IS-Wireless: Europe needs to foster its mobile networks market and embrace new players

Increase of diversity of players in the market should be a natural consequence of the technological growth we see today. In order to meet the demands in terms of traffic and use the resources available to their full potential Europe needs new, ambitious companies to enter the 5G ecosystem. Traditional approach will simply not cut it. Disaggregated networks arising in a diverse market will shape European 5G – said Slawomir Pietrzyk, Founder and CEO of IS-Wireless, a rising mobile network provider participating in the Open RAN revolution, one of the very few European companies offering end-to-end 5G solution during i14y Summit 2022 in Berlin.

Leaders of the business and research communities gathered around cutting edge mobile networks technology met in Berlin’s i14y open lab to test their innovative disaggregated mobile & transport networking solutions and discuss the future of telco networks during i14y Summit. Slawomir Pietrzyk, CEO of IS-Wireless was a speaker in the „Economic Importance of Disaggregation” panel discussion, featuring representatives of the leading telecommunications companies such as Vodafone, Accenture, Deutsche Telekom. 

Network traffic demands grow exponentially. It urgently calls for completely new business models, as it becomes clear that the ones, we have known for decades are obsolete and simply not able to fill the gaps and expectations of modern markets. Technology is changing rapidly and the approach to deploying and using it must keep up with the market demand. – Slawomir Pietrzyk said.

More than just economic argument for disaggregation

Guests of the roundtable emphasized great potential of disaggregated networks to reduce the total operational costs as compared to traditional, single-vendor networks.

Based on the experience with pioneer Open RAN deployments, the so-called 1st wave of the revolution was focused on the unique economic viability resulting from the ability to share resources, use commercially available hardware such as servers, automate deployments and reduce the necessary manpower. Soon, in the scope of what can be called the 2nd wave of open networks, significant financial benefits are expected to result from reusing the existing infrastructure and using the available radio frequency spectrum more efficiently – said CEO of IS-Wireless, Slawomir Pietrzyk.

He noticed that there are other significant qualities of disaggregated networks to keep in mind

Even if the operational costs were similar to a traditional RAN setup, disaggregated networks provide a fundamental advantage of the freedom of choice and lack of costly dependency on a single supplier – Slawomir Pietrzyk highlighted. 

New players in the market

While making a case for disaggregation of networks, experts also addressed its effects on the entire market.

Moving towards disaggregation and interoperability is exactly what the European market needs. It leads to improved competition in the market as it allows highly specialized, innovative companies to grow. As the market becomes more open towards new players, competitiveness increases and leads to emergence of novel, innovative tools – argued Slawomir Pietrzyk, CEO of IS-Wireless as he explained that his company is an example of this market transformation.

The company is one of a few European 5G solutions providers and the only SME in the region offering complete technology for building disaggregated 5G networks, according to the report „Building an Open RAN Ecosystem for Europe” prepared by the leading European telecom operators – Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telecom Italia (TIM), Telefónica and Vodafone. IS-Wireless has also been recognized as a vendor of 4G/5G RAN for Industrial 5G by the British Digital Catapult.