Raising Europe’s comms standard
Europe’s top mobile operators have formed a pact to create local telco cloud stack under the standard of the open-source body Linux Foundation Europe, reveals Ray le Maistre in Telecom TV. The apex quintet comprising Deutsche Telekom (DT), Orange, Telecom Italia (TIM), Telefónica and Vodafone will work with Ericsson and Nokia to build a single software base that informs the entire telco cloud stack. If Project Sylva succeeds it could cater for Europe’s urgent privacy, security and energy-saving needs.
According to the Project Sylva GitLab page the main objective is to release a cloud-native infrastructure stack to host telco functions (such as 5G, OpenRAN, CDN) and edge use cases. The main technical challenges for Sylva are network performance, distributed cloud (multi-cluster Kubernetes, bare metal automation), energy efficiency, security (hardening and compliance) and openness, it says. In the latter case that means to capitalise and contribute to initiatives like Anuket, Nephio and O-RAN. “Sylva provides an environment to collaborate and develop solutions to tackle down specific technology challenges and facilitate cloud-native adaption for telco and edge use cases,” said the Gitlab text.
“Sylva has the potential to expedite the cloudification of telecoms and network functions to boost security, reduce energy consumption and deliver cross-border applications,” said Yago Tenorio, fellow and director of network architecture at Vodafone.
The inciting incident for this dramatic action was the fragmentation of telco cloud software caused by hyperscaling and self-interest. There is no unity among cloud platform developers and there could be little motivation in them underpinning local infrastructures. That could mean the next generation of telecom services and functions has no cohesion and is hopelessly divided across borders. At best this means telecoms operators will be forced to duplicate their effort to achieve the same outcome. At worst, the cloud could become a telecom tyranny where hyperscalers divide and rule.
“The telco cloud ecosystem today is fragmented and slowing down our operational model transformation,” said Laurent Leboucher, group CTO and senior VP at Orange Innovation Networks. The interoperability of workloads and systems is a challenge and operators have to deal with a multiplicity of vertical solutions that are different for each vendor, leading to operational complexity, lack of scalability, and high costs, according to Leboucher: “Orange strongly supports this initiative.”
“The lack of a harmonised and performing cloud environment, now fragmented and heterogeneous and not built-for-purpose, is slowing down the network evolution process towards the cloud,” sad Juan Carlos García, senior VP of technology innovation and ecosystems at Telefónica.