Cloud-Native Networks Seen as New World for Carriers

BT moved to a cloud-native network because of its need for flexibility, said Neil McRae, chief architect. “We needed a platform that was scalable, reliable and really key to us was flexibility,” he said: “We didn’t know how many customers we were going to have, we didn’t know how many would watch linear versus streaming.”

Having a stand-alone 5G core platform “has helped a lot,” McRae said. Rolling out the platform during the COVID-19 pandemic was difficult because of the challenges of doing end-to-end testing, he said. “That really delayed us quite a lot,” he said. “Testing is crucial because it’s your one way of knowing that when you press the button … the platform is going to do what you expect,” he said. BT found it had to “bring in a lot of new skills” as a company to build its own cloud platform, he said.

McRae said building the cloud network and making it work, fixing glitches, required constant adjustments. “In telco, we’ve always learned on the job, that’s nothing new for us,” he said. There are “thousands of technologies that we’ve used,” he said: “We are the best at taking a technology and making it robust and reliable. No one else on the planet can do that except telcos.” The platform has positioned BT “for essentially the unknown future of what 5G is going to bring over the next few years,” he said.

Building a cloud-native platform requires skills beyond those traditionally available at the carriers, said consultant Danielle Royston, CEO of TelcoDR. Carriers also need “software expertise -- the ability to quickly develop and to find new applications by assembling components of cloud products,” she said. Providers also need expertise on “building the cloud-native technologies,” she said. “I’m a big fan of the hyperscalers, so it’s really understanding their capabilities … and how they can quickly help telcos build new applications,” she said.

The cloud also requires a new focus on financial issues, Royston said. “When you’re building with hyperscaler components, the price may change, [with] new technologies coming into the picture it’s really easy to switch out different components,”she said: “Trying to manage your very variable costs … is going to be a key.” Royston said procurement cycles are much shorter than what has traditionally been seen by providers. Carriers need to make things less complex, she said.

Telecom carriers famously want custom-built equipment , Royston said. “Operating a network around the world is basically 80% the same, maybe even 90%,” she said. The “winners” will be companies that recognize that “making things simpler is actually the challenge,” she said.

“Working at the edge is not the same as working in a resource-unlimited data center,” said Oliver Cantor, Verizon associate director-global products. “You now have finite resources, you have different environments, different security needs, different power needs,” he said. Verizon is finding that cloud developers “are increasingly needing network engineering skills” and telecom engineers need to understand the cloud, he said.

The skill sets carriers will need is “a mix” of “existing know how” but also new software and cloud expertise, said Jean-Marius Antonica, software product line manager-edge computing at Lenovo. The complexity of the cloud means providers need more automation, he said. “You cannot just rely on the old ways of doing things,” he said: “You have to have much of the stack automated or otherwise people will burn out.”

Carriers should partner with vendors to build “pre-deployment” labs to familiarize key employees with new technologies, said Ranny Haiby, Linux Foundation chief technology officer-networking, edge, IoT and access. The engineers can then “understand better what kind of skill sets they need to have, but they also keep up to date on all the latest technologies,” he said.