphone. Like a concierge, the assistant understands your goals and takes care of the details.

Network & Mobile News

In Network & 5G News, Telia Lithuania is leveraging Ciena's WaveLogic 5 Extreme coherent optics to upgrade its countrywide network to support 400G and higher services and deploy the first 800Gb/s wavelength service between major cities in Lithuania. The Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency has procured a 5G core network from Ericsson to develop Rakel G2, Sweden’s critical communications network for public safety and emergency services including national defense purposes. Comarch has become one of the first companies in Poland to receive a permit to use dedicated 4 to 4.1 GHz radio frequencies for private 5G networks. The company will set up a fully-fledged 5G network to improve the quality of its products. 

VEON has launched its Geolocation Gateway with the first implementation already in place in Uzbekistan. Building on the global GSMA Open Gateway framework for universal, open APIs for enterprise developers, the Geolocation Gateway will enable a wide range of use cases, from proximity-based commercial services to reducing fraud in financial services, as well as supporting location-based emergency response. Summit Communications has selected Juniper Networks' PTX Series Routers for 400G Converged Optical Routing solution upgrades to serve as the foundation of Summit's core network. This will enable seamless network capacity expansion and efficient delivery of enhanced connectivity over hundreds of kilometers to various points of presence across the country.

Wave Electronics has designed-in Picocom’s PC802 system-on-chip into its latest Open RAN product, the WEH47-TM24B radio unit. In conjunction with Wave Electronics, Picocom showcased the new deployment-ready O-RU in a live end-to-end demonstration at MWC 2024. Anritsu Corporation and MediaTek have verified advanced three uplink transmission technology featured in MediaTek's M80 5G Modem by using Anritsu's MT8000A all-in-one Radio Communication Test Station, providing a flexible test platform for ultrafast, large-capacity 5G communications. The MT8000A supports sub-6 GHz and mmWave RF tests, as well as protocol tests for development of advanced 5G technologies.

At MWC, Red Hat collaborated with stc Group to achieve faster development, delivery and innovation of services by harnessing automation and cloud-native agility. With Red Hat OpenShift, Cisco system integration and Cisco Network Services Orchestrator, stc Group is now able to host multiple cloud-native network functions from various ecosystem vendors with automated deployment and operations.