Dish Network has added yet another supplier to its list of vendors for its forthcoming 5G Open RAN build-out. The latest recruit is Oracle, which will supply the technology to enable a service-based architecture (SBA) for Dish’s 5G core.
The SBA is part of the 3GPP’s 5G core standards, and is essential to network slicing. It hands automated coordination of network functions so that new services can be quickly assembled from different microservices and provisioned automatically to customers. This will be the basis of many network-as-a-service offerings for enterprises, and of network slicing.
Dish’s chief network officer, Marc Rouanne, said the Oracle technology would enable SBA and so allow customers “to consume software on demand” while also supporting the “advanced core functions required to power a truly automated network”.
This is a big endorsement for Oracle, whose only publicly announced 5G core customer is KT of South Korea.
Rouanne said: “Oracle’s capabilities will essentially serve as the control tower of our network core … While many carriers may claim to have 5G, there are certain attributes only possible with a cloud-based standalone network, and our working with Oracle will yield results that will unleash the power of true, fully-optimized 5G.”
Oracle’s 5G core control plane complies with standards from the Cloud-Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), and supports a range of network functions. Those that Dish will activate are:
Policy Control Function (PCF), which dynamically routes traffic for low latency applications to the network edge, while also imposing policies that will minimize resource usage and enable slicing.
Network Repository Function (NRF), which will serve as a central repository for all of the network functions in Dish’s 5G network, along with the services provided by each of these elements.
Network Exposure Function (NEF), which will act as a central point for service exposure. It also authorizes all access requests originating from outside the operator’s own network to support cellular IoT, broadband, edge computing and API gateway use cases for enterprise customers.
Dish also said it will use Oracle’s implementations of the 5G Service Communications Proxy (SCP), Network Slice Selection Function (NSSF), Security Edge Protection Proxy (SEPP) and Binding Selection Function (BSF).
The enterprise focus of the Oracle/Dish announcement, and the choice of a supplier with strong presence in many enterprise markets, reinforces the assumption that Dish will pursue a B2B, and even wholesale, strategy to drive new revenues and differentiation for its cloud-based 5G network. Supporting slicing and NaaS directly for enterprises, or for enterprise service providers, would address an underserved market in the USA, while sticking to Dish’s core business model, and providing 5G mainly to add broadband to its pay-TV services, would be unlikely to justify the cost of the new network, especially as Dish’s TV market share and customer base are in decline.
Rouanne has also been discussing the hot topic of Open RAN security, and claims the argument that openness equates to lower security is wrong. He told SDxCentral: “I like to think of 4G networks as dark networks where you have no visibility, and I like to think of open technology, Open RAN, as a place where you have visibility.”
The former Nokia COO added: “Personally, I have a tendency to be more afraid and scared in darkness than in clear, visible light. Openness allows you to have visibility and it allows you to put your defense and your security where you see the threats might be coming. Whereas in 4G networks, you’re praying in the dark that Ericsson or Nokia will not make a mistake in their black box, but you don’t know, you wait and see and then pray that you’re strong enough to resist when an attack is coming from out of nowhere.”
Dish recently announced contracts for network security with three suppliers – Nokia itself, plus Allot and Palo Alto Networks, after about 18 months of testing many tools and services.
“We’ve come to the conclusion that Allot has the most in-depth capabilities to detect, in real time, threats and with a lot of different techniques and capabilities,” Rouanne said. “We have an orchestrated network, so we can react by the millisecond and we can isolate any threats inside the network or outside, and reroute, isolate the slices, or the sub-networks.” In an unsliced network, he argued, “if there is a threat, it’s impacting everyone. Whereas with our sliced, orchestrated network, we can separate the traffic and isolate it even on different routes or hardware if needed.”
Nokia is providing Dish with security orchestration capabilities, to make automated decisions about isolated slices, and change policies in real time. Meanwhile, Palo Alto Networks will implement software-based firewalls at the container level of Dish’s network, so that each port and container can be protected.
Dish aims to boost security further by offering very open access to its platform for its whole ecosystem, to maximize the eyes on the network and the people testing and checking for vulnerabilities in any piece of code. But that will be balanced by a zero-trust policy. “We trust nothing. We trust no vendor. We trust nobody,” Rouanne said in the interview. “We just check everything and, once we check, we put security at every layer.”
Dish also claims to have security embedded deep into its hardware. “When I think of the existing networks that have been built over the last 20 years – and I know because I was selling them – there are so many pieces of hardware that have no embedded security. It’s scary and that’s nothing we want to do,” said Rouanne. “I don’t know how you can sleep at night with all that hardware in the field.”