Christian Leon (Ericsson): “There is no room for four mobile networks in France”

The Swedish company, which provides a large part of the telecommunications infrastructure in France, is celebrating its 150th anniversary. The opportunity for the equipment manufacturer to take stock of the challenges ahead between the development of artificial intelligence, the need to find new growth drivers in a mature market, the consolidation of the European market or even the arrival of 6G by 2030. Overview with the Managing Director for France, Christian Leon.

THE TRIBUNE. Ericsson is celebrating its 150th anniversary this year. How do you envisage the coming decades? And above all, how can we conquer new market shares and find other growth drivers as the telecoms market matures in many countries?

CHRISTIAN LEON. Ericsson has been present in the telecommunications market for 150 years, including 115 years in France. We started with the telegraph and in the future we will connect physical artificial intelligence (physical AI). Each year, the group devotes a budget of 4.5 billion euros to research and development. When we observe the first use cases of AI, we see that it very quickly becomes a distributed intelligence. Through our mobile phones, we use multimodal assistants. We upload streams of images and videos. However, networks were not designed for this. There is a need for technological innovation and innovation on networks.

By 2030, we of course anticipate a general increase in traffic, but also a change in its nature. The uses of artificial intelligence will notably increase the need for upstream speeds, while networks have historically been mainly used for downloading speeds.

How is the French telecommunications market doing today? Are operators continuing to invest massively in their infrastructure or are you seeing a slowdown?

Machine-translated from French