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75% of base stations will be upgraded to 5G-Advanced by 2030

Naushad K. Cherrayil
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75% of base stations will be upgraded to 5G-Advanced by 2030
  • 5G-Advanced devices per radio base station will quickly gain traction around 2024 to 2026 at the early stage of the commercial launch because devices will grow more aggressively than network deployments over the period.
  • Extended Reality applications will promise monetary opportunities to both the consumer markets with use cases like gaming and video streaming, as well as enterprise opportunities such as remote working and virtual training.
  • AI/ML will become essential for future networks given the predictive rapid growth in 5G network usage and use case complexities which can’t be managed by legacy optimisation approaches with presumed models.
  • The upgrade of the 5G network infrastructure is expected to be faster in the consumer market than in enterprises.

About 75 per cent of 5G base stations will be upgraded to 5G-Advanced by 2030, five years after the estimated commercial launch, an industry expert said.

 “In 5G-Advanced, Extended Reality (XR) applications will promise monetary opportunities to both the consumer markets with use cases like gaming, video streaming, as well as enterprise opportunities such as remote working and virtual training,” Gu Zhang, 5G & Mobile Network Infrastructure Principal Analyst at ABI Research, said.

The regulatory body – 3GPP – approved the Release-18 package in December 2021, making the official start of 5G-Advanced with the planned freeze date in December 2023.

A fully automated network

5G-Advanced is expected to bring continuous enhancements to mobile network capabilities and use case-based support to help mobile operators with 5G commercialisation, long-term development of artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning (ML), and network energy savings for a fully automated network and a sustainable future.

However, Zhang said that XR applications are a major focus of 3GPP working groups to significantly improve XR-specific traffic performance and power consumption for mass market adoption.

“Another noticeable feature is AI/ML which will become essential for future networks given the predictive rapid growth in 5G network usage and use case complexities which can’t be managed by legacy optimisation approaches with presumed models,” he said.

System-level network energy saving is also a critical aspect, he added, as operators need to reduce the deployment cost but assure network performance for various use cases.

The upgrade of the 5G network infrastructure is expected to be faster in the consumer market than in enterprises.

ABI Research said that 75% of 5G base stations will be upgraded to 5G-Advanced, while in the enterprise market the ratio is about half.

Competition has already started

5G-Advanced devices per radio base station will quickly gain traction around 2024 to 2026 at the early stage of the commercial launch because devices will grow more aggressively than network deployments over the period.

Zhang pointed out that the commercial launch of 5G-Advanced will take two or three years, but the competition has already started.

“Taking AI/ML development as an example, industrial leaders such as Ericsson, Huawei, Nokia, ZTE, and Qualcomm have trialled their solutions with mobile operators across the world. Ongoing development in this area will continue to bring improvements on traffic throughputs, network coverage, power saving, anomaly detection, etc.”

Different from previous generations, 5G creates an ecosystem for vertical markets such as automotive, energy, food and agriculture, city management, government, healthcare, manufacturing, and public transportation.

“The influence on the domestic economy from the telco players will be more significant than before and that trend will continue for 5G-Advanced onward. Network operators and vendors should keep close to the regulators and make sure all parties involved grow together when the time-to-market arrives,” Zhang said.

Neom’s 36MW hyperscale data centre to run on Oracle

Naushad K. Cherrayil
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Neom’s 36MW hyperscale data centre to run on Oracle
  • Saudi smart city aims to create a scalable, agile and modern platform for all mission-critical IT workloads.
  • Oracle Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer to help run Neom’s entire IT ecosystem.

Saudi Arabia’s Neom has opted to infuse Oracle at its 36MW ZeroPoint DC data centre to create a scalable, agile and modern platform for all mission-critical IT workloads.

Neom is a Saudi city being built in the Tabuk Province of northwestern Saudi Arabia. It is planned to incorporate smart city technologies and function as a tourist destination

The name “Neom” is derived from two words. The first three letters from the Ancient Greek prefix neo-meaning “new”. The fourth letter is from the abbreviation of Mostaqbal, an Arabic word meaning “future”.

Neom has selected Oracle Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer, a self-contained cloud region that provides all the benefits of the public cloud without hosted customer data ever having to leave the data centre.

The smart city will be able to access Oracle’s portfolio of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) public cloud services and Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications to address local data residency and latency requirements and reduce operating costs.

Accelerating innovation

Richard Smith, Executive Vice-President for Technology at Oracle EMEA, said that Oracle Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer has been designed to address demanding data residency and privacy requirements and, with this, customers can run a self-contained region where all hosted data remains local to that region.

Moreover, he said that no other cloud provider delivers a fully featured public cloud with all services on-premises and, at the same time, Neom will be able to increase agility across all business processes and accelerate innovation by accessing new cloud services on-premises.

“Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer is a natural progression of our ZeroPoint DC partnership with Oracle, and will allow us to fully tap into the potential of cognitive solutions that we are developing,” Fabio Fontana, CEO at ZeroPoint DC and Chief Growth Officer at NEOM Tech &Digital Company, said.

Oracle said that Neom will also be able to reduce database administration costs by up to 80 per cent and use its resources to focus on innovations with Oracle Autonomous Database on Exadata Cloud@Customer.

The second data centre in Saudi Arabia is expected to come this year as part of their “in-country” dual region strategy to help customers address disaster recovery and compliance needs.

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Are third-party solutions providers the right answer to widening IT skills gap? 

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Are third-party solutions providers the right answer to widening IT skills gap? 
  • Failing to develop an effective plan could result in growing backlogs of stakeholder requests, innovation being sacrificed for just keeping the lights on, and productivity and efficiency losses.
  • Organisations and government authorities need to invest further in ensuring the national youth population of the GCC countries has enough resources in schools, colleges and universities offering STEM subjects leading to technology jobs.

One of the industry terms synonymous with the skills topic is the ‘Great Resignation’ and yes; the pandemic reminded us that the non-negotiables for happiness are our health and time with family and friends prompting many to re-think their work-life balance.

The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries are unique regions with different dynamics. While it has not been impacted by the Big Quit, as other commentators are calling it, the Gulf States have seen its fair share of movement. 

The ‘migrant’ population which outnumbers the local population is not here permanently and hence the skilled white-collar IT executive is always looking for greener pastures.

Taher Haj-Yousef, Regional Managing Director, Rimini Street FZ LLC.

Given the region relies heavily on importing skilled expats, the lack of inherent capacity and the reduced flow back into the region as we emerge from Covid-19, the skills gap has widened and left many businesses suffering. 

Add to that the political and economic challenges of neighbouring countries; it appears a rocky road lies ahead for companies that cannot accelerate their digital transformation. 

In December 2021, we released a GCC CIO/CTO IT sentiment report in which it was revealed that 96 per cent of respondents said accessing the right talents to keep up with the demand for digital transformation was challenging, with 39 per cent citing it was ‘very’ and 57 per cent ‘somewhat’. 

The percentage was higher in Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman where nearly half of the respondents found it ‘very’ challenging.

We are helping these customers with resource augmentation and recruitment of those much-needed skills. 

Another way of tackling these challenges is for businesses to create a comprehensive succession plan to ensure they are not caught out by skills gaps. 

Failing to develop an effective plan could result in growing backlogs of stakeholder requests, innovation being sacrificed for just keeping the lights on, and productivity and efficiency losses.

Create a comprehensive succession plan

The good news is that despite the talent competition there are different options to meet demand. By identifying the key roles and requirements in the IT team, you can qualify how best to fill those positions.  

Above all, you must decide what IT roles are critical to competitive advantage and decide how best to source them. 

For example, let’s say you’re a manufacturing business and your supply chain systems are crucial to just-in-time delivery. You could look to hire; you could reskill or upskill existing staff. 

The easy solution is to bring in temporary staff or a partner, but then you must be certain that the individual or partner is invested in your business success, has the right expertise, and understands the role they play in the transformation of your IT systems. If you don’t get that buy-in it could become an expensive option. 

However, organisations and the government authorities need to invest further in ensuring the national youth population of the GCC countries has enough resources in schools, colleges and universities offering STEM subjects leading to technology jobs. 

Find the right partner

As an industry what is important for us to consider as the best way to deal with any skills shortages in your organisation is that you do not look at it in crude terms of either hire or outsource. 

As you map out which applications are of strategic importance you should always ask the question: who are the experts in this field? Is it us or is a partner better placed?

And the secondary question is: what is the best way to continue developing the right skills?

If you want to have a modern, future-proof business application environment, the harsh reality is that resources and complexity mean you must prioritise what you will deliver. 

The same is true of where you focus your efforts in terms of finding and maintaining the right skills. If you are not best placed to deliver the right expertise and have a large pool of skilled engineers to support your applications, then you need to find the right partner.

This does not mean that bringing in a partner to run those applications should simply be about outsourcing systems just to keep the lights on. 

On the contrary, if you get the right partner with the right skills who is invested in your business goals, you will not only solve some of your skills headaches but will have a partner able to help optimise and modernise those applications in parallel to your focus on other areas of the business.

A more unified approach

For example, we have helped our clients to develop specific application functionality in diverse fields such as core banking and smart metering for utilities, because we have the industry and business application knowledge.

The right partner can help its clients manage the complex footprint of in-house applications, and private and public cloud implementations. The partner should also be able to scale up and down based on the client’s needs.  

For example, if you are a retailer, the partner should be able to increase the team during peak retailing season to ensure the business operations always run smoothly. 

Creating a more unified support strategy can be a solution to these requirements. Firms only need to work with a single support partner to manage their hybrid IT environment, rather than dealing with multiple vendors. 

Whilst we too have not been immune to the challenges of Covid-19, we have recognised the need for agility to remain competitive. 

The unified support services offered to our clients allow us to nimbly respond to changing technology and business needs.  

We have thousands of engineers with deep capability waiting to plug the skills gap. This model has helped us improve our clients’ business outcomes while improving technology service quality, scalability, and delivery speed. 

The pandemic has shown the importance of being agile and flexible to survive and thrive changing with the demands of the market with a much more flexible approach.

  • Taher Haj-Yousef is the Regional Managing Director at Rimini Street FZ LLC.

A partially paralysed man feeds himself with robotic arms connected directly to the brain 

Naushad K. Cherrayil
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A partially paralysed man feeds himself with robotic arms connected directly to the brain 
  • Scientists develop a system that responds to muscle movement signals through a brain-machine interface.
  • The theory is that the addition of sensory feedback, delivered straight to a person’s brain, may help a person perform some tasks without requiring constant visual feedback in the current experiment.
  • The project denotes the potential capabilities that can be developed to help people with disabilities but researchers say that more work needs to be done.

Recent advances in neural science, robotics and software have enabled scientists to develop a robotic system that responds to muscle movement signals from a partially paralysed person relayed through a brain-machine interface.

Humans and robots act as a team to make performing some tasks a piece of cake.

A team led by researchers at The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), in Laurel, Maryland, and the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation (PMR) in the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, published a paper in the journal Frontiers in Neurorobotics that described their latest feat using a brain-machine interface (BMI) and a pair of modular prosthetic limbs.

BMI systems provide a direct communication link between the brain and a computer, which decodes neural signals and ‘translates’ them to perform various external functions, from moving a cursor on a screen to now enjoying a bite of cake. In this particular experiment, muscle movement signals from the brain helped control the robotic prosthetics.

Innovative model for shared control

The study was built on more than 15 years of research in neural science, robotics, and software, led by APL in collaboration with the Department of PMR, as part of the Revolutionizing Prosthetics program, which was originally sponsored by the US Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA).

The new paper outlines an innovative model for shared control that enables a human to manoeuvre a pair of robotic prostheses with minimal mental input.

In less than 90 seconds, a person with very limited upper body mobility who hasn’t been able to use his fingers in about 30 years just fed himself dessert using his mind and some smart robotic hands.

A computerised voice announces each action: “moving the fork to food” and “retracting knife.” Partially paralysed, the man makes subtle motions with his right and left fists at certain prompts, such as “select cut location”, so that the machine slices off a bite-sized piece.

Now: “moving food to mouth” and another subtle gesture to align the fork with his mouth.

A true sense of control

 “This shared control approach is intended to leverage the intrinsic capabilities of the brain-machine interface and the robotic system, creating a ‘best of both worlds’ environment where the user can personalise the behaviour of a smart prosthesis,” Dr Francesco Tenore, a senior project manager in APL’s Research and Exploratory Development Department, said.

The paper’s senior author, Tenore focuses on the neural interface and applied neuroscience research.

“Although our results are preliminary, we are excited about giving users with limited capability a true sense of control over increasingly intelligent assistive machines,” he added.

Dr David Handelman, the paper’s first author and a senior roboticist in the Intelligent Systems Branch of the Research and Exploratory Development Department at APL, said that one of the most important advances in robotics demonstrated in the paper is combining robot autonomy with limited human input, with the machine doing most of the work while enabling the user to customise robot behaviour to their liking.

“For robots to perform human-like tasks for people with reduced functionality, they will require human-like dexterity. Human-like dexterity requires complex control of a complex robot skeleton,” he explained.

“Our goal is to make it easy for the user to control the few things that matter most for specific tasks.”

Exploring the potential of technology

Dr Pablo Celnik, project principal investigator in the department of PMR said: “The human-machine interaction demonstrated in this project denotes the potential capabilities that can be developed to help people with disabilities.”

While the DARPA program officially ended in August 2020, the team at APL and the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine continues to collaborate with colleagues at other institutions to demonstrate and explore the potential of the technology.

The next iteration of the system may integrate previous research that found providing sensory stimulation to amputees enabled them to not only perceive their phantom limb but use muscle movement signals from the brain to control a prosthetic.

The theory is that the addition of sensory feedback, delivered straight to a person’s brain, may help him or her perform some tasks without requiring constant visual feedback in the current experiment.

“This research is a great example of this philosophy where we knew we had all the tools to demonstrate this complex bimanual activity of daily living that non-disabled people take for granted,” Tenore said.

“Many challenges still lie ahead, including improved task execution, in terms of both accuracy and timing, and closed-loop control without the constant need for visual feedback.”

Celnik said that future research will explore the boundaries of these interactions, even beyond basic activities of daily living.

Exclusive: IPO on the radar for Dailyhunt’s parent – Verse – in the next two years

Naushad K. Cherrayil
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Exclusive: IPO on the radar for Dailyhunt’s parent – Verse – in the next two years
  • Indian unicorn forays into Middle East and North Africa markets with a headquarters in Dubai.
  • Dailyhunt is now available to users in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, and Kuwait.
  • Co-founder says the startup is well capitalised and in no need to raise more capital soon.
  • Startup aims to net $100m in revenues from Middle East and North Africa.
  • Expects 50% year-on-year growth in group revenues from $127m last year.

VerSe Innovation, the parent company of India’s largest local language content discovery platform – Dailyhunt, is looking to launch an IPO in the next 18 to 24 months if things go all in the right direction, the company’s co-founder said in an exclusive to TechChannel News.

Umang Bedi, after foraying into the Middle East and North African markets, said that the company is well capitalised and is valued at $5 billion compared to $500 million two years ago.

“In April, we raised over $805 million, the largest fundraising by any startup in India. If we ever do raise more capital, it will be more for inorganic acquisition. However, as a company, we need to grow further and we will be looking at an IPO. It is very hard to time the market but in the next 18 to 24 months, we want to be ready for an IPO,” he said.

More focus on Josh and PublicVibe

Only Dailyhunt is making revenues now, he said and added that in the next two to two-and-a-half years, the other two apps – Josh and PublicVibe are expected to start making revenues in India.  

“We will be focusing on Josh this year and PublicVibe next year. As we have grown as a company, we found that we can take our expertise to other parts of the world to cater to the readers and advertisers,” Bedi said.

The Bengaluru-based unicorn opened its regional headquarters in Dubai, focusing on the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries for the time being.

“GCC is a tech-savvy region and home to 60 million people with an internet penetration rate of about 98 per cent. The region has high news consumption among the public due to different nationalities and there is a tremendous opportunity to tap into the unmet content needs of the Middle East market, given the rich linguistic diversity and an extensive news consumption behaviour of the market,” he said.

Moreover, he said that there is also strong growth potential in the advertising market.

From a monetisation perspective, he said that the GCC has around a $5 million ad market and the Mena has a $9 million market.

Eyes 45,000 publishers

In the Middle East, Dailyhunt will be available in the GCC, to begin with in English and Arabic languages and plans to add Farsi and Hebrew gradually and has no plans to bring Josh and PublicVibe to the GCC.

The startup has already added 5,000 content partners catering to the UAE market and plans to add another 45,000 content publishers in the next 18 months from the GCC.

Dailyhunt has 100,000 content partners in India in 15 languages with 350 million monthly active users and 110 million daily active users while Josh has 150 million monthly active users and 75 million daily users, and their third app – Publicvibe – was launched recently.

“Our goal is to get $100 million in revenues from this region. We are confident that we can achieve this as we have done it in the Indian market in 15 different languages. 

Last year, our revenues from India were $127 million and expect to grow more than 50 per cent year-on-year this year,” Bedi said.

The next 12 months will be to add really good content on the platform in the Mena region, he said.

“Rome was not built in a day. So, we need to understand the regional culture and Arabic is the fourth largest language spoken globally. Once we get it right, then we will be expanding into other geographies,” he said.

The startup has no plans to open offices in other GCC countries but Bedi said that they always operate on an “asset light model” and even in India they have 2,500 employees and out of that 2,000 are located in Bengaluru and the rest in other two small offices in Mumbai and Delhi. 

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Why taking charge of cloud security is a number one priority for Middle East businesses?

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Why taking charge of cloud security is a number one priority for Middle East businesses?
  • It is clear that businesses do not have the same level of confidence or expertise to configure security in cloud computing environments compared to on-premises.
  • Unifying the visibility of multi-cloud environments and continuous intelligent monitoring of all cloud resources are essential in an effective cloud security solution.

Cloud adoption remains one of the most critical elements of digital transformation and growth for many enterprises. It can help companies deliver applications and services to customers with both speed and scalability.

But, the reality is many businesses still haven’t gotten to grips with how to monitor for and detect threats in the cloud. This lack of knowledge coupled with security policies that don’t encompass the cloud and a shortage of cybersecurity expertise relevant to cloud environments is a recipe for disaster.

Data shows that almost half of the more than 2,500 disclosed cloud-related vulnerabilities recorded to date were revealed in the last 18 months, emphasising the need for any security team to manage this growing risk closely. 

Real meaning of cloud security

Roland Daccache, Systems Engineering Manager for META at CrowdStrike.

There is no doubt that cloud computing is advantageous to all businesses. Cloud computing allows companies to reduce costs, accelerate deployments, and rapidly develop. On the other hand, protecting the cloud means securing an increasingly large attack surface that ranges from cloud workloads to the virtual servers and other technologies that underpin the cloud environment. 

Cloud security is the technology, policies, services, and controls to protect the cloud’s data, applications, and environments. Effective cloud security should focus on ensuring data privacy across networks, handling the unique cybersecurity concerns of businesses using multiple cloud services providers, and controlling the access of users, devices, and software. 

Vulnerable nature of the cloud

Data breaches are the number one concern of any business today. Research shows that data breach costs, in 2021, rose from $3.86 million to $4.24 million. Also, the techniques adversaries use to infiltrate the cloud differ from on-premise environments.

Malware attacks are far less prevalent. Nowadays, attackers exploit misconfigurations, inadequate access restrictions, stolen credentials, and other vulnerabilities.

Another major problem is organisations using more than one cloud provider, a common scenario when cloud migration occurs organically over time, which can cause an immediate visibility issue.

This creates endpoints, workloads and traffic that is not properly monitored, leaving security gaps often exploited by attackers, known as blind spots.

Also, companies often provide employees with far more privileges and permissions than needed to perform their job, which increases identity-based threats. Bad actors will carry out a technique known as password spraying.

Here, they will carry out an automated password guessing game to enter the company’s cloud. Research shows that 100 per cent of X-Force Red penetration tests of cloud environments found issues with either passwords or policies. 

Threat actors will deploy several different attack methods to compromise a business’ cloud environment. On-premise cloud pivot is also a common technique that involves threat actors infiltrating an end-user or system hosted on-premise and then shifting their access to the cloud.

Also, with the increased number of employees working from home, another point of entry for adversaries is via remote access exploitation that is often not sufficiently secured. Alternatively, attackers can profit from cloud vulnerabilities by installing crypto miners onto a company’s system.

Cryptocurrency mining is an activity that requires large amounts of computing power and bad actors will use a compromised cloud server to carry out this process and extract as much profit as possible whilst simultaneously using up the company’s resources. 

Effective security is the only way 

It is clear that businesses do not have the same level of confidence or expertise to configure security in cloud computing environments compared to on-premises. In actuality, closing the door on misconfigurations and vulnerabilities is the most basic layer of defence. The best cloud security solutions offer much more. 

Unifying the visibility of multi-cloud environments and continuous intelligent monitoring of all cloud resources are essential in an effective cloud security solution. That unified visibility must be able to detect misconfigurations, vulnerabilities and security threats while providing actionable insights and guided remediation. 

The core of any successful cloud security solution should always be up-to-date threat intelligence. Adversaries are constantly finding new ways to target the cloud and search for any weaknesses they can exploit.

Having the latest data about threat actors and their tactics and then applying it to breach detection is an absolute must. Threat intelligence enables security teams to anticipate upcoming threats and prioritise them effectively to preempt them.

Delivering all this functionality from the cloud and for the cloud provides organisations with the prevention, detection, visibility and response capabilities they need to beat attackers time and time again.

Lastly, it’s essential to have the right security policies in place that enforces golden cloud security standards that meet industry and government regulations across the entire infrastructure.

This includes everything from multi-factor authentication to general cybersecurity hygiene practices for all employees and robust incident response that ensures the company is on the front foot when the time of attack happens. 

Weighing up the differences between cloud security solutions is not simple. Any security team needs to ensure that the vendor’s specifications fit their specific company’s needs.

The best solutions will leverage real-time indicators of attack and threat intelligence to deliver hyper-accurate detections, protection and remediation.

  • Roland Daccache is the Systems Engineering Manager for META at CrowdStrike.
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