Professional services company Accenture attended this year’s Mobile World Conference (MWC) in Barcelona, where it shared insights on the top trends it feels will be most relevant for the year ahead.

MWC is an influential event attended by global mobile operators, device manufacturers, technology providers and vendors. Following two years of issues from the Covid-19 pandemic, including a cancelled event in 2020, MWC managed to have 61,000 physical attendees for 2022.

Various themes took centre stage at the booths on display, including the latest developments in 5G technology. A lot of discussion was on the metaverse, the idea of an online world of augmented and virtual reality.

Another topic that is growing in popularity is around Open Radio Access Networks (RAN). This technology allows service providers to speed up 5G network development through the use of open architecture.

Brian Smyth, Accenture’s innovation lead for the communications and media industry, and Jeffrey Wang, the company’s cloud first networks and 5G lead, spoke to SiliconRepublic.com at MWC on the latest developments in metaverse and OpenRAN technology.

Metaverse at Accenture

The metaverse is a concept that has been growing in popularity since Facebook changed its name to Meta last October. The company went all in and bet its future on the concept of the metaverse, which remains an unproven reality of the future.

However, there has been interest in the concept around the convergence of physical and digital worlds. Last November, a report by EmergenResearch said the market value for metaverse was more than $47bn in 2020 and is expected to be worth nearly $829bn by 2028.

Accenture said its own research found that in 2021, businesses were doubling down on virtual and augmented reality, with 88pc of global organisations saying they had invested in technologies to create virtual environments. 91pc of those organisations said they are planning to invest further.

Accenture has made its own stake in the metaverse, as it has created its own digital location called the “Nth Floor”, where employees from around the world can meet for presentations, socialise and participate in immersive training. The company is in the process of deploying 60,000 VR headsets to its staff in multiple countries.

Smyth said this development was heightened by a desire to have employees connect with the company during the Covid-19 pandemic.

“This is a new space where our new joiners can connect and collaborate and get a sense of place of Accenture and a sense of our culture, in a way that they couldn’t get when they couldn’t come to the office,” Smyth said. “So historically, people used to meet in offices, in our training centers. When that was not possible, this was a really great way to bring people together.

“And we’re continuing to work in this space. So even as things open up more, we have team meetings and events in these virtual worlds. And it enables people to have this sense of presence and a sense of team that you don’t always get in a 2D screen,” he added.

Smyth said Accenture has seen benefits from using this technology among its staff, such as a greater feeling of connection and a “sense of occasion” when a large group of employees are brought together this way.

“I think it’s incredibly important, particularly as a global organisation, to be able to do that. And by bringing in new technology and new ways of working, it’s really beneficial for us. And more importantly then, how we bring that to our clients in new ways.”

The future of metaverse

Smyth said Accenture is seeing huge demand in metaverse technology among its clients across multiple industries.

“We’re helping travel companies reinvent the travel experience. We’re doing immersive learning and worker safety training for utilities companies. We’re building out online retail experiences for fashion brands, on platforms like Roblox and Decentraland.

One collaboration Accenture is working on is with Touchcast, a company developing “metaverse-as-a-service”. Last January, the company launched MCity, which it said is the world’s first enterprise metaverse, where companies can register their own metaverse domain name and set up a “virtual campus.

“It’s really around building these engaging experiences that look like professional conference presentations, but can be done from your home office using your camera,” Smyth said. “So we’ve used it before for the launch of our tech vision, which is our annual report on what’s happening in tech and future trends.

“What it enables you to do is create this experience that looks like an amphitheatre, or looks like a conference hall or an event. And you have giant screens and you have a podium and a speaker, but the speaker is actually just on their webcam at home.

“But it recreates it into a 3D world. And then you pan and zoom cameras across, and you can see attendees, so it really gives this sense of occasion on an event,” He said.

Smyth said there are other applications on offer with Touchcast’s service, such as being able to create a virtual retail experience, where users can get a more tangible feeling of what a product looks and feels like before they make a purchase online.

“So we’re really excited about this Touchcast partnership, and their metaverse-as-a-service offering I think is really compelling for investor events and conferences. There’s multiple use cases, I think analyst events, community events for organisations can be really compelling.”

Smyth noted the importance of being able to have both people on VR devices and those using devices like their mobile phone or laptop for metaverse developments in the future. One example he shared was Microsoft’s plans to incorporate its own mixed reality technology into its Microsoft Teams.

Microsoft first revealed Mesh last year, a platform to help people feel like they are in the same room as each other. Last November, the company shared its plans to integrate this technology into Teams for 2022, where users will be able to make customised 2D and 3D avatars, or continue to show themselves in a video format.

Smyth said that Accenture sees the metaverse as the “next evolution of the internet”, which he described as the internet of place and immersive experiences. With the company’s own ventures with metaverse technology and its collaborations with industry partners, Smyth seems confident about the future of the metaverse.

“There’s going to be a lot more momentum around metaverse in the coming months,” Smyth said. “Certainly from Accenture in terms of how we go to market.”

Open RAN

Open RAN differs from traditional radio access networks by allowing different parts of the network’s infrastructure to be built by different vendors.

Accenture said Open RAN is one of the most “hotly debated topics in the industry” currently. A survey by Telecoms.com last November said that almost half of the respondents have already deployed Open RAN or plan to do so soon. Last year, Vodafone and Dell Technologies announced a partnership to build the first Open RAN in Europe.

Wang said Open RAN is accelerating in certain regions like Europe faster than others, which he believes is for three key reasons.

“One is the ability to try and look for a lower way to actually drive the cost down, is one of the big drivers,” Wang said. “The second is also dependent upon the geopolitical situation, the need to replace other equipment providers is another reason why. And then the third one is to try and create more of that competitive landscape so that you could actually generate more innovation on a quicker level.

“So Open RAN, I think, in the end is one of those things where you’ll start to see it come out in waves, with Europe absolutely taking the lead, but then Latin America is picking up and you’ll see other geographies around Open RAN,” he added.

Wang said Accenture is working to help new operators who have an interest in Open RAN, while also figuring out how to work with legacy networks.

“We formed a new group called Accenture Cloud First Networks,” Wang said. “The entire goal of that is to help situations like this, where there’s a new technology that comes out for those reasons that we talked about.

“As a result, sometimes this disaggregation of hardware and software creates a lot of choice, which is good, the benefits are competition, lower price, motivation. The downside is there’s more disaggregation, so how can a company like Accenture come in and help aggregate that disaggregation?”

While there are benefits from the extra competition Open RAN could create, Wang said there are also benefits for a more tightly integrated hardware and software network, such as the ability to better optimise the power network for energy management.

“So I think that while you’ll see new feature development accelerate in certain areas, in terms of the radio or other parts of the network, there has to be somebody also focused on when you glue these disparate pieces together that have been disaggregated, who’s working on those pieces around power management, around efficiency and those things.

“A group of companies needs to work very closely on that to make sure that we’re not increasing our power consumption at a data center somewhere else, because of these disaggregated pieces,” Wang said.

Wang believes Open RAN is going to be successful in certain areas “and is needed”, but said its going to come in phases.

“I think in geographies that are basically still slow to adopt, you might see Open RAN show up in things like a private wireless scenario, where something that isn’t touching the macro network with millions and millions of consumers, but more so these more targeted, more surgical deployments where they’re actually trying it, testing, iterating it and then actually working it into the broader network.”

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