CTO Focus Sessions | The future of gaming anywhere is 5G
Welcome to this CTO Focus Session, where we will be focusing on the value that 5G networks can bring to enterprises and app developers. 5G networks are already adding a lot of value to high productivity conferencing, uninterrupted video conferencing, adding value to virtual and augmented reality services, also to seamless and secure authentication services, for example, in the enterprise space. But another really important area that is on the rise is cloud based mobile gaming. And those games, of course, make a lot of use of networks, high performing networks. And that's the topic of this CTO Focus Session. Today, I'm joined by the CEO of Blacknut, Olivier Avaro, and it’s going to be a really exciting discussion about how networks and games can work together.
So why don't you join me in this session? Hello, Olivier, and very welcome to the CTO Focus Session. Olivier, you are the CEO of Blacknut, a leading cloud gaming company, so it's great to have you here on this session. Thanks for inviting us to the show. I think it's great to be in this CTO session.
Yeah. Look, Blacknut is indeed the leading actor in the cloud gaming space. It's actually, as you know, the gaming industry has enjoyed very nice growth in the last couple of years. And the cloud gaming segment is one of the fastest growing segment of the gaming industry.
This is something that we seen experienced from the ground. We are currently signing and delivering one to two new carriers with our cloud gaming solution, which is great. Okay? And out of these new carriers we are delivering, half of it is the mobile first, right? I mean they are launching the service, from a mobile network. And for this, to be successful, you definitely need to have a great infrastructure. I think cloud gaming requires, a very strong network to be successful and to provide a great experience to the end user. Well, I think we see similar signs from our end from, if you look at some of the market developments here, it's clear that 5G services are now launched, especially of course, in markets where there is a strong 5G build out.
So, you have built out, so-called mid-band, the 3.5GHz spectrum, and therefore, you get better capacity, but also better peak rates, and overall a better user experience, lower latency. And what consumers are looking for is really a better, enhanced mobile broadband experience. Some are, of course, going for residential access or what we call fixed wireless access. Others are clearly looking at gaming and in some cases, also enhanced with augmented and virtual reality based services. So, I think that if we look at early markets like, Southeast Asia, Singapore in particular, where, 5G standalone networks have already been built up, they have these kind of offerings in the market.
A variety of mobile offerings – they are there to drive the subscriber's appetite for 5G. But I think they also paved the way for many other countries and operators around the world in terms of using this best practice and adopting it to their markets. And of course, video and video streaming in some cases, combined with offerings on cloud based gaming is really what they are looking at in the consumer space. I also see that in our own predictions of data growth, it's continued to grow in networks around the world, both 4G and 5G networks. And if you look at, North America as one example, then we in just five years time, we will have, roughly doubled or more than doubled the use of data to 55GB per smartphone per month. So, that really shows that video and immersive experiences will continue to be a driver for network buildout.
And this really leads me back to you, Olivier. When you work, and you work of course, with very many mobile operators around the world, what are the key factors to, succeed with jointly bringing these on demand mobile gaming experiences to market? Yeah. So, in our industry, content is king, right? So, I think the first key factor is great content and great content means content you don't have usually on mobile, right? So, it's premium game, console quality games, and this is what the cloud gaming technology allows you to bring on any mobile devices. Right. So, we do bring this content. We have a catalog of more than 600 games that we bring with our cloud gaming solution.
So, license from great publishers. We also allow the end user to bring their own license – a bring your own game kind of approach. And of course, you know, we support great premium games, you know, let's say like Fortnite. So, content is a key thing, is a key factor.
Now, great content need to have great delivery, right? I think if you provide a poor experience people will not choose your service. And definitely providing this kind of console great quality games as some kind of challenge, need some kind of, specific characteristic on the mobile networks, and this is where 5G comes into play. Yeah, for sure. And as I mentioned before, on some of the frontrunners, when it comes to 5G coverage build out and the 5G standalone, which gives you better control or quality of service, they are really pairing that up with this great user experience that come, for example, in the video area or in the mobile gaming area. So, I think we see very much the same thing.
It's interesting also, when we look at what consumers say around the market we have. We do market research in Ericsson's Consumer and Enterprise Labs. And if we look at one of our recent studies on any post about 5G globally, if you look at what consumers say in, I think 11 markets, about a quarter of those interviewed consumers are actually longing for an ability to get better performance to boost their capability of the network service. And, they want to do it on demand.
So, it's not about always necessarily having this, but for a specific occasion, in a productivity situation, or in a video conference or as we talked about, of course, in gaming or in other areas where you need this from time to time. And, I think, this is very clear that they see the value, and they also have a clear willingness to pay for these higher performance services. So we are, I think, moving from a world, where best effort was good enough to a world, where applications and situations demand more and of course, consume more resources from the network. But ultimately, consumers understand that there is capabilities that they need and they are willing to pay for when it comes to performance. So, if we look then at your customers, the mobile gamers, what do they require from an end user experience point of view? And how do you see that 5G is really supporting that? We've been into it a little bit already, but any specific capabilities that you see from your side? Sure. Absolutely.
So, I think our end user had been very badly educated, right? They are used to get all their content one click away. This is the way they are consuming news, Spotify, and Netflix kind of content. You know, they're all streaming movies and series, and when they play games, actually playing games on, you know, console or PC, and here everything is kind of magic. You click, you play. Right?
So, they expect at least the same kind of experiences when they will play with a cloud gaming solution. Unfortunately, you cannot do this exactly this way because you cannot afford to do buffering, you cannot afford to use CDM. Cloud gaming basically requires a game to run on the cloud, and to be streaming in the form of video stream, and to have, when you click, kind of an immediate response, right? And to do this magic, you need specific characteristics from the network. Of course, you need to have great bandwidth, Okay? Because you stream the video stream, but you also need to have very low latency, that will make the difference between being dead or alive in a game. And you need to have very low jitter.
The jitter is how, you know the latency is varying, right? If you have the right jitter, basically the frames are going to be a bit flaky. And you say, oh, what's happening? It’s like a drummer in the band that is changing the rhythm, alright? So, if you want to have the same kind of experience you have with a console or PC, you have to have these three characteristics from the network: great bandwidth, very low latency, and very good jitter. And that latency, and of course the jitter as well, it really comes with capabilities in 5G that we didn't have before. So, we have network slicing capabilities that allow to lower the lag or the delay, but also to provide bounds for latency so that the network does not deliver packets with a longer delay than a certain maximum limit. And that, of course, helps in design of games and many other applications as well.
And these are in-built, standardized capabilities that comes from the way that 5G is engineered and, of course, now rolled out. And I think that's great news for the applicators, developers that want to build this great experience. But it actually leads me very much to the next topic here. Our aim is really to link the world of networks and network capabilities. with the world of application developers and previously they have been, I would say, disconnected or not at all connected. We have APIs for devices, we have APIs on the cloud side, and of course, developers are very used to build applications on top of those.
Now we are opening up this new avenue of innovation by creating 5G APIs, where network capabilities are exposed to developers, and they can then consume and pay for the services that they require. And, you know that we have acquired Vonage. Vonage is strong and leading CPaaS provider – communication platform as a service provider. They also have offerings in the UC&CC area. But from your point of view, linking the networks and the applications and the experiences on the gaming side, it really starts there with CPaaS in our view.
What's your view of CPaaS and the likes of Vonage in the journey that gamers and game developers are on? Sure so, you know so far it was kind of best effort. You know when you are sending data packets in the network, it was like a stream and play, right? At least from our perspective in the cloud gaming space because no buffer, no margin in terms of delays, latency, and so on. So that I think was – and sometime it works, you know – when you have very stable networks, maybe a fiber connection, that network can work, but in some of the case, we are just hoping it’s going to work. Here with network API, we feel that we are now becoming empowered, right? And being capable to actually provide the kind of experience that our end user expects. So, I think this capability that company like Vonage provide are basically empowering application developer to deliver their content with a quality that is expected by the end user.
And we mentioned about jitter, latency, and those kind of thing. So, that I think is great. And for this to succeed, as you mentioned, I think they need to be standard. They need to be simple.
Okay? Cross network. So, I think if you don't have the layer of abstraction, to be blunt, you know, we will not use it because we cannot afford as application developer to adapt to any networks, to every operator, to every geography. So, they need to be standard. They need to be simple, and they need to be also cost effective.
At the end of the day when they stand, there would be a price to pay for such quality, and I think that because the end user waits for such quality, I think probably there is a good reason that we have to invent, but definitely it has to be valuable for all delivery chain. And that's really the aim, of course, to work together with leading operators around the world to create this uniform or easy to use, easy to consume set of network APIs that really works for applications, wherever they are around the world, but also application developers that want to serve the global market. So, that kind of aggregation role is a key piece that have been largely missing until now. So, we're really working hard with operators and application developers to solve this challenge in the industry. But, maybe we should turn a little bit to the future now, Olivier. Of course, there are great capabilities in networks being rolled out and consumed today, but if I look a few years into the future, I see great interest both in terms of consumer and enterprise interest, but also in terms of making networks even more used in new experiences, such as in augmented and virtual reality.
In fact, we start to see already now that new devices with lighter weight or better form factors are coming online. And that's just the start of it. In less than five years’ time, a little bit beyond 2025, we see that the performance will be so good that you can start to replace smartphone usage for a day with your AR immersive wear or XR glasses. And that's because we are moving some of the compute from the glasses into the network edge.
That's because we are, of course, optimizing the whole experience from applications through the network and the edge to the end user device to create that great experience. And if you look a few more years out, around 2030, our expectation is that augmented reality will really be a big part of this, and XR devices on the networks in aggregate would be around 1 billion. And that's, of course, a significant part, which means that we need to redesign networks to take care of that new behavior and that new network load, much more uplink heavy traffic, and of course, user experience is going to be critically important if you rely on these devices.
So that's kind of the technology journey until let's say 2030. What's your view? Well, if you look at the key technology that will fully enable the cloud gaming space, definitely the first one is network. So, I think if we solve the network equation the way we discussed it, with companies like Vonage providing consistent set of APIs that will be definitely a breakthrough. The second technology that are required, is basically the compute and storage part. And this is where, you know, edge cloud – so, the capacity to bring servers a bit closer right to the end user. And this is what, for example, we are doing in Blacknut or with partners like within Arc.
We will actually be I see the magic potion together with a network piece to boost the whole industry on steroids and create basically a bunch of great applications. Yeah. No, I think it's just clearly in the beginning of that journey and we're happy to work together with you on that Olivier.
Any thoughts on the coming ten years? I touched a little bit on one of the drivers, immersive and the XR journey that will clearly impact the way we build and operate networks going forward. But from a gaming perspective, ten years out. So first, I'm super excited that we have this new toy here. With the network we can rely on to develop our cloud gaming services and to deploy our gaming space. And, you know, the gaming industry has always been very, innovative and embracing technology very fast.
So, I'm sure that this new technology is going to be a game changer. Based on this, as you put new technologies, you will also enable the publishers, a studio to invent new ways to create content the same way we tap in for Netflix. As Netflix changes the way streaming content is being produced, so we are seeing the same way actually happening for the gaming industry. And if we look a bit more forward, definitely the same kind of technology we are using for cloud gaming can be used for, let's say the metaverse, can be used to stream, what we call cloud native games, so, gaming experience that can be actually built having the cloud in mind or accessing games in the metaverse and all this kind of thing. So, definitely the next ten years are going to be super exciting.
I think we're putting the foundation here to reinvent our industry, and I'm really looking forward to work together with you on that aspect. I think that's an exciting future for sure, Olivier. And if you take some of the gaming examples that you did, and then you add on top of that gamification of industries and enterprises, and we see, of course, an opportunity to scale these learnings and the technology and the business models, and ultimately serve both consumers and enterprises with the learnings that we are going through right now together, but also together with operators around the world. So big thanks to you, Olivier. It was great chatting to you and I do think that we have not just great opportunities here, but we are learning new things every day in terms of how to open up the networks as the biggest innovation platform ever, getting requirements and getting early learnings from game developers and of course, the whole gaming community out there.
And I think this is the only way to build networks in the future, to open them up completely for innovation. So big thanks for the collaboration and also for the chat. Thank you. Thank you very much.
Now I'm joined by an Ericsson colleague, Martin Zander, who is a thought leader and driver of network programmability and APIs with partners in the ecosystem and across the industry. So very welcome, Martin. Thank you, Erik, great to be here. So, what's your reflections on this discussion on network programmability, open APIs, but also the driving needs that gamers and game developers have? I think it was very exciting to listen in to both of you and Olivier. Olivier is really putting the finger on the challenges that they have today using the mobile network where they cannot get enough predictability out of the network, where they have challenges with latency and jitter, even if the bandwidth is good. And having an open programmable API for influencing the network resources is really a possibility for him to design services that actually are adapted for a mobile environment. They have longed for this, and now we're putting the tools in his hand and he has this vision, which we've fully subscribe to, that you should be able to get latency and jitter under control and create the same or even better experience while on the go as you have in front of your console or at home.
I think it's great. Any other reflections from your side? Yes. So, cloud gaming is a leading use case, I think, that demonstrates really, what we can see from other verticals and enterprise uses to come, because it's a highly interactive streaming service and this is applicable for a virtual desktop infrastructure or cloud-native applications that are now delivered over normal laptops.
They all have the same type of requirements on good latency and low jitter. And so, this is really just demonstrating where the market is heading. And we've seen great usage of that in the examples through the three years of work from anywhere. You have it in education – remote education – you have it in remote patient handling or the health sector. And of course, some of the APIs that are already available through CPaaS platforms, they are moving in this direction as well, advanced video services and of course, more to come there.
Any more thoughts from your side? Yeah. So, Olivier also highlighted the benefits of bringing in the CPaaS model in using these type of services because really what they need to do is to be able to scale in a cost-efficient way, and in a, let's call it easy and secure way, across networks. And, having that entry point with the CPaaS, allows them to do that, in a cost-efficient way. It also helps them to simplify and design services also for other developers. When you integrate these type of services, it's actually consuming a network resource and that needs to be paid for.
Now, having that in a predictable way, delivered over an API is really the model to go to help to design these new generation services. And with global reach and making it attractive to build for, if not the global market, in multiple markets at once, and also, building on the learnings from the early CPaaS with text and voice and now advanced video APIs, and much more to come, of course, that way. Any final thoughts from your side, Martin? Well, I'm looking forward to see this in live networks. We have already tested it in Hong Kong, together with BlackNut and SmarTone, where we actually could demonstrate a superior user experience when we use the improved network resources. So, comparing two devices, the one that we're using, this could then see a much better latency and jitter. So, definitely promising indications of what to expect.
I think that's a great example, and from our own research we also see, as I mentioned, that there is an understanding that this is a possibility. 25 percent are looking for this kind of dynamic boost of performance when they need it, of course, paying for it as well. And I think it's just the sign of moving from traditional best effort world to something where, you get different quality of service, different capabilities depending on your needs, the applications’ needs, where you are, and in what circumstances you are. So, of course, that kind of dynamism is very much looked for both from the consumers and the enterprises. Great. Thanks, Martin. Let's continue to work with Blacknut,
but of course, also make sure that all sectors can benefit from this network programmability and the open APIs. Great. Now we are going to wrap up this CTO Focus Session, and we have had a discussion with Olivier Avaro, CEO of Blacknut, a leading cloud gaming provider.
And the mobile experience is critically important for them. Of course, we have many mobile gamers already, but they start to demand more from the network. Immersive experiences, bounded or latency that is very, very low. And these are capabilities that we now can bring to the developers through open 5G APIs. The first steps are taken already now working together with operators around the world and bringing this onto one platform, one aggregation platform, the CPaaS evolution into the hands of developers that are building them for the global market with new network capabilities.
Much the same as we've seen on the device API side, on the cloud side, now we're doing similar journey when it comes to network API. So great. Thanks to all of you taking part in this, and stay tuned. More to come.
2024-12-24 09:19
