Affirmed Networks provides virtualised, cloud-native mobile network services for operators.
The services are intended to simplify operators’ network operations, reduce costs and help them create and launch new revenue-generating services quickly, such as mobile broadband, IoT, Wi-Fi roaming and autonomous cars.
Affirmed has more than 100 enterprise customers including Orange, STC, Telus, Turkcell and Vodafone and has raised a total of $155 million in funding, according to Crunchbase.
In a blog, Yousef Khalidi, Corporate VP, Azure Networking, wrote, “We believe that software can play an important role in helping advance 5G and deliver new network solutions that offer step-change advancements in speed, cost and security.
“There is a significant opportunity for both incumbents and new players across the industry to innovate, collaborate and create new markets, serving the networking and edge computing needs of our mutual customers.”
Cloud collides with telecoms
While previous generations of mobile networks have run on purpose-built hardware, 5G will be able to leverage public cloud computing platforms such as those provided by Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud. The idea is to keep costs down, enable scale rapidly and efficiently, and support security – although breaches of security in public clouds are not unknown.
Last October, Affirmed announced a successful trial of its UnityCloud 5G Core solution on Azure’s rival, Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure.
Microsoft Azure has been testing network edge capabilities with AT&T’s 5G network, which the operator announced at MWC2019.
Google Cloud too is moving into the telecoms market. Earlier this month it announced Anthos for Telecom, which is version of Google’s container-based Anthos multi-cloud platform optimised for telcos.
Google said it could be used to modernise existing applications and to build new ones on top of Kubernetes.