Fair-contribution debate takes centre stage but cloudcos’ eyes remain on the telco prize
Although Barcelona is echoing with dire warnings about what will happen unless Big Tech pays its way, the cloud units of the same firms are demonstrating their telco-friendly tech. Whatever the outcome of the European Union’s consultation on the subject, this is a massive market that they can only tap by working with the operators.
Amazon Web Services
AWS beat the rush and made several announcements last week including a private wireless partnership programme in which Deutsche Telekom, KDDI, Orange, T-Mobile and Telefónica are participating. The Integrated Private Wireless on AWS programme is designed to combine its own infrastructure and services with operators’ 4G and 5G networks plus the assets and expertise of its 100,000 or so partners across 150 countries as required.
The idea is to simply and speed up the deployment of private mobile networks. The AWS ecosystem could be a huge boon as it’s an aspect operators typically struggle with and should mean they don’t have to start from scratch with each customer.
Valérie Cussac, Executive Vice President Smart Mobility Services, Orange Business, noted, “Orange is pleased to leverage its leading-edge Pikeo initiative and partnership with AWS to launch its new solution, Mobile Private Network cloud. With our operator-integrator expertise, Orange Business can orchestrate, integrate and operate 5G private networks on AWS and edge infrastructure to unleash innovative use cases, combining private 5G, IoT, cloud/edge, data and AI.”
Telco Network Builder
Amazon also launched a managed service for deploying and managing networks, AWS Telco Network Builder. One of the main objectives here is to make deploying telcos’ functions on cloud more efficient by using common terminology and languages. For example, AWS says Telco Network Builder supports multiple specifications developed by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI).
There are no upfront commitments or fees to use AWS Telco Network Builder, and customers pay only for the AWS services used to manage their network, AWS says. Amdocs, Cloudify, Infosys, Mavenir and O2 Telefónica are all investigating the Builder’s possibilities.
Bas Hendrikx, Head of Cloud Center of Excellence at O2 Telefónica. “We are exploring AWS Telco Network Builder to enable us to leverage automation to deliver new 5G network services faster and manage our networks more efficiently”.
Products already in use by various operators include AWS Private 5G, AWS Cloud WAN, AWS Outposts (to ease edge deployments) and AWS Wavelength (for ultra low-latency applications).
Microsoft Azure
This cloudco made a flurry of announcements at MWC intended to benefit telcos and their enterprise customers. The Azure Operator Nexus cloud platform allows operators to run workloads on-prem or the Azure platform. This was ‘behind the curtains’ last year but is now public with AT&T as its customer reference. The US operator is running its 5G Standalone core on the platform. Ericsson, Mavenir and Nokia are all offering core mobile applications via this platform.
The new Azure Communications gateway managed service can connects the PSTN network to Microsoft Teams, and Azure Operator Voicemail enables operators to migrate their voicemail systems to the Azure platform.
Private wireless networks are also high on the Azure agenda. Azure private MEC and Azure Private 5G Core have been launched into the market, although Azure already provided private MEC to enterprise users via telcos including BT, Deutsche Telekom, Etisalat as was, now e&, STC and Telefónica.
Azure is demonstrating a RAN observability capability, which is not yet available. This integrates the RAN’s key performance indicators (KPIs) with online dashboards to provide partners and enterprise customers with network insights and analytics for private 4G or 5G networks from one Azure portal.
Google Cloud
By far the smallest of the three biggest cloudcos, Google Cloud unveiled Telecom Network Automation at MWC which is intended to accelerate network and edge deployments. It does this using cloud-native automation based on Kubernetes and the work done by Nephio, the open-source project that Google Cloud founded in partnership with the Linux Foundation in 2022.
The hyperscaler also launched Telecom Data Fabric for migrating operators’ workloads to the cloud faster and more efficiently, plus the Telecom Subscriber Insights analytics platform.
Last week Deutsche Telekom, Google Cloud and Ericsson announced they have deployed Ericsson 5G Core cloud-native network functions (CNFs) on-prem using Google Distributed Cloud Edge.
Oracle Cloud
Oracle and VMware have announced that they want to help telcos modernise their networks by incorporating Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) including OCI Dedicated Region as an integral part of their 5G network function architecture.
VMware Telco Cloud Platform – Public Cloud, with an integration with Oracle Cloud VMware Solution, will help deliver greater flexibility for CSPs to design and implement their end-to-end networks with rich ecosystem of VMware verified network functions, enabling them to deploy services in Oracle’s public cloud with 40+ global regions or with Dedicated Region to create a dedicated cloud on-premises.