Ericsson has called on the wireless industry to step up its efforts in cloud platforms, so that mobile players do not become irrelevant in technology’s biggest trend. The pace of innovation in the cloud has been far faster than in mobile, according to the Swedish firm’s CTO Ulf Ewaldsson, speaking at the GigaOM Structure:Europe conference in London this week.
Mobile networks have not kept up with the needs of the internet and the cloud, and need to step up the shift towards far more scalable and flexible design approaches, which will fill the gap.
Ewaldsson said: ‘The only reason why the innovation power that’s going on in the cloud will not be unleashed or not happen is if the networks are not good enough. Over the years Ericsson has been working with these kinds of technologies, we have innovated a lot of things that we want to do, and then we see they cannot be realized because the networks are not good enough.’
His solution, naturally enough for a wireless infrastructure vendor, is to move the mobile network into the cloud itself, something that is starting to happen with the Cloud-RAN trend, in which baseband functions are virtualized in software on standard servers, supporting stripped-down cell site equipment. That puts software defined networking (SDN) at the center of the plan, though Ewaldsson was careful to point out that specialized radio hardware ‘ the radio heads and antennas which are left behind at the cell site by the centralizing C-RAN trend ‘ cannot be replicated in software and will always be required. Having protected Ericsson’s most fundamental business, he went on to agree that many access and core network processes can be virtualized, and the company aims to provide the platforms to do so.
It has been a vocal exponent of the main standards effort focused on a carrier network implementation of SDN, Network Functions Visualization (NFV). However, it has also been accused of trying to keep SDN on somewhat specialized hardware to protect the differentiation and margins of the wireless equipment suppliers. And in the real world shift to more software-driven, dynamic network designs, NSN has been a stronger innovator. Its Liquid Net portfolio runs a rising number of functions in software and points the way to the future when wireless hardware vendors become software companies.
Ericsson also wants to take a key role in cloud platforms themselves, and Ewaldsson argued that this will be realistic because the mobile network, once virtualized, will become an extension of the cloud, not just a means to access it. Here, too, it has not always been the fastest mover, and it faces the specter of Cisco, a real data center player, moving into its telecoms space, perhaps better equipped for the cloud/network convergence the CTO envisages.
All the large vendors know that this is the fight they have to win. Supporting SDN while ensuring they retain control of the underlying infrastructure, and putting themselves at the heart of the related move towards hosted cloud platforms, will be critical.
Ericsson showed off a full cloud platform at this year’s Mobile World Congress, running on its SSR (Smart Service Router) and its blade servers. It has also developed a Cloud Execution Environment, based on OpenStack and KVM hypervisors, plus its own Cloud Manager OSS tools. It says its system will distribute and orchestrate cloud capabilities horizontally across the network, enabling new vertical exposure opportunities. ‘Cloud services need to be distributed and networks – including computing and storage capabilities – need to be elastic on an end-to-end basis. This combination will bring a new set of capabilities that doesn’t exist today,’ said the company. The new environment allows virtualized and non-virtualized applications (from Ericsson or third parties) to execute side-by-side ‘ important to cellcos, few of which will want a ‘big bang’ migration to SDN or the cloud.
But this still saw Ericsson coming in well behind Alcatel-Lucent, which had unveiled its own CloudBandoffering in late 2011, running on its 7750 Service Routers. This harnesses algorithms developed at ALU’s Bell Labs unit, which can analyze a range of conditions – such as server load and network congestion ‘ as well as user requirements, to obtain the best settings for a given application at any given time.
The idea is that operators should be able to use a single cloud platform to service consumers, corporate customers and third party service providers, and support services like voice and video without dedicated hardware, all in the most flexible way to maximize network efficiency. CloudBand has two elements – the CloudBand Management System, which coordinates and optimizes services between the network and the cloud; and the CloudBand Node, which provides the computing, storage and networking hardware and associated software.
Huawei’s offering is called SoftCom, which Sanqi Li, CTO of the carrier division, says ‘is all about helping the telco service providers to transform within the new digital economy’. There are four elements to SoftCom, which Huawei rather unfortunately labels ‘cloudilization’. The first is at hardware level, deploying functions on standard routers. The second is at network level, consolidating the traffic tasks into one plane. Third is to replace the usual infrastructure with cloud-based systems. And fourth is to adopt an internet oriented operation, rather than the traditional telecoms view, in order to simplify infrastructure and processes, and reduce costs.
‘Existing network infrastructure is closed and protocol centric,’ said Li. ‘Software is embedded into the network device and when that device is added into the network, it can be there for 10, 15, even 20 years. It is complicated, it is controlling … the traditional service model can no longer sustain this. The end objective is to move the other way, from closed networks to open systems. The bottom line is to bring cloud business technology to telecoms and to take SDN to them as well.’