Last week, Danish operator TDC Net suffered an outage that meant users couldn’t make calls, including to emergency services, for several hours. In a statement the day after the outage, the operator clearly fingered the likely guilty party as a technical error in its Ericsson core network software.
Describing the event as a “significant operational disruption”, TDC Net said that “an unusually high volume” of call traffic had “overloaded part of the core network.”
Ericsson, which also provides managed services to TDC, provided a statement to TDC that appeared to shoulder the blame. “Ericsson regrets the incident on Thursday in Denmark, which affected TDC NET’s mobile network. We are now working hard with our customer to identify the cause and will do our utmost to prevent it from happening again.”
The incident showed the importance of the core network, the part of the network that handles and controls user calls and sessions on the network. It also shows how complex an area the core can be. When the outage initially happened TDC said the fault was likely caused by a software upgrade. A later statement then indicated that there was a capacity issue. The two could, of course, be related. Either way it shows that even a high profile customer that has been showcased for its transformation story can run into issues.
TDC is a customer of Ericsson’s 5G Standalone core capabilities, putting it at the vanguard of a growing category of operators who are shifting from 5G NSA. But 5G SA growth has been slower than some have predicted – of about 320 CSPs currently offering commercial 5G services globally, less than 20 percent are 5G SA – as has been the move to cloud-native core networks.
Now Ericsson has released a new 4G and 5G Core product – Compact Packet Core – that it says will make it easier for service providers to transition from a dedicated EPC deployment to a cloud-native deployment of 5G Core functions.
The Compact Packet Core is a single rack iteration of Ericsson’s Packet Core Controller (control plane functions such as MME, SGW-C, PGW-C, AMF and SMF) and Packet Core Gateway functions (UPF, PGW, SGW and TDF) that comes with pre-configured parameters and automated lifecycle management capability, including migration procedures.
Ulf Jonsson, Ericsson’s head of packet core product offering, said there were two main reasons for the introduction of the compact version of the Core.
The first is to give mid-sized operators that currently have the Ericsson EPC on a physical appliance, or as a vEPC, an easier way to move to a cloud-native deployment.
“It’s actually been quite complex for them to move to cloud-native,”Jonsson said. “So what we are doing with Compact Packet Core is making sure that they get everything they have in their virtualised or physical environment today on a cloud-native and modernised platform. And not only that, they get the benefits that they can introduce 5G SA, and all the new functionality from that point of view.”
Jonsson said there are a “large number” of mid-sized operators who have yet to make the move to a cloud native core. He said that accessing CNIS’ cloud-native features such as In-Service Software Upgrades (ISSU), Container-as-a-Service rolling upgrades (CaaS RU) would also make operational management easier.
“We have a pre-configured system with default parameter sets. Which means that to do the installation and configuration is much more easy. We also make it easy to automatically upgrade the software, so you get the latest functionality and security patches quicker. And we can also offer our central lifecycle management automation, where we can handle all these upgrades centrally from Ericsson.
“I think traditionally, especially for smaller operators, upgrades have been quite cumbersome. But with this solution it’s really simple.”
The other deployment case is for larger operators who already have the full Ericsson cloud core, but want to increase capacity either in a regional location or in the user plane. Compact Core gives them a means to do this in a low footprint, Jonsson said.
Public cloud or not?
The Compact Packet Core is available for deployment on Ericsson’s own cloud infrastructure, which it calls CNIS (Cloud Native Infrastructure).
One proposal to ease the cloud-native transition, and to offer operators more software portability, has been to access public cloud infrastructure for core network deployments.
Ericsson itself is investigating deployments of core network software in hybrid public-private cloud deployments, and has run tests with DT and Google, and with Swisscom and AWS.
Just this week, AWS announced that Comcast would be moving its 5G core to AWS infrastructure. Telefonica O2 Germany has put an unspecified amount of traffic through a Nokia 5G Core that runs on AWS, although the bulk of its core remains on Ericsson’s own infrastructure.
Jonsson said that the public cloud is of interest to operators as a deployment option, although it is not the focus of this particular offering.
An Ericsson spokesperson said it remained committed to those platforms which it is deploying at scale, although it is investigating a hybrid cloud model for core, and may have more to say in 2025.
Ericsson’s cloud infrastructure page has a section on hybrid public cloud in which it says, “While the debate between private and HCP public cloud continues, many CSPs remain cautious to adopt HCP public cloud for critical telecom workloads due to concerns about regulatory compliance, data privacy and maintaining telco-grade performance.
“HCP public cloud solutions offer scalability and flexibility for non-critical applications such as data analytics and AI workloads. However, their suitability for core telecom functions – requiring low latency, high availability and guaranteed performance – remains under evaluation.
“Total cost of ownership (TCO) is another key factor. Although HCP public cloud can deliver cost efficiencies for certain workloads, CSPs must evaluate long-term TCO to ensure it meets the high-performance standards required in telecom.”
