Telcos Still Finding Their Way on Cloud, Private Networks

Verizon offers both private and public mobile-edge networks while it puts significant focus on the IoT, said Beth Cohen, Verizon cloud technology strategist. She sees the most interest in the services the carrier offers in the utilities, logistics and transportation sectors and “quite surprisingly the retail space.”

As one example, Verizon partnered with a shipyard in the U.K. and set up a private 5G network, Cohen said. “Shipyards are very large places,” she said: “There’s a lot of tracking of containers.” By using a private 5G network, rather than Wi-Fi, they were able to cut the number of access points “down to something reasonable,” which proved “more cost-effective,” with lower latency and better reliability, she said.

Modern connected apps are driving Microsoft’s “product and go-to market strategy,” said Shriraj Gaglani, vice president-product management. He said one of Microsoft’s customers operates hundreds of oil rigs in the North Sea and other locations and is using private networks to connect the “huge” number of cameras and sensors needed to reduce the costs of onsite inspections.

“For large spaces, for a large number of devices, in very harsh conditions, technologies like Wi-Fi are not really trusted for mission-critical requirements,” Gaglani said. You have Wi-Fi on the oil rigs, but it’s not used to connect the devices tied to safety and operations, he said. Once an industrial customer installs its first private network, it leads to the second and third, he said.

“It’s really about the applications at the end of the day,” Cohen said: “Verizon provides the network, Microsoft provides the infrastructure. … It’s the application developers, it’s the integrators that are really making the case with our customers.”

T-Mobile supports customers who want to use both private and public clouds and provides options for both, said Chris Melus, T-Mobile Business vice president-product development. “We do have such very strong suggestions” on “what we would prefer them to use,” he said. In launching a private network “there are certain things that make sense in certain combinations,” he said.

Manufacturing is driving the move to the edge, Melus said. The sector needs lower latency on the factory floor, in shipping and logistics, he said. Computer vision trains, which trains computers to interpret and understand the visual world, and other AI capabilities “are really making a case for why you would want that compute on site,” he said. Companies have wireless cameras on the shop floor and need that data to be analyzed using AI, he said.

Opinions “vary greatly” on whether carriers should use a hybrid public or private cloud, said David Martin, STL Partners senior analyst. “Many still argue that critical network functions, such as 5G core, cannot or should not be run on public cloud,” he said. Others disagree and “more and more network workloads are being run on public cloud, even exclusively on public cloud,” he said.

Companies need to use both private and public clouds and both have their place, said Pradeep Jhunjhunwala, head-cloud engineering at Indian carrier Reliance Jio. Everyone will have to move to the cloud, but we can’t have just a “public cloud world because of … degradation issues or latency issues or performance issues,” he said. “We’ll see different types of cloud coming up” based on what customers want, he said.

Norway’s Telenor has a “public cloud first” strategy, said Pal Gronsund, director-cloud strategy and architecture. “There are so many benefits like the scalability, flexibility, automation,” he said. Telenor will move more of its network functions to the public cloud “where that’s possible, and it is really getting possible,” he said.