Carriers Moving to Cloud at Different Rates, With Different Strategies
Providers are at different stages of moving to the cloud, and are taking different approaches, speakers said during Silverlinings’ Cloud-Native 5G Summit Tuesday. Experts agreed the cloud is now seen as the network wave of the future.
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Operators need to change how they look at cloud, said Sameh Naguib, Amazon Web Services worldwide head-telco network transformation. “Cloud is not just hardware -- cloud is a platform that provides everything from hardware to software to container management to operation tooling,” he said. “Operators really need to change the culture internally and consider cloud as a vehicle for transforming the company,” he said.
Some providers, including cable operators and mobile virtual network operators looking for more control, are building greenfield networks, Naguib said. These companies “have the luxury” to “go all in into the cloud and to leverage cloud to its max,” he said. A prime U.S. example is Dish Wireless, he said.
Other carriers are just starting to make major investments in 5G in legacy networks, Naguib said. Some of these companies are fully embracing the cloud, while others embrace it in only some areas or for some groups of subscribers, he said. A third group is early adopters of 5G that often don’t want to buy more new hardware or invest in their IP multimedia subsystem, he said. Some of them are looking at IoT on the cloud, using a slice of the network, or using the cloud for disaster recovery, he said.
Microsoft became interested in the cloud because that's what customers wanted, said Shawn Hakl, vice president-5G strategy. “A lot of it was about simplification -- digital simplification, digital channels,” he said. A lot of the complexity in the back office comes from the network side of a carrier, he said. “A conversation that started in the product department ended up with the networking organization,” he said.
Carriers are looking to transform their networks and asking what comes next, Hakl said. Two years ago, the discussion was “if it was the cloud,” he said. Now carriers are asking “when are we going to work with a cloud provider,” he said. Carriers are finding the things they were looking for through a private cloud can be obtained using public clouds, he said.
Verizon found its own way to the cloud, said Beth Cohen, Verizon cloud technology strategist. “We were looking for ways to make our infrastructure more efficient and more effective,” she said. Some carriers are “going whole hog” and the cloud service providers are providing their infrastructure, she said. “Others like Verizon are doing a little more mix and match,” she said: “Those are strategic decisions because they have a lot of business implications.”
Cohen said she's involved in the Anuket project, which is trying to develop a common model and specifications for virtualized and cloud native network functions. “The need for a common infrastructure … is super critical to keep the vendor system alive, and it benefits everybody,” she said.
New problems surface every year, as do opportunities, said Duncan Curry, Red Hat global director-strategic alliances-hyperscalers. Telecom and cloud providers “need to cohabitate, they need to innovate together,” said Curry. Red Hat is seeing more “hybrid multi-clouds” where carriers, AWS and Microsoft work together, he said.
“Nobody is going to migrate their entire phone company to the public cloud,” Hakl said. “There will be a hybrid cloud … and that’s state of the art today. For folks who are questioning whether it can happen or not, it’s happening at scale.”
RAN Is Next
The next big move will be using the cloud for the radio access network, using cloud technology for basic processing and AI, Hakl said. “You can ingrain AI technology into networking technology, but it goes a lot smoother when you’re working off a platform designed to do that end to end,” he said. AI means better power management and customer-specific service-level agreements, he said.
Red Hat is “happyish” to not happy with the pace of change, Curry said. Telcos remain “too slow” and “they need to step up” with more “agile” deployments, he said. The use of AI remains “in its infancy,” he said. “There’s a lot of work to be done,” he said.
According to the Global Mobile Suppliers Association, 116 operators in more 53 countries are exploring 5G stand-alone networks using the cloud, said Ramesh Nagarajan, Google Cloud global head-network modernization and partnerships. “We are seeing quite good progress so far and we expect this kind of momentum and growth to continue,” he said.
Early deployments, where hardware, the operating system, container management and network apps sometimes came from different vendors, have meant “complexities, challenges, time to market was delayed,” Nagarajan said. It’s not uncommon for the initial deployment to take weeks or months, but the launch as long as two years, he said.