Moving Towards the Digital Telecommunications Revolution

By Benoit Hanssen, CTO, Wind Tre

Benoit Hanssen, CTO, Wind Tre

The telecommunications market is in a period of transition. Today, as every person on the planet is using mobile phones and internet, the industry is moving in the direction where everyone is trying to get connected. After the 1990s, the telecommunications industry has been playing a more significant role in the economic development of both developed and developing countries.

The industry has transformed in the last 20 years and is forging ahead to adopt advanced telecommunication technologies. Telecom industry is reinventing itself especially in the mobile industry and in every ten years a new generation technology has come up and the services started with very basic services like voice calls. As the industry has already adopted 3G and is now at the tail end of the 4G life cycle, it is getting ready for the next generation technology which is called 5G. With 5th generation of mobile technology coming up the telecom industry has a lot of focus towards its adoption.

With 5G the industry is trying to enhance the quality of service by increasing the capacity and speed at which the internet works on the mobile phones and mobile technologies. This will trigger the beginning of new applications that are not possible today. The 5G technology is much better suited to be applied for the IoT because instead of connecting millions of people, it’s better to connect billions of devices so that there is a change in the number of connectivity’s that are made. One of the other aspects the 5G is going to enable the industry is to better segment different types of users. Today, networks are primarily aimed at mobile consumers—use their phones to download videos, pictures, to communicate and use social media.

Mobile technologies are being updated to perform more efficiently especially in reaching the limits and rules of nature.

The 5G technology is much better suited to be applied for the IoT because instead of connecting millions of people, it’s better to connect billions of devices

The mobile technology uses frequency waves, electromagnetic waves to travel through the air. As mobile operators can use frequency abided by limitations and there are many purposes for which these frequencies are used, there is heavy competition between different purposes to use these airways. Thus, as the industry is moving towards 5th generation technology, there is the necessity for more airways to channel the internet data traffic that the customers want to have. So working on making these airways available to customers is one of the challenges that are prevailing in the industry. In order to cater this challenge, the providers are trying to make better use of the available frequencies.

Another challenge is making devices extremely sophisticated with respect to their functioning with electromagnetic waves, packing them in smaller devices, and their dependency on battery power. For example, for IoT, the telecom industry is looking for the devices which have requirements to work for at least 10 years on battery power. So there is need to develop devices which work at extremely low power and last for a long time to make them economical.

Further, the telecom service providers are also challenged by the companies that have more freedom to act like Facebook, Google. These companies are not necessarily subjected to same rules as telecommunications companies. So the telecom companies are under the scrutiny as they have traditionally built a relationship of trust with their customers. To maintain these trusted relationships with customer, maintaining security has to come at the top of the agenda. Nowadays, governments are also looking form security point of view to provide vital infrastructure to countries to ensure that not only the data of customers is secure but also the communications that these people are making is also secure and safe.

To this, Wind Tre also provides a wide range of telecommunication services to companies, enterprises, and to Public Administrations in Italy. Ranging from utility companies to provide a comprehensive package of services to offices and also enabling their services to the public in Italy. The firm also enables a lot of small businesses to efficiently and effectively manage their business by providing solutions for unified communications. Where in people who don’t have offices like plumbers, electricians also can be reached no matter where they are, to better manage their customers and needs. So in that way, the firm enables a complete portfolio of innovative and integrated services in the entire market.

The firm is also adopting the technologies that are emerging such as AI to support their businesses. “We are very active in adopting cloud-based applications in our business and also using our own products/services we want to follow an operation to adopt some of the capabilities in technology to uphold our customers,” concludes Hanssen.