Canonical at India Mobile Congress 2024 – a retrospective

With an ambition to become Asia’s technology hub for telecommunications in the 5G/6G era, India hosts the annual India Mobile Congress (IMC) in Pragati Maidan, New Delhi. IMC is an annual trade exhibition for the telecommunication sector, bringing together operators, system integrators, as well as software and hardware vendors. It has now established itself as a showcase of innovation, technology and digital transformation in Asia.

Telecommunications is a key sector for Canonical. To showcase our technology products to the fast growing telecom market in India, we participated at this year’s IMC event as an exhibitor. During the event, our team explained how Ubuntu makes it possible to build a uniform, end-to-end telecom infrastructure based on production-grade, supported and secure open source software, from connected devices to 5G/6G edge clouds, core clouds and public clouds.

We had a great time at IMC exploring innovations and presenting our own technologies. If we had to sum up our takeaways from the event in one sentence, it’d be this: the future of telecommunications is open source.

Telco-grade security and support with automation

Visitors to our booth learned about how our automation framework helps telco operators and enterprises achieve fully software-defined data centres, offering virtual machines, containers and bare metal systems at scale. We also had a good opportunity to talk to representatives from various companies and received feedback on their ongoing use of our tooling. With automated open source, and the support and security coverage provided by Canonical’s industry-leading open source subscription, Ubuntu Pro, Canonical products continue to pave the way towards cost-efficient and secure telecom infrastructure.

Lower costs and speed up AI/ML adoption in telco: from LLMs and RAG to building digital twins

With the cloudification of networks, and the transition from central deployments to highly distributed architectures with edge computing, AI/ML will play a key role in monetising networks for operators. Our team explained how this is achieved through repeatable and scalable deployments at the telco edge, to ultimately achieve edge AI capabilities. Such deployments vary based on use cases and targeted outcomes. Seeing that many enterprises are looking to speed up AI adoption and turn experiments into real results, we were happy to share how we help bridge the talent gap and save resources with our 5-day intensive workshops. Our team works alongside enterprises to boost their MLOps capabilities, focusing on their unique needs.

Open source for telecom in 2024

In an industry with a complex ecosystem, vendor solutions have been traditionally proprietary, limiting innovation and transparency. The sector, however, has been gradually adopting open source technologies, from operating systems to software infrastructure and applications in containers and virtual machines. This has incubated a vibrant market with various vendors, delivering more competitive solutions to operators. 

Canonical, the distributor of the Ubuntu operating system, has a unique position in this market with its suite of open source products for telecom infrastructure, ranging from container orchestration to virtual infrastructure software. India Mobile Congress is the perfect venue where many vendors, solutions providers, system integrators and operators in India have the opportunity to hear about the many benefits brought by telco-grade secure and trusted open source products. It is also an opportunity for us to talk to this vibrant community of telecom specialists to hear more about their needs and understand how they see the sector evolving in India. Canonical will continue to play a major role in the Indian market to deliver cost effective open source products to the telecom industry.