It’s the week before MWC23 and while many telco cloud releases remain wrapped under embargos, plenty has been released.
We round up what has been made public this week in telco cloud. We’re concentrating on actual product and solution launches. If there are partnership or customer announcements, they need to be sufficiently significant to make the grade – and some of them are.
Amazon/ AWS gets building
AWS announced AWS Telco Network Builder, which is a managed service for telcos deploying network functions in AWS. It says telcos can “populate their architecture” in AWS by translating their templates into the AWS console, provisioning the necessary AWS infrastructure for the deployment.
AWS said, “designing and scaling a telco network in the cloud can be a laborious, time-intensive process due to the iterative nature and breadth of network use cases.” Then once functions are deployed, the operator must update each NF individually – “time consuming work that strains resources.”
AWS also said that its tools would stop telcos buying and using too many cloud resources, and investing in separate visibility and monitoring tools.
Endorsements came from O2 Telefonica in Germany, as well as Mavenir, Infosys and Cloudify.
You can read a blog from AWS here that takes you through how to instantiate a network:
Dell adds Red Hat to Infrastructure Block programme
Dell and Red Hat announced a partnership to deliver pre-loaded, validated and integrated cloud platform software from Red Hat on Dell hardware.
Dell calls its integrated solutions “Infrastructure blocks” – last year it released Infrastructure Blocks for virtualized/Open RAN (vRAN/O-RAN) networks with Wind River. This year it is Red Hat’s turn, with Dell Telecom Infrastructure Blocks for Red Hat.
Dell says this is a “fully engineered, cloud-native solution, co-designed with Red Hat and backed by Dell services and support.” The solution includes the hardware, software and subscriptions network operators need to build, scale out and power cloud core network functions using Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes.
PR Quote: “CSPs can quickly and easily migrate their existing “vertical” network architectures into a single, unified, horizontal cloud architecture with one management interface.”
These will be available in the second half of 2023.
NEC’s core for DoCoMo now on hybrid cloud
NTTDoCoMo and NEC said they had completed a design for a 5G Core network that uses a hybrid cloud environment, combining AWS and DoCoMo’s on-premise infrastructure.
They said the design will enable DOCOMO to switch between on-premises NFV and AWS infrastructure for 5GC redundancy operations, providing a more flexible and cost-effective method of managing network performance and capacity.
DOCOMO and NEC also successfully onboarded NEC’s 5G User Plane Function software dedicated to edge computing (Edge UPF) on the AWS Graviton3 processor. The verification is expected to support the faster construction and reduced energy consumption of 5GCs and Edge UPFs for IoT use cases.
While Ericsson gets its onto Google’s Distributed Edge for DT
Deutsche Telekom, Ericsson and Google Cloud said they had successfully deployed Ericsson’s 5G Core on an on-premises implementation of Google Distributed Cloud Edge (GDC Edge) hosted at the Deutsche Telekom lab in Austria.
For the trial, the partners evaluated the benefits that GDC Edge can provide for Deutsche Telekom to maintain and operate telco cloud platforms and for Ericsson as a CNF vendor to validate GDC Edge for the deployment of its dual-mode 5G Core solution. Leveraging the automation functionalities of GDC Edge and Ericsson tools, the partners were able to successfully demonstrate the deployment in minutes of the cloud and 5G core application.
This announcement is an outcome of Deutsche Telekom and Google Cloud’s strategic partnership, announced in July 2022, to define a joint roadmap.
Snowflake crystallises Telecom Data Cloud
Snowflake announced the launch of the Telecom Data Cloud, which unites Snowflake’s data platform with partner solutions, and industry-specific datasets.
The data cloud company said that Telecom Data Cloud “helps telecommunications service providers break down data silos within companies and across the ecosystem, allowing organizations to easily and securely access data in near real-time, enrich it with machine learning (ML) models, and then share and analyse it to drive better decisions.”
Other proposed benefits:
- Teams across IT, network engineering, data science, network operations, and product management can collaborate using data to improve planning, make faster business decisions, better manage network resources, and reduce time to market on new services.
- Snowflake and Snowpark enable machine generated data in near-real time using ML models to predict faults, schedule maintenance ahead of time, and to reduce operational downtime.
Telcos already using Snowflake include:
- AT&T – “driving to a single source of truth for their data”
- OneWeb – Moved itr data operations over to Snowflake in just six weeks and is leveraging Snowflake to harness the power of space data for the enhanced performance of its network
- M1 – uses Snowflake to combine data from M1’s CRM, billing systems, website, and mobile app to provide a more complete view of the customer.
There’s a whole bunch of partners that can offer solutions out of the box, as well as act as sources of data, or use Snowflake to power their own solutions. Amdocs is an example of the last of these. See more here.
Arrcus takes segment routing into cloud
Arrcus is a company that works in “core, edge and multi-cloud network infrastructure”. Its Arrcus Connected Edge (ACE) platform is designed to provide a routing platform for operator network services
At MWC it and SoftBank will be showing the integration of 5G network slicing with plug-ins for SRv6 (Segment Routing v6) Mobile User Plane (MUP) and integration with orchestration from partner Elisa Polystar.
The ACE platform, through its components ArcOS and ArcIQ, provides traffic engineering and telemetry capabilities. Supporting segment routing, an MPLS-based routing protocol, means that ArcOS can enable service providers to divide their networks into smaller, more manageable segments.
The MWC demo will showcase an end-to-end fabric that extends from RAN to 5G edge to IP transport networks, with seamless and automated support for network slicing and telemetry.
Arrcus also announced a tie-up with VMWare to run ACE in VMWare’s Telco Cloud Platform. The integration leverages Arrcus’ traffic engineering technology to enable automated slicing and service management. Operators can also create instances across RAN, 5G core, (MEC)/edge and transport networks. And it includes a service assurance platform for transport network, 5G core and RAN telemetry, so CSPs receive metadata on key network parameters