Tech-leading India market critical for Ericsson: Borje Ekholm

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BARCELONA : Ericsson intends to beef up its India presence as local telcos will demand the latest technology ahead of their global peers, the company’s president and chief executive officer Börje Ekholm said in an exclusive interaction with Mint on the sidelines of the mobile world congress (MWC) in Barcelona. “India is a big market, a growing market, and an early adopter of digital technologies. More importantly, it's a technology leading market today, so we need to deploy the latest technologies in India in order to accommodate the growth in traffic and have energy efficiency at the same time.

So, for us, big presence in India is critical for our long-term development of the technology as well," he said. Ekholm said the Swedish telecom gear maker will begin offering AI (artificial intelligence) solutions in its products. “We're using GenAI (generative AI), but we're also starting to build it into our products in the way the products are, or the way the network functionalities are exposed.

So, we're starting to see that happening now," he said. Ericsson is already using GenAI in internal operations for software development and for administrative processes, to become more efficient. Ericsson introduced Explainable AI for telcos in mid-February to improve network design and optimisation to enhance end user experience.

It has also introduced tools for telcos to improve their own productivity. Its transport automation controller flags network degradations or issues with capacity utilisation, and provides insights to telcos on how to improve performance. The top boss admitted that while business from India will flatten after the lightning-fast pace of 5G deployment in the country, telcos will also begin rolling out fixed