Our research director Neil Shah attended 5G Asia and IoT World Asia, 2019 in Singapore. He moderated and chaired the following events:

• 5G Asia Presentation: Deep Dive into 5G Components, Devices and Operator Strategies, Readiness & Outlook

We had an opportunity to deliver a keynote on the latest development in 5G Value Chain Components, Devices and Operator Strategies, Readiness & Outlook to different industry stakeholders. There is a growing understanding about the 5G network rollouts, broader benefits but tracking the component, devices part of value chain is critical to understand the potential rate of adoption of 5G technology.

• Introduction to 5G Network
• Potential 5G use cases – Smart Devices
• Operator roll-out & Device Data Plan Strategies
• Devices & Semiconductor Components Readiness
• 5G Devices Outlook

There is a related webinar and report here.

• IoT Asia : Panel Discussion:  Harmonizing IoT to Across your Partner Ecosystem

Moderator: Neil Shah, Partner & Research Director, Counterpoint Research

• Terence Wong, Market Development Director, APAC, GSMA
• Sonia Sant, Head, Learning Product Technology & Innovation and Operations, Standard Chartered Bank
• Cheng Choon Jeng, Director, Global Alliance and Partnerships, IoT, Group Enterprise, Singtel
• Michelle Woo Pui Mun, Vice President Innovation, ENGIE Factory Asia Pacific, ENGIE

IoT is a very fragmented market but offers tremendous opportunities for every stakeholder in the value chain. However, unlike smartphone industry, a single player can’t offer the entire experience per se but IoT implementation success is going to be based on striking right partnerships. These partnerships and collaboration will vary across applications and at some points those partnerships can transform and take M&A route to capture more value and deliver a more integrated solution. However, the IoT is at nascent stage and for each vertical or application its going to look different in terms of number of players involved to provide a solution to maturity of the solution and scale. The panelists discussed how the IoT community is driving collaboration and global collaboration across partner networks to deliver end to end solutions. For example:

• Terence Wong from GSMA explained how a cellular IoT + blockchain solution helped fishing industry to drive efficiencies right from harvesting, processing, selling, exporting, shipping and consumption in Thailand via right partnerships among the IoT ecosystem players. This proven solution can now be scaled globally.
• Cheng from Singtel also discussed how Singtel via different partnerships from system integrators to hardware manufacturers to cloud players to government bodies is driving IoT deployments for transforming Singapore into a Smart City Nation. This depicts the importance of PPP – Public Private Partnerships.
• With Michelle Woo from ENGIE, she highlighted working with different IoT startups driving innovation in sustainable energy, smart cities and helping them scale, exit via M&A to deliver further value and helping fill gaps in the value chain and also enhancing applications. Many traditional enterprises have to start investing in incubating innovative startups in their industry to drive digital transformation and disruption. All begins with a customer-centric and solution-driven mindset.
• Ms. Sant from Standard Chartered Bank has developed an in-house connected knowledge sharing and agile skilling platform in-house to digitally skill employees for this tsunami of digital transformation. People Capability plays a vital role in empowering the workforce with future ready skills and behaviors. Empowering the workforce with up-to-date knowledge will help them better engage with clients and partners about the impact and opportunities of digital technology such as IoT, blockchain and cloud technologies.

5G, IoT, SDN/NFV Asia Awards Jury Panel

Apart from all the participation at the event, Counterpoint was also part of the jury panel judging a large number of entries across different categories from 5G to IoT to infrastructure on best, innovative solutions out there transforming industry:

Some great entries from the leading technology vendors/operators driving innovation and commercialisation of 5G and virtualisation of networks. Very tough call in some entries, really ground-breaking innovations. The winners announced at the award ceremony in Singapore were:

🏆 Best 5G commercial launch in Asia (MNO):  KT Telecom
🏆 Most Innovative 5G Trial in Asia: SK Telecom
🏆 Best RAN Technology (Vendor): Mavenir
🏆 Best 5G Core Technology: Huawei
🏆 Best Network Automation: Accedian previously Performance Vision
🏆 Best Network Security: Cisco
🏆 Most Impactful NFV/SDN Project: SK Telecom
🏆 Most Innovative NFV/SDN Solution: Huawei
🏆 Best Industrial IoT Solution: Dassault Systèmes

Other interesting observations from the event:

• Deploying an End-to-End Virtualized and Cloudified Network is a hot topic. Japan’s ecommerce giant and MVNO Rakuten is transitioning into a full MNO and under the leadership of Tareq Amin is building such a cloud-native open network with aim to make it agile, less expensive, completely flat in the cloud so most of the services can be launched faster. The key companies helping Rakuten to build its visionary network include - suppliers include Cisco, Nokia, Altiostar, Intel, Red Hat, OKI, Fujitsu, Tech Mahindra, Ciena, Netcracker, Qualcomm, Mavenir, Quanta (QCT), Sercomm, Allot, Innoeye and Viavi.
• High Altitude Platform Station (HAPS) is another technology which caught our eye at 5G Asia. Softbank’s startup HAPS Mobile is building an unmanned aircraft HAWK30 which doubles as a base station in stratosphere to smoothly transmit the radio waves to mobile devices on the ground. The HAPS base station at a height of 20km above ground in the stratosphere will have a coverage that can extend the area of 200km in diameter replacing the need of more than tens of thousands terrestrial base stations. 40 such aircrafts could cover the entire Japan. The entire Japanese islands could be covered by just 40 HAWK30 across mounbtains, remote areas and greatly beneficial during unfortunate events – such as earthquakes or typhoons which could knock-off hundreds of terrestrial cell towers.