Carriers Taking Different Paths on Network Orchestration
5G is starting to lead to important changes in networks, speakers said Tuesday during an Informa Tech virtual 5G orchestration and service assurance conference. Network orchestration, which involves the automated configuration, management and coordination of parts of the network, is…
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becoming an increasingly important concept for telcos, speakers agreed. It’s clear that to support customer demands service providers “will really have to fine-tune their orchestration,” said Jim Hodges, Heavy Reading research director. “There’s so much different in 5G … that we’re just starting to understand the service implications,” he said. After years of “hype” around 5G “we’re starting to see in 2023 finally some deployments,” said Troy Saulnier, who leads a network strategy team at Bell Canada. Industry is still waiting for a “major leap” into AI and using the cloud “to create this promise of a new explosion of services,” he said. Among the expected changes are digital logistics applications for retailers, improved latency demand by other customers and very-long battery life and lower energy consumption for the IoT, Saulnier said. Carriers need to “differentiate the customer experience” and tune it to “the actual customer in question,” he said. “We are all in this rapidly evolving digital landscape and there are many, many challenges and complexities that we need to deal with,” said Mehrdad Ekbatani, product-marketing manager-5G at Amdocs. Carriers are increasingly able to offer “differentiated services, but with that comes a lot of complexity,” he said. Providers need to keep investing in their networks as data consumption grows though revenue is “mostly flat” in mature markets, he said: “There is an urgent need here for more agility, more resilience” while controlling the costs. 5G was designed to be “open and agile,” Ekbatani said. Some use cases are emerging “but we don’t really know what the future will bring,” he said. “The only thing that we are guaranteed” is “there is going to be a continuous growth in management complexity” and “at the same we also have to transform our existing, siloed networks,” Ekbatani said. About 40% of the providers Fujitsu works with are still evaluating what to do on network orchestration, said Rhonda Holloway, Fujitsu director-network automation solution marketing. “As an industry we’re refining our approaches, our use cases and differentiators,” she said. Providers still “have a lot of uncertainty” about the best approach to network orchestration, she said: “It’s dependent on their network size, complexity, goals and budget” but also about “choosing between centralized, distributed or some kind of hybrid orchestration.”