Interview with Zoran Spasojevic, Virgin Media O2

Zoran's speaker profile

We sat down with Zoran Spasojevic ahead of the 5G Core Summit next month to find out about the industry trends, services, business models, and features being considered in the new core network, as well as the advice he would give telcos embarking on the 5G Core deployment journey.

What are some of the big industry trends, services and business models you are seeing in the industry right now? 

In the enterprise segment, we are seeing trends in LTE-M and NB IoT, 5G A network slicing, network as a service, as well as 4G and 5G private networks, focussing on manufacturing, transportation, media and entertainment, logistics and utilities.

The retail enterprise sector and consumer segment does offer some potential trends, but they seem to be limited at this stage. Within this space, use cases range from remote monitoring/ control/ management, logistics, UHD video streaming and video monitoring, AR/VR, to digital twins, and more.

What sort of features are you considering in this new core network? 

We are considering deployment of separate consumer and corporate segment packet core and packet core networks, dual mode to support 4G/5G NSA and 5G SA functionalities. We are also considering introducing other basic shared 5G SA network functions (such as UDM, NRF) plus additional ones relevant to NaaS and network slicing such as NEF and NSSF. On top of that in the OSS space we are looking at the e2e orchestration layer and how to integrate it with the core network to achieve automation, orchestration and self serve.

How will you address these in your session at the 5G Core Summit 2023? 

In my session at 5G Core Summit, I will address the e2e high level architecture setup for 5G SA network slicing.

How will your customers – consumers and enterprises – benefit? 

It will open new opportunities to optimise the customer experience based on the service that they use, opening space for additional services and optimised capacity use.

What one piece of advice would you give telcos embarking on the 5G Core deployment journey? What are some of the ways that they can overcome the challenges? 

I will give three: cloudification, automation, CICD.

This will help to speed up deployments, fix faults quicker and remove any proprietary application and infrastructure dependencies.

Zoran Spasojevic will be speaking at 5G Core Summit, which takes place in Istanbul from 14-15 November. Register for your pass here.