Episode 17: Telstra, Telefonica and Telus Edge Strategies, Plus More Private 5G

Inside Living on the Edge episode 17, Jason and Dan discuss the wide ranging strategies that mobile network operators are taking from network deployment to hybrid cloud. More on Private 5G with the Economist and AWS.

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• Moving core to cloud for 'suckers,' tweets BT exec after AWS outage — But a European telco backlash against these sorts of deals has begun. "Hope the folks at AWS fix their big problem and re-light their big candle – in the meantime I re-refer you to this," tweeted Neil McRae, chief architect of the UK's BT. His other tweet, the one to which he was re-referring his followers, reads: "So still want to put your network core into the public cloud? #suckers." Scott Petty, the chief digital officer of Vodafone, has been similarly scathing. "Our view would be that's too risky and that you are almost outsourcing a core competency," he said at a recent press event when discussing the AT&T arrangement with Microsoft. "You need to be able to work effectively with all the key players and move workloads around." So determined is Vodafone to avoid Snap's fate that it has even started investing in its own software tools, allowing it to move IT workloads from one environment to another. Over the next few years, it plans to add another 7,000 software engineers to the 9,000 it currently employs. European stakeholders, meanwhile, are pushing ahead with Gaia-X, a vague plan to create sovereign data infrastructure for Europe. It has been championed by bigwigs such as Timotheus Höttges, the CEO of German telco incumbent Deutsche Telekom. "If we find partners here in Europe who are driving this Gaia-X or the open-source standard for cloud infrastructure, this might help us as well in the edge environment," he told analysts on a recent call.
• Morgan Stanley Telecoms CTO Symposium: Telefonica Strategy for Systems and Network Evolution — 5G and Edge computing as enablers for new services requiring low latency and locality • There are services that require 1 ms of latency and cloud platform (as we know it today) can not provide support to them. • Edge computing, which brings the cloud closer to the customer. There are applications "on-premise" that can be hosted in the edge cloud. Telco Edge Cloud • Considered a complement to hyperscaler edge that allows providing differential MNO features, and further distributed topology following network core sites to deploy app loads. • GSMA operator platform definition concluded as reference to guide telco edge implementations. • Integration between 5G core and the telco edge platform to enable such features and provide a key differentiation to traditional cloud
• Telstra Purple launches new hybrid cloud service — The new service aims to help customers navigate their public cloud platforms from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, alongside Telstra Private Cloud, which has been built on Dell Technologies and VMware software to host customer data onshore. Available as a self-serve solution, Telstra Hybrid Cloud can also be fully managed by the Telstra Purple team, who is responsible for updating, patching and 24x7 monitoring, while organisations maintain control of their day-to-day virtual machine operations.
• Crown Castle, American Tower approach the edge differently — “As long as we own the really important pieces of network, fiber, small cell hubs, tower sites where we can put these edge data centers, we believe we are best positioned for that,” he continued. “And we don't see the need for those metro data centers to augment our offering.” It’s a different approach than tower company peer American Tower, which ramped up edge ambitions with a recent $10.1 billion deal to buy CoreSite. CoreSite’s portfolio adds 25 data centers, 21 cloud on-ramps and over 32,000 interconnections in eight major U.S. markets – significantly building on American Tower’s existing three metro and six edge data centers. He sees CoreSite as a way to boost growth rates on tower sites and extend that trend down the line as networks transition from 4G to 5G. “We think there’s an opportunity to have a whole another revenue stream created at the tower site,” he continued. “And we think the reality of that happening for us is enhanced by having direct control over these 21 critical cloud-on ramps as well as these 32,000 interconnection facilities across eight key markets in the U.S.”
• IBM and Telus partner on 5G edge compute solutions — Under the partnership, IBM will bring its Cloud Satellite solutions to Telus’ 5G edge computing platform, improving customers’ access to advanced AI and data analytics capabilities. By pairing the two, the partnership will allow enterprises to automatically deploy and manage latency-sensitive workloads, reaping the benefits of 5G, all through a single dashboard. Targeting the hybrid cloud environment, IBM’s Cloud Satellite allows the operator to manage applications across public and private clouds anywhere. Telus’ 5G edge computing platform brings additional benefits including low latency, secure connections, and high data availability to customers across Canada.
• Economist Report: Private 5G — Executives view integration with legacy systems and infrastructure complexity as some of the key barriers for implementing private 5G networks. Outsourcing to a managed service provider is a preferred approach for implementing private 5G networks, while system integration services and post- deployment network management are highly sought after when engaging with suppliers.
• Private 5G networks are becoming a thing, and Amazon's AWS wants to have a say on it — That’s why this new AWS Private 5G offering is so intriguing. AWS started with its cloud heritage, built the software tools necessary to run telco-focused workloads, then pieced it all together with the one element it didn’t natively have—the antennas and hardware RAN components—to create a complete solution. To be clear, AWS is partnering with RAN hardware providers, not creating its own hardware, as part of its offering. The company has yet to reveal who those partner companies are though. This is the opposite of the traditional concept of the carriers leading with a wireless network offering and then getting the necessary partners on the computing side, which they have clearly started to do Intel, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Dell, HPE, Cisco and many others have all started efforts with carriers. This also reflects the speed cloud providers are able to create solutions and potentially cut out carrier partners entirely. In many ways, the pay-as-you-go model offered by Amazon is more compelling for something like a private 5G network than its computing model because of the large upfront capital costs that private networks typically require.
• Q&A: AWS is on the edge, and that’s where its customers want to be — Vellante: So, AWS’ edge strategy is essentially to bring the AWS cloud to where the customers are in instances where they either can’t move or won’t move their resources into the cloud, or there’s no connectivity? Elissaios: Right. I think that you’re pointing out a very important thing, which is the common factor across all of these offerings. It is the AWS cloud; it’s not a copycat of the cloud. It’s the same API. It’s the same services that you already know and use. So, the powerful thing here is that it’s the same compute that you know and love in the cloud. The same Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance types, the Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes, the Simple Storage Service (S3), or Relational Database Service (RDS) for your databases and Elastic MapReduce (EMR) clusters. You can use the same services and the compute is the same, all the way down from the hardware up to the service.