Inside Living on the Edge episode ten, Jason and Dan discuss BT & Telefonica’s multi-vendor strategies, Orange’s perspective on hyperscalers and the operator network, Telstra’s resiliency different with joint GTM with hyperscalers, Verizon and American tower talk edge at Goldman Sachs Communacopia, Dell’s $114B telco market ambition. New use cases featuring multicopters and healthcare.
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- BT, Telefónica highlight emerging multivendor nature of the 5G core — “The main component of 5G-SA is the 5G mobile core, the ‘brain’ of the 5G system. Unfortunately, most 5G core deployments are still single vendor dependent, with strong dependencies on that vendor’s underlying proprietary architecture. This single-vendor dependency can be a killer for innovation. It restricts open collaboration from the broader 5G ecosystem of companies developing new technology, use cases, and services that the market expects,” noted Patrick Waldemar, Vice President and Head of Technology in Telenor Research. Instead, Telenor says it has deployed “a truly multi-vendor, 5G core environment running on a vendor-neutral platform.
- Orange alert to cloud 'lock-in' risks as it takes next edge steps — "The role of the hyperscalers today in the networks remains, in fact, very limited, whether we are talking about telco cloud or AI platforms." The difficulty of moving from one public cloud to another would depend on what, exactly, an operator has purchased, according to James Crawshaw, a principal analyst with Omdia (a sister company to Light Reading).
"If it is just infrastructure-as-a-service, it is easy to go across," he says. "If you use platform-as-a-service, like the Google Cloud Spanner database, that is not available on AWS and Microsoft Azure." These bespoke digital services are creating a "stickiness" that makes changing providers difficult, says Crawshaw. "The Amazon version of Kubernetes [an open-source platform] is different from Azure's and changing would require rework," he explains. "But it is not impossible."
Other experts have noted similar issues. "Amazon's AI solution is different from Microsoft's and all the software is designed to work with AWS," says John Strand, the CEO of Danish advisory firm Strand Consult. "The migration cost is gigantic."
Risk mitigation at Orange seems partly to mean avoiding over-reliance on Google for AI. Besides continuing to invest in its own AI capabilities, Orange will still use AI tools developed by more traditional suppliers, such as Ericsson, says Bellego.
"The interest we have and that Ericsson has is much more in the algorithms and the data than in the platform itself," he says.
Telstra sees resiliency as a 'monetisable differentiator' — Resilience will also come from having direct relationships and joint go-to-market strategies with the cloud hyperscalers, Katinakis said.He called out Telstra’s “absolute partnership” approach with Microsoft, AWS and Google, comprising “unified go-to-market models, co-creation of services, identifying problems that we can solve together” and the potential sale of services to each other.
“We have chosen to partner with them to bring value to our customers jointly because we think that both sides will optimise [for that],” Katinakis said.
Verizon Communications Inc.'s (VZ) CEO Hans Vestberg on Goldman Sachs 30th Annual Communacopia Conference (Transcript) — We launched, I think, for almost two years ago, the first 5G mobile edge compute. And we're still the only one in the market that has commercial offerings, both on private and public.So the head-start is probably two years and it's going to be a land grab because it's a very different model, where we're going to serve our customer with our license spectrum, where they're going to rely on it. Then we're going to see which ultimate model is going to be. Will they buy the equipment to run inside and maintain it? Or will they buy capacity from us? That's sort of what we're discussing with our customers right now. And we have so many trials that we're now starting converting to commercials. And you saw this summer a couple of them are now converted to commercial deals and we're focused on getting many more of those.
American Tower Corporation (AMT) Presents at Goldman Sachs 30th Annual Communacopia Conference (Transcript) — 5G, we're at the very early innings of it. I don't think we've even touched what the opportunity is going to be for us in the United States. And because it's not just about speed, right? It's all about – to me, it's largely about latency. And so, I look at the opportunities for applications, new ways of doing business, new ways of living, new ways that you and I are actually living our lives are going to be impacted by the benefits of 5G. And that's different than we've seen in 4G or 3G. And so, I would expect that 5G is going to be here again clearly throughout the decade.Dell Eyes Growth in $114B Telecom Market — “Our core business is growing and thriving. And from there we are building multiple, multi-billion dollar businesses in areas, like edge and telco, where our market position, unique capabilities, and go-to-market reach let us do what others can’t,” Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell said this week at the company’s analyst event. “What’s happening is the fundamental change in the architecture. Roughly 70% of the spend is on the radio, and the radio side is being disaggregated and opened up. That’s the opportunity for us,” Clarke said, adding telco infrastructure is opening up, embracing modular hardware, virtualization, containerization, and is on a path to be largely housed in the cloud.
Equinix, Nokia team up to provide production framework for testing 5G and edge solutions — The development center — located at the Equinix DA11 International Business Exchange (IBX) data center in Dallas is a “production-ready interconnection sandbox environment from the radio network to the cloud,” as per Equinix, which will enable select ecosystem participants to develop end-to-end edge solutions. “As we look to a future where 5G is ubiquitous, the way that IP traffic moves between networks around the world will change completely, and interconnected data centers will play a crucial role in this new 5G-dominated future,” said Sean Hemphill, VP Webscale Business at Nokia.
Telstra and Airspeeder team up to get racing multicopter series off the ground — Airspeeder says it has robotic avatars in place of humans in the cockpit that mimic movements made by a pilot in an on-ground simulator, in order to provide information on how rapid acceleration and deceleration could affect humans -- it is hoped the new generation of vehicles will be crewed in 2022. The vehicles include lidar and radar collision avoidance systems, have a top speed of 200 kilometres per hour, and fly under 40 metres from the ground, Telstra said.GE Healthcare, SK Telecom to cooperate in establishing digital healthcare — SKT will build an in-hospital patient data network based on 5G MEC to realize ultra-low-latency medical services, smoothly supply large-capacity patient data, create a cloud service desired by the hospital, and support maintenance operation.GE Healthcare plan to offer a variety of its digital healthcare solutions and technical support such as Mural, an integrated remote monitoring solution for infection, severe, and emergency patient data, Edison Healthlink, an edge computing technology for medical staff, Command Center that serves as a mission control center that analyzes to increase hospital workflow, and MUSE, an electrocardiogram (ECG) management, the company said.
