In covering all aspects of a telecom network and being around for 102 years, VIAVI Solutions is in a good position to understand not only the needs of its customers, but where the market is headed. IoT Insider spoke to Sameh Yamany, CTO at VIAVI to learn more about the tech they see on the horizon and how AI will impact radio access networks (RAN).
Spoiler alert: the talking points for VIAVI in 2025 and the coming years will be AI and automation.
“Telecom expertise is disappearing because of the ageing telecom technicians,” said Yamany, “and let’s face the reality: not all of the new generation wants to play in the field … so this is moving around. We are seeing AI and automation.”
VIAVI’s exhibit and solutions shown at Mobile World Congress encapsulated some of the ways in which AI and automation is manifesting.
“We’re showing how our instruments no longer require technical [skills] that need a PhD to manage them,” Yamany explained. “We showed at Mobile World Congress our CEO doing RF testing. He came in, he held the RF instrument, and asked the question, ‘what do I do first?’ The solution captured the RF environment and advises what to do. It’s dynamic, and we’re just using AI to do that.”
What technologies are coming?
Every time an emerging technology appears it needs to be tested, which is where VIAVI plays.
“A lot of these vendors, even for some of the ideas they have on a drawing board, need to test it,” said Yamany. “We were in 5G even before the standards.”
This provides them with the foresight to know what’s coming, which includes providing products to test 6G. The life cycle for testing spans from early stage through to deployment support, testing and monitoring to troubleshoot any issues that arise, and finally, optimisation, to further improve on products that have been deployed.
In terms of what’s coming next? AI-RAN, said Yamany.
“Everybody is saying, ‘AI-RAN. What does it mean?’ It’s not just hype or using a buzzword. People feel that there is a need for the RAN to be dynamic.”
AI-RAN, in effect, refers to the integration of AI technologies into RAN. The hope is that by doing so, the network can become more dynamic – for example, AI identifying where network resources can be allocated, how performance can be improved, and how the network can be optimised in a way that is more efficient and cost-effective. It’s still in its early stages, although the AI-RAN Alliance, which was established in February 2024, now counts 75 members spanning 17 countries across the world.
So there is clearly appetite for it, and Yamany expressed his own personal belief in it. “I always say this famous expression, ‘don’t go to a gunfight with a knife’. AI is there and you’re not going to change it.”
AI-RAN is the next “evolution” for the telecoms industry, which is driven by the needs of different industries. But no one industry is the same.
“We’ve been engaged with proposals because a lot of governments are funding this expansion of telecoms into the industrial world like utilities, or agriculture, but if you go into each one of them, the requirement for RAN is completely different,” said Yamany.
In agriculture, for example, which is deploying moving objects like drones and automated equipment, the requirement for RAN is to ensure high-density accuracy and optimised encoding and decoding.
Importantly, as AI proliferates, the transport network needs to be improved also. “It can be as fast as possible, you can put the best GPUs out there in [the] world … they still have to run on this fibre network,” said Yamany. “So operators have realised that with all these amazing innovations, there are some fundamentals that need to move along. Now at VIAVI we’re involved in optical networks.
“There is a pivotal shift towards the operator saying, ‘Let me fix my basement first so you can have all these amazing applications on the top’. The same thing happened with AI, ‘let me fix some of the fibre’.”
Adoption of digital twin technology
Offering testing solutions for non-terrestrial networks (NTN) as Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite constellations and interest in NTN more broadly has grown, Yamany stressed that digital twin technology could play a key role in this.
“We’re working with all of these LEO and GEO satellites to build a digital twin from real data from the movement of satellites,” he said. “Now you can test your technology, show how the beams are going to move, what the Doppler effects are going to look like, what the effects on the device [will be].”
Adoption of digital twin technology has been slow, Yamany noted, but the advantages of being able to understand precisely how technology for satellite communications will perform is proving particularly valuable for those without technical expertise.
In a similar vein, AI assistant bots are going to be useful in enabling fast deployments that typically require technical knowledge.
“I do stuff in a day that I used to do in a week,” he explained. “It’s an expertise that I didn’t have … it’s like a calculator.”
The advent of AI assistants and integration represents a wider journey of how technology has evolved for Yamany, where the rise of motor vehicles replacing horse and carriage didn’t result in the replacement of jobs – but the introduction of many more instead.
“It’s a great time and there is a lot of technology coming in,” concluded Yamany, aptly summing up his embrace of new technologies and privileged position to see what’s coming.
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