This live Q&A show was broadcast at the end of day two of the Next-Gen Telco Infra summit. TelecomTV’s Guy Daniels was joined by industry guest panellists for this question and answer session. Among the questions raised by our audience were:

• How do we plan for next-gen telco infra when we don't know exactly how our networks will be used in the future? Do we end up making educated guesses, or do we instead have to over-engineer to allow for all possibilities?
• Is public edge computing eventually going to be a commercial reality, or does private edge cover most of the needs of enterprise customers?
• Will there really be revenue opportunities for running AI inference services within the RAN, as recent announcements claim, and what is the industry doing collectively to evaluate such opportunities?
• What are the advantages and disadvantages of open networking when it comes to upgrading telco infrastructure and datacentres?
• Is the telco infrastructure sector progressively being taken over by other players, such as hyperscalers? If so, what can telcos do?
• Will moves towards local cloud/AI inferencing lead to smaller, even federated, content providers, to the extent that mobile network operators (MNOs) are under threat?
• Might we see smaller public edge nodes distributed geographically or will we have to wait to see if more use cases justify new investment?
• The start-up market for telco infra is famously perilous. Is it even possible for startups to successfully engage directly with telcos?

Recorded November 2024