AT&T, Verizon, A10 Share 5G Opportunities, Challenges

… security.

Yasir Liaqatullah, vice president of product management for A10 Networks, said we’ll see millions more new IoT devices connected to the network than with 4G LTE. Data protection becomes more important as mobile traffic increases and densifies. The stakes rise especially high as we count on 5G to power mission-critical applications like autonomous vehicles and remote patient monitoring.

But with the massive amount of devices, mitigating an attack in 5G is like “finding a needle in a haystack,” according to Liaqatullah. He said partners are going to need artificial intelligence to keep up.

“If an attack happens, the service provider has to go through all of this traffic and all of these connections, identify the attack and then automatically put preventive measures in against that, mitigate that attack, create a report and take the network back to normal. For all of that to happen, you need AI,” he said.

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If 5G isn’t mature or monetizable yet, it’s close, and the partners who fail to educate themselves now will suffer. JS Group CEO Janet Schijns said partners must discuss 5G opportunities with their customers in 2019 in order to be considered experts in the upcoming years.

“If you’re not today talking about it, you really could be in trouble,” Schijns said. “And I think it comes down to thinking about how you’re going to present that to your customer.”

Check out our other recap of the TBI Big Event.