MWC22: GSMA Special Report with Vodafone CCO Alex Froment-Curtil

You're

watching our special report on Vodafone as part of our MWC22 Barcelona broadcast and I am delighted to be joined by Alex Fromont-Curtill who is the Chief Commercial Officer of Vodafone. Alex, it's great to see you.

Thanks for having me Justin.

Thanks for joining us Alex. Now of course we're back to business in Barcelona. Tell us what is Vodafone's aim for MWC this year?

Well

first of all we're delighted to be back physically at MWC where really the conversations are going to be shaping the future of our industry. Vodafone typically likes at MWC to show a glimpse of the technology of the future but this year we wanted to focus on one fundamental crisis that we're all facing the climate crisis and that's why we wanted our voice to be heard and to lead the industry in telling that we need to enable a much more sustainable society so Planet is at the heart of our MWC presence.

Yeah

you raise a very good point there Alex with the battle against climate change. What role can Vodafone's networks and technologies play as we look to address some of society's wider challenges?

So connectivity has played a really important role and I think we've realized that this importance of digital inclusion is really key for Europe going forward and so that's definitely a theme that we are focusing on as a company

but

also during the the Covid crisis I think the climate challenge has really risen in everybody's conscious whether it's consumers or businesses governments definitely

and

so this is really a theme that we have chosen to focus on this year at MWC and so if I reflect a bit on our network our technology what can we do?

Well

first as an industry and as Vodafone we need to lead by example

which

means really making sure that we are doing everything we can in our own right so at Vodafone for example all our European networks are 100% powered by renewable energy

we

have a big focus on e-waste to make sure we reuse and recycle our network waste and of course we're working on our carbon footprint with the aim to reduce to our carbon footprint by 2025 and really eliminate carbon across all our footprint and supply chain by 2040. These are the so-called net zero commitments.

That's

what we are doing I would say internally

but

what is really special is that as Vodafone but also as an industry

we

can enable other businesses we can enable consumers to also have an impact on climate change so you will see on our stand at MWC a couple of demos of how our technology can help businesses and consumers reduce their carbon footprint let's take a few examples with our technology we can help really deforestation as we did in Romania with our technology we have really IOT forest management capability that we're piloting with the UK government

we'll

be showing you a couple of sensors that helps businesses optimize their supply chain and their logistics and finally we'll be looking at for consumers how they can really take part in the in

the

circular economy of hardware.

Let's

expand a little bit on that concept of the circular economy that you just mentioned Alex I mean what is Vodafone doing in this area?

So

as Vodafone we realize that hardware and technical hardware is really predominant nowadays so in today's situation in UK as an example every individual has about six connected device

as

a household is probably more around a 20 and we think that's going to continue growing and growing well that's a real challenge for the planet.

So

last year in 2021 we had announced an initiative called Echo Rating which was about helping consumers make the right choice by identifying those smartphones that have the highest

I

would say reusability capability

that

was last year

this

year in 22 the Vodafone is rolling out a suite of services to help consumers prolong the life of their hardware so from device financing

to

insurance and repair and also to trade in and good as new secondhand refurbished devices. All these capabilities are really about telling the customers let us help you prolong

the

lifetime of your hardware and this is not just Vodafone doing this I'm really inviting here the whole industry and the whole value chain to take part in this initiative to really make the circular economy a key part of our industry.

Some

strong goals there Alex. What is Vodafone's vision of the future? What are your real objectives and hopes?

So

we've just published a report with the future laboratory around our vision of the future of connectivity.

One

of the first conclusions

is

that there's really an explosion in connectivity that is currently happening and will continue in the next couple of years.

Of

course it is driven by both the proliferation of hardware we just talked about but also by the use cases and applications that are using our network and as we move increasingly into AR and VR

definitely

there will be a lot of demand on our networks both from a speed a capacity and a latency so I think really as soon as you think about AR VR

we

really need 5G at scale

that's

really what say more from the the connectivity perspective but we already also see some very strong trends in terms of the connected home because now there's more standardization and interoperability of devices and that's a key enabler for that to take off

we're

seeing a huge demand

for

what we call urban mobility so green urban cities now today cities don't need to be smarter they need to be greener they need to be more sustainable and we really believe that with iot sensors and our capabilities we can help governments and local mayors make their cities much more sustainable whether around energy efficiency electrical vehicle charging that will make it a much better place to live

and

that's maybe around kind of the neighborhood you want to live but from a broader economy perspective we are also seeing that now businesses will definitely embrace data-based decision making to be able to run their business more efficiently and that data-centric approach to business will be driven by a lot of sensor and iot technologies so if i look at those elements from a consumer perspective to a business perspective to a government perspective connectivity

being

able to understand the world real time and hence the bandwidth necessary to deliver that is really our future so uh the future looks very exciting definitely 5g is going to play a key role both for businesses and consumers going forward and and that's the vision we have

accordingly

you know when i think about take a step back about um thinking about our challenges in society

of

course there are challenges

we

do have great technology and we do believe that with this great technology if we can get the human creativity to take those technologies we can solve any kind of challenges of society and that's really the

the

mindset that we have when we say together we can

well

you've touched on some major topics there that i'm sure are going to be big talking points in the halls of the fear of grand via this year alex thank you very much for sharing those thoughts been good talking with you thank

you

thank

you

my

name is Lauren the carpathian mountains in Romania to help stop the illegal logging and poaching that goes on in this area

am

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am

dezvoltat un sistem de monitorizare acustică alimentat cu panoul solare care folosind rețeaua vodafone transmite în timp real criptat continu strigătul de ajutor al pădurii acesta

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De

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