FYUZ 2023 review and opinions on latest Open RAN announcements

 

Last week marked the second edition of FYUZ, the Telecom Infra Project's annual celebration of open and disaggregated networks. TIP's activity, throughout the year, provides a space for innovation and collaboration in telecoms network access, transport and core main domains. The working groups create deployment blueprints as well as implementation guidelines and documentation. The organization also federates a number of open labs, facilitating interoperability, conformance and performance testing.

I was not there are for the show's first edition, last year, but found a lot of valuable insight in this year's. I understand from casual discussion with participants that this year was a little smaller than last, probably due to the fact that the previous edition saw Meta presenting its Metaverse ready networks strategy, which attracted a lot of people outside the traditional telco realm. AT about 1200 attendees, the show felt busy without being overwhelming and the mix of main stage conference content in the morning  and breakout presentations in the afternoon left ample time for sampling the top notch food and browsing the booth. What I found very different in that show also, was how approachable and relaxed attendees were, which allowed for productive and yet casual discussions.

Even before FYUZ, the previous incarnation of the show, the TIP forum was a landmark show for vendors and operators announcing their progress on open and disaggregated networks, particularly around open RAN.

The news that came out of the show this year marked an interesting progress in the technology's implementation, and a possible transition from the trough of disillusion to a pragmatic implementation.

The first day saw big announcements from Santiago Tenorio, TIP's chairman and head of Open RAN at Vodafone. The operator announced that Open RAN's evaluation and pilots were progressing well and that it would, in its next global RFQ for RAN refresh, affecting over 125,000 cell sites see Open RAN gain at least 30% of the planned deployment. The RFQ is due to be released this year for selection in early 2024, as their contracts with existing vendors are due to expire in April 2025.

That same day, Ericsson’s head of networks, Fredrik Jejdling, confirmed the company's support of Open RAN announced earlier this year. You might have read my perspective on Ericsson's stance on Open RAN, the presentation did not change my opinion, but it is a good progress for the industry that the RAN market leader is now officially supporting the technology, albeit with some caveats.

Nokia, on their side announced a 5G Open RAN pilot with Vodafone in Italy, and another pilot successfully completed in Romania, on a cluster of Open RAN sites shared by Orange and Vodafone (MOCN).

While TIP is a traditional conduit for the big 5 European operators to enact their Open RAN strategy, this year saw an event dominated by Vodafone, with a somewhat subdued presence from Deutsche Telekom, Telefonica, Orange and TIM. Rakuten Symphony was notable by its absence, as well as Samsung.

The subsequent days saw less prominent announcements, but good representation and panel participation from Open RAN supporters and vendors. Particularly, Mavenir and Juniper networks were fairly vocal about late Open RAN joiners who do not really seem to embrace multivendor competition and open API / interfaces approach.

I was fortunate to be on a few panels, notably on the main stage to discuss RAN intelligence progress, particularly around the RICs and Apps emergence as orchestration and automation engines for the RAN.

I also presented the findings of my report on the topic, presentation below and moderated a panel on overcoming automation challenges in telecom networks with CI/CD/CT.

Why Telcos need Open Core Surgery

 (This article was initially published in Light Reading)

At Mobile World Congress, TIP (the Telecom Infra Project, an industry forum created by Facebook and a number of leading telco operators and IT vendors), announced the creation of a new project group called Open Core Network. Details have starting to emerge last week, with a webinar.

The ambitious target of the group is to define and develop an open and disaggregated 4G Evolved Packet Core and 5G Core for wireless, wired, Wi-Fi on a variety of use cases.

We have seen in the recent past that various attempts to open up the telco cloud ecosystem and value chain have had contrasted results.

• Telco clouds, based on VNFs and Openstack-like virtualization layer have mostly failed to reach critical mass in deployment and usability.
•  ETSI-defined orchestration efforts based on open source projects such as OSM (Open Source Mano) and ONAP (Open Network Automation Platform) have been a work in progress and have equally, to date, failed to become automated telco networks app stores.
• TIP has been successful with the definition, launch and deployment of Open RAN. We have recently seen announcements from Altiostar, Nokia and Cisco in Rakuten's network, as well as from Mavenir in Idea and DISH networks.

As we know, these efforts are aimed at disrupting the current telecom infrastructure provider cost structure by disaggregating traditional networks.

First by separating hardware from software, so that the solutions can be deployed in white boxes - Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) hardware - rather than costly proprietary ones.

Second by breaking telecom functions into software elements that can be deployed, managed and sourced independently from each other. This is key in the sense that it allows new vendors to enter the ecosystem, who can specialize in specific elements rather than end-to-end solutions. This increases competition and allow a more flexible sourcing strategy, with either best-of-breed vendors for each elements or selection of vendors for fit-for-purpose use cases deployments. The key to enable this scenario is an architecture that is accepted by all, with well-defined software elements functions and more importantly, open, standard, rigid interfaces that guarantee that one vendor can be substituted by another without undue integration effort.

5G is supposed to be the first telco cloud network that is natively virtualized, software-defined, elastic and automated at scale. This can be achieved today by deploying a single vendor solution from one of the dominant telco vendors. Things start to complicate vastly if one wants to deploy a multi-vendor network. Since the standards are not quite finalized on some of the elements and behaviour of a 5G network and operators are announcing and launching 5G networks nonetheless, vendors have to fill the gaps with proprietary implementations, and extensions to the standards to make their end-to-end solution automated, software defined and elastic.

One last bastion of telco proprietary implementation is the Core network. The Core network is basically the brain of the telco network. All the consumer data is stored there, all the charging systems reside there, all the elements to decide where traffic should go and how it should be treated live in the Core. This brain is very complex and composed of a number of elements that have, until now, usually been sold and deployed from single vendors. This has long been a trojan horse for dominant telco vendors to control a network. It is also a self-perpetuating decision, as the evolution from one standard version to another or from one generation to another is much more cost effective as an upgrade of the current vendor's solution as opposed to a rip and replace by a new vendor. 

With 5G, the traditional vendors had a few different architectural options for Core deployment and they mostly elected a non-standalone (NSA) version, which can only be deployed as an upgrade to the 4G EPC. It essentially guarantees that a current 4G Core deployment will evolve to 5G with the same vendor, perpetuating the control over the network. This does not only affect the Core network, it also affects the Radio Access Network (RAN), as its implementation, in the early stage of 5G is dependent on an harmonious interworking with the Core. As a result, many traditional Core vendors who are also RAN vendors have created a situation where the only practical and economical way for an operator to launch 5G fast is to deploy Core and RAN from that same vendor. This situation perpetuates the oligopoly in telco supply chain, which reduces innovation and increase costs.

TIP's Open Core is an attempt to create a Core network for 4G and 5G that will be open, composed of software elements that will be provided by independent vendors, all using the same open interfaces to allow low-touch integration and increase the rate of innovation. If the group follows the same path as Open RAN, it could become a major disruption in telco networks, enabling for the first time in decades the possible deployment of a full telco network from a rich ecosystem of vendors and an innovation pace in sync with what we have seen from the hyperscaler world.

This and more in my upcoming report on telco edge and hybrid cloud networks.

Hyperscalers enter telco battlefront

We have, over the last few weeks, seen a flurry a announcements from hyperscalers investing in telco infrastructure and networks. Between Facebook's $5.7B investment in India's Jio Reliance, to Microsoft's acquisition of Affirmed Networks for $1.35B or even AWS' launch of Outpost and Google's Anthos ramp up.

Why are hyperscalers investing in telecom gear and why now?

Facebook had signalled its intent as far as 2016 when Mark Zuckerberg presented at mobile world congress his vision for the future of the company.

Beyond the obvious transition from picture and video sharing to virtual / augmented reality, tucked-in in the top right, are two innocuous words “telco infra”.

What Facebook realized is that basically anyone who has regular access to broadband will likely use a Facebook service. One way to increase the company’s growth is to invent / buy / promote more services, which is costly and uncertain. Another way is simply to connect more people.

With over 2,5 billion Facebook products users, the company still has some space to grow in this area, but the key limiting factor seems to be connectivity itself. The last billions of broadband unconnected are harder to attain because traditional telecom networks do not reach there. The last unconnected are mostly in rural area. Geographically disperse, with a lower income than their urban counterparts.

Looking at this problem from their perspective, Facebook reached a similar conclusion to the network operators operating in these markets. Traditional telco networks are too expensive to deploy and maintain to reach this population sustainably. The same tactics employed by operators to disaggregate and stimulate the infrastructure market can be refocused and better stimulated by Facebook.

This was the start of Facebook Connectivity, a specific line of business in the social media’s giant empire to change the cost structure of telco networks. Facebook connectivity has evolved to encompass a variety of efforts, ranging from the creation of TIP (an open forum to disaggregate and open telco networks), the co investment with Telefonica in a Joint Venture dedicated to connect the unconnected in latin america and this week, the announcement of its acquisition of 9.9% of Jio Reliance in India.

How about Microsoft, Google and others?

Google had, before the recent open source cloud platform Anthos dug their toes in telco water with project Fi and its fiber businesses.

Microsoft has been trying for he last 5 years to exploit the transition in telco networks from proprietary to IT. Even IBM's Redhat acquisition had a telco interest, as the giants also try to become a more prevalent vendor in the telco ecosystem.

So... why now?

Another powerful pivot point in Telecom is the emergence of 5G. As the latest telephony technology generation rolls out, telco networks are undeniably being re-architected and redesigned to look more like cloud networks. This creates an interesting set of risks and opportunities for incumbents and new entrants alike.
For operators, the main interest is to drastically reduce the cost of rolling out and maintaining complex telco networks by using powerful virtualization, SDN and automation techniques that have allowed hyperscalers to dominate cloud computing. These technologies, if applied correctly can transform the cost structure of network operators, particularly important at the outset of multi billion dollars investment in 5G infrastructure. The radical cost structure disruption comes from disaggregation of the network between hardware and software, the introduction of new vendors in the value chain who drive price pressure on incumbents and the widespread automation and cloud economics.

These opportunities bring also new risks. While they open up the supply chain with the introduction of new vendors, they also allow new actors to enter the value chain, either to substitute and dominate legacy vendors or create new control points (see the orchestrator wars I have been mentioning in previous posts). The additional risk is that the cost of entry into telco becomes lower for cloud hyperscalers as the technology to run telco networks transitions from proprietary closed ecosystem to open source, cloud environment.

The last pivot point is another telco technology that is very specifically aimed at creating a cloud environment in telco networks: Edge computing. It creates a cloud layer that can allow the provision, reservation and consumption of telco connectivity, together with cloud computing. As a greenfield environment, it is a natural entry point for cloud operators and new vendors alike to enter the telco ecosystem.

Facebook, Google, AWS, Microsoft and others seem to think that 5G and edge computing in particular will be more cloud than telco. Network operators try to resist this claim by building a 5G network that will be a fully integrated connectivity and computing experience, complementary to public clouds, but different enough to command a premium, a different value chain and operator control.

In which direction will the market move? This and more in my report and workshop Edge computing and Hybrid Clouds 2020.

Edge computing and Telecom Infra Project

Video taken for the 2018 Telecom infra Project summit in London.

Video of the presentation at TIP 2017: Telefonica's Internet para todos

This is the video describing the project "internet para todos", connecting the unconnected in LatAm.
I present the industry trends and constraints that force telcos reeaxamine their model and the necessary changes in the value chain and the technology to enable ultra low cost versatile networks to connect the unconnected

Internet Para Todos: Connecting the Unconnected in LATAM

Patrick Lopez, VP, Networks Innovation, Telefonica

TIPping point

For those of you familiar with this blog, you know that I have been advocating for more collaboration between content providers and network operators for a long time (here and here for instance). 

In my new role at Telefonica, I support a number of teams of talented intra-preneurs, tasked with inventing Telefonica's next generation networks, to serve the evolving needs of our consumers, enterprises and things at a global level. Additionally, connecting the unconnected and fostering sustainable, valuable connectivity services is a key mandate for our organization.

Very quickly, much emphasis has been put in delivering specific valuable use cases, through a process of hypothesis validation through prototyping, testing and commercial trials in compressed time frames. I will tell you more about Telefonica's innovation process in a future blog.

What has been clear is that open source projects, and SDN have been a huge contributing factor to our teams' early successes. It is quite impossible to have weekly releases, innovation sprints and rapid prototyping without the flexibility afforded by software-defined networking. What has become increasingly important, as well, is the necessity, as projects grow and get transitioned to our live networks to prepare people and processes for this more organic and rapid development. There are certainly many methodologies and concepts to enhance teams and development's agility, but we have been looking for a hands-on approach that would be best suited to our environment as a networks operator.

As you might have seen, Telefonica has joined Facebook's Telecom Infra Project earlier this year and we have found this collaboration helpful. We are renewing our commitment and increase our areas of interest beyond the Media Friendly Group and the Open Cellular Project with the announcement of our involvement with the People and Processes group. Realizing that - beyond technology- agility, adaptability, predictability and accountability are necessary traits of our teams, we are committing ourselves to sustainably improve our methods in recruitment, training, development, operations and human capital.

We are joining other network operators that have started - or will start- this journey and looking forward to share with the community the results of our efforts, and the path we are taking to transform our capabilities and skills.

Mobile QoE White Paper

Extracted from the white paper "Mobile Networks QoE" commissioned by Accedian Networks. 

2016 is an interesting year in mobile networks.  Maybe for the first time, we are seeing tangible signs of evolution from digital services to mobile-first. As it was the case for the transition from traditional services to digital, this evolution causes disruptions and new behavior patterns in the ecosystem, from users to networks, to service providers.

Take for example social networks. 47% of Facebook users access the service exclusively through mobile and generate 78% of the company’s ad revenue. In video streaming services, YouTube sees 50% of its views on mobile devices and 49% Netflix’ 18 to 34 years old demographics watch it on mobile.

This extraordinary change in behavior causes unabated traffic growth on mobile networks as well a changes in the traffic mix. Video becomes the dominant use that pervades every other aspect of the network. Indeed, all involved in the mobile value chain have identified video services as the most promising revenue opportunity for next generation networks. Video services are rapidly becoming the new gold rush.

“Video services are the new gold rush”

Video is essentially a very different animal from voice or even other data services. While voice, messaging and data traffic can essentially be predicted fairly accurately as a function of number and density of subscribers, time of day and busy hour patterns, video follows a less predictable growth. There is a wide disparity in consumption from one user to the other, and this is not only due to their viewing habits. It is also function of their device screen size and resolution, the network that they are using and the video services they access. The same video, viewed on a social sharing site on a small screen or on full HD or at 4K on a large screen can have a 10 -20x impact on the network, for essentially the same service.

Video requires specialized equipment to manage and guarantee its quality in the network, otherwise, when congestion occurs, there is a risk that it consumes resources effectively denying voice, browsing, email and other services fair (and necessary) access to the network.

This unpredictable traffic growth results in exponential costs for networks to serve the demand.

As mobile becomes the preferred medium to consume digital content and services, Mobile Network Operators (MNOs), whose revenue was traditionally derived from selling “transport,” see their share squeezed as subscribers increasingly value content and have more and more options in accessing it. The double effect of the MNOs’ decreasing margins and increasing costs forces them to rethink their network architecture.

New services, on the horizon such as Voice and Video over LTE (VoLTE & ViLTE), augmented and virtual reality, wearable and IoT, automotive and M2M will not be achievable technologically or economically with the current networks.

Any architecture shift must not simply increase capacity; it must also improve the user experience. It must give the MNO granular control over how services are created, delivered, monitored, and optimized. It must make best use of capacity in each situation, to put the network at the service of the subscriber. It must make QoE — the single biggest differentiator within their control — the foundation for network control, revenue growth and subscriber loyalty.

By offering exceptional user experience, MNOs can become the access provider of choice, part of their users continuously connected lives as their trusted curator of apps, real-time communications, and video.

“How to build massively scalable networks while guaranteeing Quality of Experience?”

As a result, the mobile industry has embarked on a journey to design tomorrow’s networks, borrowing heavily from the changes that have revolutionized enterprise IT departments with SDN (Software Defined Networking) and innovating with 5G and NFV (Networks Functions Virtualization) for instance. The target is to emulate some of the essential attributes of innovative service providers such as Facebook, Google and Netflix who have had to innovate and solve some of the very same problems.

QoE is rapidly becoming the major battlefield upon which network operators and content providers will differentiate and win consumers’ trust.  Quality of Experience requires a richly instrumented network, with feedback telemetry woven through its fabric to anticipate, detect, measure any potential failure.

Video interview at MWC15 by Qosmos on SDN and NFV in wireless

Short interview by Qosmos on the state of SDN & NFV in wireless networks in 2015.

OTT as MVNO… or MNOs

This is an excerpt from my latest report "Video monetization 2015" .

OTT providers on their side might have some slightly different plans and views from mobile network operators. Most of them have built a business predominantly digital, based on internet-based delivery and had had to navigate the intricacies of creating an ecosystem (content creation, aggregation, distribution,…) and a business model (free, freemium, ad sponsored, hybrid, subscription, sponsored…) for the internet. 

This effort has resulted in partnerships and value chains, where content delivery is a little part of the value and when third parties like CDN can’t provide suitable or economical service levels, they are replaced by homegrown solutions, as illustrated by Netflix and Google’s caching strategy.

As a result, I believe that Google’s SVP products Sundar Pichai’s announcement at mobile world congress 2015 is likely to be a sea change. The company has decided to put rumors of becoming an MVNO to bed by integrating vertically the value chain one step further. The company will launch a MVNO service in the US, probably on Sprint and/or T-Mobile networks, blending cellular and wi-fi coverage. It starts to look increasingly like the dystopian future described here.

It is very likely that Google being who they are, will be looking at extending their services to mobile in a very different fashion than a mobile network operator. One can muse that in all likeliness, a Google subscriber (!?) with an Android device on YouTube or G+ is unlikely to pay for minutes of voice or Megabytes of data. It is likely that this first attempt to translate the very basics of mobile network economics into an ad sponsored model will have a very disruptive and durable effect on the whole value chain.

If you remember, this is not the only initiative that Google has with mobile networks. Since 2013, the company has been exploring the possibility to build and operate wireless networks in Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. If you put this with the recent announcement that Telstra in Australia, Vodafone in New Zealand and Telefonica in South America have all agreed to participate in live trials of the Loon project, it is likely that Google will look at being increasingly involve in cellular networks. The project now supports LTE and balloons can stay up for about 6 months. 

Driving the nail farther in operator’s coffins, Mark Zuckergerg at the same show was advocating for Facebook’s initiative internet.org that is promoting free mobile internet access in emerging countries. The rationale here is that free internet promotes usage, which promotes engagement, which promotes new revenues. Current experiments in Millicom Paraguay or Tanzania, saw increases of data users by the tune of 30% and 10x increase in smartphone sales.

All in all, OTT providers have fundamentally different view of services and value different things than mobile network operators. The reconciliation of these views and the emergence of a new coherent business model will be painful but necessary.

More on the subject, as well as strategies from OTT and mobile network operators to monetize video in "Video monetization 2015".