Only weeks after Dish endorsed the still-experimental idea of deploying a whole 5G network in the public cloud, Telefónica gave AWS another significant boost, saying it had validated AWS Outposts as a viable option to deploy its core network.
Outposts is a managed service that supports common AWS cloud infrastructure, services and tools in any location, delivering a consistent environment across on-premise and public, collocated clouds. This would allow Telefónica to deploy instances of its cloud-native core in different locations according to the use case, potentially spanning its own Unica telco cloud and those of customers and of AWS.
This flexibility it important, since there will be different considerations and economics for the macro 5G network, compared to private or enterprise networks, or rural build-outs, for instance. Telefónica’s German subsidiary, O2, has already worked with AWS since last autumn on a public cloud-based core that was particularly focused on enterprise customers.
This latest set of tests and trials took place in the Spanish group’s Brazilian subsidiary, Vivo, and involved core elements for 5G Standalone provided by Mavenir, Nokia and Oracle.
Vivo said “correct functionality” was demonstrated in the AWS South America (São Paulo) Region and in Telefónica ’s on-premise data centers via AWS Outposts. Spirent’s Landslide Core Network Testing solution was used to verify control plane functionality and to carry out high-load testing for to validate user plane performance. As a result, Telefónica said it believes AWS Outposts can be a viable option for 5G Core deployment in future.
“Thanks to this project, Telefónica has reached a clear milestone in its 5G plans in Brazil and also for its deployment strategy in the group, where cloud-native 5G platforms allow a wide range of private and public infrastructure options,” said Cayetano Carbajo, director of core, transport and service platforms for Telefónica’s global CTIO team, in a statement.
Fabio Cerone, managing director of EMEA telco for AWS, added: “With the option to build their 5G core on AWS, Telefónica is opening the door to leveraging AWS’s breadth and depth of cloud services across their on-premises locations. With AWS, Telefónica can fully automate their network and dynamically scale and allocate their 5G network capacity to meet the needs of their business and consumer customers.”
The importance of tests like Vivo’s is to demonstrate that operators can work with public cloud providers while not sacrificing all control of their clouds. Indeed, Outposts is a highly strategic offering for AWS because it allows telcos and enterprises to keep their options open in terms of the placement of cloud workloads. AWS has said in the past that its on-premises edge cloud offerings, such as Snowball, are important because they enable cloud-nervous enterprises to build confidence and eventually be emboldened to move their workloads to the public edge and cloud. The same process seems to be in play for operators, with Outposts providing reassurance via support for a telco’s own cloud, while demonstrating the benefits of moving everything to the public platform.
In Telefónica’s case, there are the usual concerns about moving to a public cloud – fear of lock-in; of infrastructure that is not optimized for the most demanding 5G processes; of sacrificing control of network performance and differentiation. And there is the added consideration of preserving the investment that the Spanish group has made over several years in its own Unica cloud, which it will be reluctant to write off or sideline, despite reported cost and performance challenges for some applications.
Other operators, too, are expanding their projects with the hyperscalers while preserving a hybrid approach. Last week, speaking at a JP Morgan investor conference, Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg said his firm is working with AWS to create applications for enterprise customers that require ultra-low latency and ultra-high throughput. These will use a combination of public edge cloud and private 5G MEC (mobile edge computing).
“There are other companies that are thinking about offloading their software, their radio technology and being run on a cloud infrastructure. That’s a different way,” Vestberg said. “We are virtualizing our networks as well. But we’re not doing it on standard cloud infrastructure.” He maintains that is a key difference between Verizon and its new challenger Dish Network.
Dish is offloading all its functions to the AWS cloud for reasons of cost, speed to market and efficiency, while Verizon is keeping control of its most important network processes and differentiators, and tapping into AWS capabilities to improve its range of offerings for enterprises – and that work could potentially extend to some Verizon network functions in future, once the architectures are proven.
Telefónica Vivo is also going through the process of migrating from Huawei equipment to relying entirely on Nokia radios. Conexis Brasil Digital, which represents the largest telcos in the country, has previously reported that Vivo was using Huawei equipment in 65% of its network, more than its rival Brazilian operators, Claro, Oi and TIM (though all had at least 45% of their 4G network from the Chinese supplier).
Vivo launched 5G Non-Standalone in July 2020, using dynamic spectrum sharing (DSS) technology from Ericsson and Huawei in order to run the new radios in surplus 3G and 4G spectrum, rather than wait for the much-delayed auction, which is now expected in July this year.
While the AWS project has focused on the core, Vivo is also interested in a cloud-native Open RAN in future. It has worked with two Open RAN software providers, Altiostar and Mavenir, on pilots in Brazil, though its main 5G Standalone tests have been supported by incumbent vendor Nokia.