Critics say there is a dark cloud over Ericsson. But Ericsson says that the cloud is their future. New Technologies sat in the classroom of strategichefen Ulf Ewaldsson. And got a lesson in next-generation communications.
Ten minutes into our interview takes Ulf Ewaldsson the role of magister. He stands at the white board and starts drawing. When Ericsson’s group strategy director is finished, he has illustrated throughout the communication society’s near future. And Ericsson’s role in it.
Now is Ewaldssons rapid daub on the board is not directly scientific, but nevertheless symbolic. Only a small part of it belongs to radio, Ericsson’s old paradgren.
“Just radioaccessen is not enough for us to have a really good market,” says Ewaldsson.
it’s Not that the small part is insignificant. With a few years left to 5g, Ericsson has developed a new radio system that is no larger than it can fit in a suitcase. The time of the installation must be according to the marketing counted in minutes.
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another new feature is a radioinnovation to compensate for that 5g must operate at higher frequency bands (with less range) than their older standardsyskon. Innovation, referred to as "beam tracking", means that our phones to quickly get access from the antenna that is best suited at any given time: the fluctuations can occur several times per millisecond. The antennas themselves are new and more advanced than the Ericsson built earlier.
those who follow the company closely are already familiar with this, as well as the are familiar with the obvious benefits of 5g: speeds and response times, which, according to Ericsson, at least, to be able to compete with fibre optics.
– The fixed and the mobile networks blend together and in 5g technology, there will be no difference between fixed and mobile. It makes the dream of "the last mile" of wireless becomes a reality, ” says Ulf Ewaldsson.
"The last wireless mile" he is talking about is the ability to offer bredbandslika conditions to the places where the fiberkablarna not yet reached. An example is in the Boliden mine in Kankberg, outside Skellefteå, where tests with a 5g then takes place a year back.
But for the Ulf Ewaldsson is this all just a part of Ericsson’s definition of 5g. Another – and equally important – is the cloud.
To the left of the white board, he has drawn up a "prylarnas world". The phone is long since connected, as well as the computer and the tv. Now is the time for all the other gadgets to take the plunge. To the right to share the stuff in different datahallsmoln. The bottom gets a rectangle from right to left represent the data the same route. Then it starts to get interesting.
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A new larger cloud drifting into the middle. Ulf Ewaldssons name on it is not as exciting – the "distributed cloud infrastructure" – but the idea that is looming up behind it is all the more exotic.
– It means that the network itself can have a virtual infrastructure. A processor does not know which load goes on it, ” he says.
With such a solution is dedicated hardware for a particular purpose redundant. We are accustomed to thinking of computers as a device built of processors, memories and hard drives, connected to electricity and neatly packaged in a chassis. But Ericsson’s idea (they certainly are not alone) is to disassemble the units down to its components and instead allowing them to communicate between themselves with the help of light.
– the Idea is that there is no need to operate together in the same box. Centralprocessorer, memories, and hard drives will be individual. Then we commit them with a bus, a type of cable, creating in practice a single optical network, ” says Jason Hoffman, molnchef at Ericsson, when we talk again a few days later.
” Look at Ulf’s illustration, transportboxen at the bottom. Most of the transport networks is optical, which fits well if one is to make the data centers fully optical.
Hoffman will take an example. A processor on a central printed circuit board can use a hard drive three kilometres away, but the user is not noticeable to the geographical distance. In extension, it means that the virtual applications and the whole system can be moved to and run in the cloud.
– If you are completely optical, you can virtualize everything. Just everything, ” says Jason Hoffman.
When we think about cloud infrastructure, today we intend to often on the major pieces: Google and Amazon, Microsoft and Apple. We do not think about the tens of thousands of data centers around the world that also supplies the it systems. Of them look the Ericsson a the opportunity. What happens if they can build an optical network linking the Ericsson millions of base stations, with tens of thousands of modernized data center and a public cloud?
– Then we can start to build control systems. We can begin to regard it in the same way that we regard the human cardio – vascular system, ” says Jason Hoffman.
An optical network, the virtualization of the system and a cycle of the data, thus, it is also 5g for Ericsson. Not least because it sets the incentive for the internet of things. The connected devices Ulf Ewaldsson is shown on the left are not smart just because they are connected, or measuring things with sensors. They need to give new insights as well.
“You know, we have built infrastructure in nearly 200 countries,” says Hoffman.
” But what is it used for today? It is used for media consumption. It used to take selfies. But we think like this: What would happen if we started sending the data from the several trillion units upstream instead? And what would happen if we can make decisions based on the data and change the behavior of the thing the data came from?
Ericsson and their competitors are waging a race right now: to become the it-provider for the systems and platforms that will manage the data, making applications that give insights about the data. Companies who in turn purchases it-systems do not need to invest in hardware, but can order as needed: on demand and à la carte. Ulf Ewaldsson notes that it marks a cultural shift where Ericsson is no longer as tightly linked to the operators.
“this,” he says and nods towards the white board, is the ultimate infrastructure. And as you can see, it is operator-independent. It is said that if it goes bad for the operators, so it goes bad for Ericsson. Maybe so, but it is not safe. We are the suppliers of infrastructure into this system and it is up to the operators what they want to do this.
When Ericsson announced that they would kick up to 1 000 employees within the Swedish research and development and replace them with an equal number of new services, it was "the distributed cloud infrastructure" which, at least in part, lay behind the decision.
– The transformation we are facing now is as big as the one we went through when the gears are digitized in the 70′s. I see before me a large R & d investment in Sweden, as one of the key elements in this. I want to send out a strong signal to the whole Swedish industry and to the universities and colleges we want to invest here. We really want to get good support by skilled and knowledgeable engineers to take our offer in the direction I just described.
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this is The Ericsson HDS 8000
Ericsson has nothing to "sit like a spider in the web" as far as the new communication infrastructure. But they also offer a whole system, dubbed the Hyperscale Data Center 8000.
"It is not thought of as a product, but a system. It consists of a hardware platform, multiple form factors, multiple protocols, silo and apis. You should see it as a platform: our clients can add things to the system, ” says Ericsson’s molnchef, Jason Hoffman.
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