For those telcos that are bold enough to move their most critical network functions to the public cloud, Mavenir aims to be there to help. The company has expanded its partnership with Amazon AWS in order to offer its 4G and 5G cloud-native network functions on AWS’s infrastructure, together with the larger firm’s container technology and analytics.
All Mavenir’s key software products – its cloud-native Open RAN vDU and vCU, 4G/5G packet core, IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) and messaging – will be combined with Amazon’s Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) to support container-based deployment in any data center (collocated or on-premise), as long as it is based on AWS Outposts. Outposts is a managed service that supports common AWS cloud infrastructure, services and tools in any location.
There will also be options for migrating existing deployments of Mavenir’s IMS core, voice and messaging to the AWS platform. Mavenir’s Edge AI, an app store for elements such as AR/VR, Industrial IoT and robotics control, will facilitate deployment of these applications in AWS.
One of the most strategic areas of the 5G migration to the cloud will be support for cross-domain orchestration of all the virtual network functions (VNFs) and other elements; and evolution to network slicing. These areas are where the brains of the network will reside, and the company that can provide and control these layers will have the most strategic position with telcos. In the Mavenir/AWS deal, Mavenir’s orchestration and network slicing solutions will run on AWS, and the two companies will combine their technologies to support network-wide data analytics, insights and optimization. This shows how smaller vendors can harness the R&D and capabilities of cloud leaders to close the gap, in terms of scale and services, with the leading network equipment providers.
Such offerings will allow operators to offload network workloads from their own clouds to the public platform, which could potentially make costs lower or at least more predictable and opex-centric, while allowing them to tap into the technologies that hyperscalers have developed in key areas like high performance processing and AI-enabled analytics.
A solution that bundles the RAN and core software with AWS capabilities is likely to appeal particularly to smaller operators that lack their own significant inhouse clouds or engineering resources. It could also be the basis of future ‘network-in-a-box’ solutions, which are one of the key goals of the enterprise cellular ecosystem because they would address the cost and complexity issues that have often held back progress in these markets. Mavenir and AWS emphasized that they will work together to enable private networks and edge deployments, using the former’s Digital Enablement platform.
The cooperation has its roots in the Dish Network deployment of a 5G vRAN and core, planned to start this year in the USA. Dish recently announced that it would migrate many of its RAN instances to the AWS cloud, running some on AWS’s own Graviton processors rather than on the Intel FlexRAN platform that has supported Dish’s trials. Mavenir has been able to extend the work done for Dish into a general offering for other telcos.
Sidd Chenumolu, VP of technology development at Dish, said in a statement last week: “The collaboration with Mavenir and AWS allows us to build out our 5G network and messaging platforms in a true cloud-native manner, harnessing the speed and agility that the AWS cloud brings along with Mavenir’s expertise in deploying and operating cloud-native network functions.”
“Working with AWS enables us to bring new customer-focused 5G use cases and 5G deployments to the market faster and with unique capabilities to realise true 5G potential. Mavenir’s solutions are designed to support full public cloud as well as hybrid cloud deployments,” said Bejoy Pankajakshan, chief strategy officer at Mavenir.
“We’re delighted to collaborate with Mavenir to offer voice and messaging solutions for core network and RAN customers along with AI/ML solutions for orchestration and observability.” said Amir Rao, general manager of the telco solution portfolio and tech alliances at AWS.