The following transcript has been edited for length and readability. Listen to the entire discussion here on The Broadband Bunch.
Craig Corbin:
5G, a new global wireless standard, enables a new kind of network designed to connect virtually everyone and everything together, machines, objects, devices etc. In places around the world, much is being done with 5G. The Scotland 5G Centre was established with a mission to enhance opportunities going forward with 5G. Our guest today is the CEO of The Scotland 5G Centre, Paul Coffey, who has the ability to take a vision and make it reality. Paul is passionate about mobile telecommunications and delivering socioeconomic benefits to a broad range of stakeholders enabling digital connectivity.
Craig Corbin:
For those who might not be familiar with the organization and what you’re doing, let’s get started with a 30,000-foot overview of The Scotland 5G Center.
Scotland’s 5G Story
Paul Coffey:
Most people know Scotland, and if they’ve not been here, they can perhaps visualize. It’s perhaps one of the more challenging geographies to deploy mobile infrastructure. It’s pretty vast and the population is centered around seven primary cities. There’s large areas that are more sparsely populated. It’s surrounded by some amazing scenery and mountains. We have a bit of a problem with mobile coverage. The center was established a year ago, October 2019, with the mission to be a national resource – to stimulate economic development and promote social economic benefit from communications across the country. We’re funded by the Scottish Government and we have three founding partners – two universities, the University of Strathclyde and the University of Glasgow and then lastly, Scottish Futures Trust, who are a delivery arm for the Scottish Government.
Paul Coffey:
We’re really there to help promote infrastructure with a view through a 5G lens. What is it that 5G can do and how can we accelerate demand? At the moment it’s still very much a consumer offering. My job as a chief exec at the Scotland 5G Center is to ensure people fully understand the transformational impact 5G will have going forward with a view to accelerating demand and adoption. So we can really get the mobile operators to say, “Hey, we’ve stimulated this demand. We need more infrastructure in Scotland. We’ve got these fantastic 5G use cases. We need to be pushing 5G out even further than it perhaps has done with its previous Gs.”
Craig Corbin:
Part of what you’re incorporating, if I understand it, are a series or a network of innovation hubs. Talk about that.
National Network of 5G Innovation Centers
Paul Coffey:
The center was set up a year ago. At the moment we’re funding three key projects. One is about infrastructure – looking at the national infrastructure that we’ve got across Scotland and how we can utilize that better with best practices, setting policy, payment frameworks, all that good stuff – so we can get more infrastructure out there. Second is about rural and the third, urban. These are three fantastic cornerstones of the Center being set up. As great as they are, they’re not national projects and I’ve been in post six months, that’s one of the first things I recognized. We’re a national center and we need to have national reach. About eight weeks ago, we initially launched this out to the market, where we are going to be establishing a national network of innovation centers across Scotland.
Paul Coffey:
There are networks, innovation hubs, innovation networks all over the world but, to my knowledge, there’s nowhere they are doing it at a national scale. So, that is fundamentally different. What the strategy behind this is a view of partnering up with existing facilities in Scotland, around some of the very diverse use cases and sectors that we’ve got in Scotland. We’ve got the obvious ones, the manufacturing and health, but there’s so much going on in agriculture, aquaculture, space, science and those industries.
Paul Coffey:
What we’ll be doing is establishing a 5G Connect hub, with each of these hubs primarily targeted on one of these great diverse sectors. Then we’ll work with the existing community and overlay a 5G infrastructure, with the objective of saying, “Okay, these are the problems and these are the challenges I’ve got in the sector at the moment. If we have access to a high bandwidth, low latency, 5G network, what does it mean? What use cases does it [5G] solve?” So that with a view of starting to develop, enhance and innovate those use cases with the right collaboration and partnership, we can get them to market and get them to market much faster than they would have been otherwise.
5G Commercial Use
Paul Coffey:
Whilst the center brings together academia, industry and government bodies, what we’re targeting here is commercial use cases. These aren’t primarily focused on R&D. It’s very many solutions focused on the more mature stages of the technology readiness curve, with the view of getting these out to market. We can actually say, “this is the outcome that will be generated as a result of this.” Because ultimately, 5G, what is it? It’s a pipe. It’s an enabler to do things. But it’s what we do with it. The application or the service that runs over the top is the, “so what?” That’s what’s really going to make people sit up and say, “Okay, I’ll put a private network in here, or I’ll invest in this. I’ll do things differently because it will make a material difference to my business.”
Craig Corbin:
It’s a perfect segue to looking at the benefit across the board – to economic development opportunities to keep Scotland ahead of the curve by focusing on what they can utilize 5G for now. How do you anticipate this concept being received in the marketplace?
Paul Coffey:
We’re seeing 5G out there now, absolutely. But it’s still very much a consumer offering. Let’s be frank, are there going to be any incremental revenues realized from 5G in the consumer space? No, they’re not. No one’s generally going to be paying any more for 5G. What does it mean? It’s transformational in the business space, but that is going to take time. Why is it going to take time? There’s more infrastructure that needs to get out there. That takes time, that takes money and heavy lifting and shifting. We need to be starting that now. So, “finger in the air” I think 2025, is my estimate of when 5G really gets motoring. We need to be working now. The next four years or so is getting that infrastructure rolled out.
Craig Corbin:
To lay the groundwork.
5G & Fiber Broadband
Paul Coffey:
Absolutely. If you look at 5G, especially in the context of Scotland, whilst it’s a wireless technology, it still needs wires at some point. You still need that backhaul. It’s about getting fiber to where it matters. Not necessarily to the premise, but fiber to where it matters. When we’re talking about gigabit, throughputs, you still need fiber broadband somewhere.
Paul Coffey:
And it’s about stimulating the demand side of things as well. I have many a meeting with people saying, “why do I need 5G? Why can I not do it over 4G or wifi for that matter?” And to be fair, 5G has been a marketer’s dream, you might argue but it’s still very much has been targeted at the consumer play. Has the industry done enough in answering the question of “Why do I need 5G?” No. And that’s what we’ll be focusing on. Getting some really solid outcomes through use cases that are for Scotland to focus on and say, “this is why you need 5G because this is how it works. This is why and how it will transform your business. It’s not just about low latency or high bandwidth. It’s about really transforming how we conduct our lives and businesses.”
5G Transforming Lives
Paul Coffey:
I was presenting the other day and one of the examples was a look at health today. So health, at the moment we only look at, I think it’s 16% of the available dataset, in terms of the health authority. When you go in and get assessed or whatever, it’s only 16% of the available dataset. If you got your IoT connected up and using 5G as a backhaul, you start to look at, “okay, we know this is the type of environment you live in. Is there any damp in that household? This is your diet. This is your sleeping patterns.” You start to overlay all these different types of data. You start to have a really detailed view of the type of person and your health wellbeing around that with a view to making real-time decisions. Real-time intervention based on that dataset.
Paul Coffey:
It’s those real-time decision-making and data science behind it that will transform health in this example. You can apply that same concept to all sorts of industries. It’s that, that’s going to be transformational, not downloading a Netflix movie in a few seconds. That’s what I’m super excited about. That’s what we need to put the groundwork in now to ensure that in four- or five-years’ time, we’re hitting the ground running. And somewhere like Scotland – where there’s a lot of remote population densities and communities, where it’s perhaps not so easy for them to go into the local medical center – we can hook them up to this health monitoring and public services and it can be really transformational.
Craig Corbin:
Transformational as to the benefit not only to the health of the citizen, but also to the net savings long-term as to what has to be spent on medicine. And from that standpoint, 5G delivers a huge transformational opportunity. You mentioned earlier the need for low latency. People tend to be drawn like a moth to the light with regard to speed but low latency is something that in this industry, people don’t tend to worry about. Low latency is an incredibly important part of the equation. How is The Scotland 5G Center addressing that particular topic?
Paul Coffey:
It’s a bit of a drug, isn’t it? The speed. We all get quite excited about it. How many use cases do you really need 500 megabits a second for or whatever it’s going to be? But I think latency is probably going to have the more transformational impact and getting that down. More use cases can be created over that. There’s a lot of excitement about IoT, but that’s still not really got going.
Paul Coffey:
IoT and low latency, it’s those use cases that will come through. We’re partnering with a collaboration of partners across Scotland. There’s an awful lot going on. There’s a very rich tapestry of industry partners across Scotland that we’re linking up, that we will invite to work into these Connect hubs that we’re setting up, to stimulate the market and come up with these various use cases to use these pillars that are coming out of the 5G framework.
5G Connect Hubs Bringing Partners Together
Paul Coffey:
It’s an agile framework that’s been created. When people ask what the difference is from 3G to 4G to 5G. I think that where 3G and 4G were a step up in speed, 5G is very much an agile framework built around speed and latency and potentially billions of connected devices. That will end up in the ecosystem and The Scotland 5G Center is responsible for establishing that ecosystem in Scotland. Whilst previous generations have been very much consumer offerings and left to the hands of the mobile network operators, the MNO is just a component part now in the 5G space of that ecosystem.
5G Adds 17 Billion to Scottish GDP
Paul Coffey:
Creation of these 5G Connect hubs is really to create that ecosystem. To bring in that collaboration of partners utilizing the 5G framework, create that ecosystem, that can really transform Scotland and deliver on the social economic benefits – that’s what it comes down to. The Center and the Scottish Government commissioned a report last year by Deloitte. Deloitte looked at what will 5G do for Scotland when delivered to its full extent. Not just to where we are now in terms of coverage, but when we are really extended to the full reach. £17 billion uplift to GDP is what can be added to Scotland’s economy by 2035. Okay, that’s a few years out, but even take it just to 2025, it’s £3 billion! Significant economic benefits can be delivered as a result of 5G. That’s really what the Center is there to do. It’s tasked with delivering how we can put Scotland in the most advantageous place to deliver on those benefits.
Craig Corbin:
The Scotland 5G Center mission is to not only accelerate 5G adoption and innovation, but to ensure that Scotland becomes a leader in 5G development and deployment – not only from a local standpoint, but globally as well.
Paul Coffey:
A lot is happening in Scotland and these hubs are really to take that forward. Ultimately these hubs will only go so far. We can increase and stimulate demand. We can increase that, but ultimately it comes down to mobile operators putting kits on the ground. I think we need to be frank about that. They’ve got 2G, 3G, 4G, and now 5G deployed! The opex is only going in one direction, right? Those CFOs, they got a tough job.
One Sixth Without Broadband Service
Paul Coffey:
If we take Scotland as an example, there’s a million people living without mobile coverage today. They’re in remote rural / ultra-rural areas. A million people out of a population of 6 million…that’s a significant proportion of the population that are unserved. How do we address them? The innovation hubs are going to stimulate that demand. It’s going to put Scotland on the map. It’s going to attract those industry partners to come in and work with the entrepreneurship of Scotland. Not only that, there’s an awful lot happening in the telco space as well. There’s something called OpenRAN, coming along pretty fast, to be honest, which is basically disaggregating the network. For 25 years, since I’ve been involved in this game, it’s very much been monopolized by your Tier One infrastructure providers like Nokia or Ericsson.
OpenRAN Technology
Paul Coffey:
Now there’s a new game in town called OpenRAN, which basically enables you to disaggregate your hardware and your software. So I can buy standard off-the-shelf hardware and then plug in my software component on top of that. And that’s stimulating a whole Tier Two supply chain in this space, which enables you to put infrastructure out there much more cost-effectively. It’s those guys that I want to be attracting into Scotland to say, “Hey, we can do things differently here in Scotland. We can bridge that gap that perhaps has not been connected before by targeting this OpenRAN technology through a new diverse pool of suppliers by offering something called neutral host.”
Paul Coffey:
Basically, you have one network, and you share the resources around multiple mobile operators. Because the model at the moment is one network and one mobile operator. You cut and paste. You cookie cutter it around. How’s that cost effective going forward in a world of virtualization and cloud? The old game in town is one site, one network. There’s a lot more collaboration ongoing and ultimately there’s some new games coming down the track, as it were, which are going to shake this market up. What I’m doing in Scotland here is laying the groundwork for those times, and then they’ll help me out.
Collaboration, Innovation and Digital Transformation
Craig Corbin:
Earlier in the conversation, you mentioned digital transformation with respect to the virtually limitless number of devices and machines that will be connected. Part of the advantage that 5G will bring is the ability for real-time decision-making with regard to data and data mining. How will the efforts of The Scotland 5G Center look to take advantage of that?
Paul Coffey:
This is a key component part. People perhaps in a way talk about how all this 5G automation is going to take jobs away. And absolutely, I think it will redistribute jobs. Those perhaps more mundane jobs that are here today will perhaps become automated. We need to plan for the future, and that is about skills and retraining. A lot of that for me is around data science. That’s going to be a huge, huge market as we go forward, when you look at the possibilities. I think that’s where 5G can come in. Everything is moving to the cloud nowadays. If you look at that real-time data science and decision-making, some of it will be conducted over fiber, but if you really want that true agility, autonomy, 5G can handle that at the edge.
Paul Coffey:
It’s that piece that we’re in, with the Connect hubs that we’re building and bringing in those data science players. There’s a lot happening within academia across Scotland. There’s an organization called DataLab, which are big and we’re partnering with those guys. Whilst we’re called The Scotland 5G Center, for me, it’s about enabling digital transformation and we can’t do that on our own. It’s about collaboration, fostering innovation with the right framework of partners and bringing in those from Scotland will enable us to do that.
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