“It’s not something that’s going to disappear in six months; it is actually a tangible, useful thing, with a lot of complications,” Milanesi said. “We can talk about bias and what comes with it and how we really need to deploy it ethically, but it is going to impact every aspect of our lives.”

Milanesi and O’Donnell spoke with theCUBE Research analysts Dave Vellante and Shelly Kramer at MWC Barcelona, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the implications of AI and the cool devices on display in Barcelona. (* Disclosure below.)

Open RAN promises flexibility, faces challenges

The conversation was an opportunity for O’Donnell to discuss one of his favorite subjects, Open RAN. The technology represents an evolution in mobile network architectures, offering service providers the flexibility to use interoperable subcomponents from different vendors in an open radio access network.

“You bought from Ericsson, or you bought from Nokia, or a couple other vendors, and that’s how you made sure they worked,” O’Donnell explained. “Because telcos originally were basically utilities, they weren’t tech-focused; they were a utility like the water or something else. As they’ve evolved over time, there’s this idea, just as we have in the compute world, of mix and match of different things.”

The idea with Open RAN was that it would be great to get things cheaper and to get things that worked better, according to O’Donnell. But there were some geopolitical issues involved related to Huawei and concerns about Huawei equipment in certain countries.

“That also played into all of this,” he said. “Problem has been, it turns out it’s really hard to do something like that and, oh by the way, keep those seven nines of utility — even now, like what we saw happened with AT&T last week.”

While it’s hard to do and hard to get the benefits, according to O’Donnell, more and more companies are starting to do it.

“They’re taking sort of an interesting version of it. They’re saying it’s Open RAN, but it’s still all the equipment from one single vendor. It’s just that the interfaces are open,” he said.

Meanwhile, AI is starting to be brought into some of the applications that are running on the telco network. There are various research projects taking place right now, according to Milanesi.

“We’re spending a lot of time on AI, both from an adoption perspective and as a user, whether I’m a consumer or an enterprise user and willing and interested in using,” she said.

Sustainability is being viewed as a purchase driver, according to Milanesi. Whether or not there’s a lot of debate around this, the reality is that especially in this market, sustainability is driving both opportunity and risk.

“Those are kind of the hot topics that we are looking into right now,” she said.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE Research’s coverage of MWC Barcelona:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the MWC Barcelona event. No sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE