No surprises as Ericsson goes all-in on 5G for MWC 2019

Ericsson had its traditional pre-MWC media and analyst fest yesterday, at which it focused on improvements being made to its 5G Platform.

Given that this is the year we finally start to see 5G in the wild, and that Ericsson’s business is largely devoted to mobile networks, the utter inevitability of this set of announcements can be forgiven. As can the relative lack of eye-catching launches at a time when every part of the 5G ecosystem is focused more on making sure its stuff works properly, rather than flashy new initiatives.

So Ericsson’s message was that it’s all over this 5G thing and that whatever your 5G needs might be, it’s got them covered. “Ericsson has the portfolio in place for service providers to switch on 5G today and we are currently rolling out commercial 5G networks in the US, Europe, Asia and Australia,” said Fredrik Jejdling, Ericsson’s networks head. “We’re continuously developing our portfolio to make life easier for our customers, enabling them to manage increased data traffic growth, simplify operations, and secure 5G revenues.”

We’d expect no less of you Fred, so let’s have a look at some of the fruits of this continual development. Right now Ericsson is all about making the evolution to 5G is smooth as possible for its customers. A key component of that is the Dual-mode 5G Cloud Core, which supports all legacy mobile technology generations as well as SA and NSA 5G and promises to dynamically switch between them depending on what’s available. Here’s how it works, simple eh?

Of course it wouldn’t be an Ericsson launch without a bunch of shiny new radios, nine of them to be precise, including new dual band, triple band, and Massive MIMO ones. On top of that there’s a new microwave backhaul product and an upgrade to all the clever virtualization and orchestration software you need to make all this 5G magic happen, and that’s about it.

“As we evolve our network to 5G, we need to simplify operations, reduce time to market for new functionalities, and open up our network for innovation,” Ericsson got Patrick Weibel, Head of 5G at Swisscom, to say. “Ericsson’s dual-mode 5G Cloud Core allows for the flexible evolution of our 4G Core network to a combined 4G and 5G network while maintaining cost efficiency. Adding to this, the evolved Ericsson Dynamic Orchestration solution bring us the automation of network slices required to reduce our provisioning time of services from weeks to hours.”

If Ericsson’s and Nokia’s pre-MWC events are anything to go by, this is going to be a tricky show for us hacks. The arrival of 5G means we’ve entered the boring, pragmatic, implementation phase and the announcements reflect that. While we can hardly hold that against the industry, especially having mocked its hyperbolic tendencies of previous years, it does make finding the ‘story’ a bit more challenging. Bring on 6G, that’s what we say.