Huawei IT Products for Telco Operator Digital Transformation

Sponsored by Huawei

Written by ABI Research Senior Director Dimitris Mavrakis  

Telco operators across the world are currently pursuing their digital transformation strategies in order to evolve from the legacy connectivity business and become Information and Communication Technology (ICT) providers. The opportunity is there: telco operators already operate what can be called distributed intelligence networks and have experience in managing them. In a way, these platforms are what will likely power tomorrow’s processing payloads, including Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms running in distributed deployments. This was a key theme at the MWC trade show this year, with the slogan of the show being “Connectivity Unleashed” and focusing on enterprise applications—contrary to previous shows, which focused mostly on consumer applications.

Huawei’s New Product Launches at MWC22 for Telco ICT Evolution

To capitalize on this opportunity, telco operators need to upgrade their existing operations and especially their Information Technology (IT) infrastructure. Huawei’s most recent announcements in the ICT domain can help it augment its ICT strategy in many areas. Specifically, to enable carriers' digital and intelligent transformation, Huawei has created a green, reliable, efficient, and intelligent IT foundation, which includes a fully-collaborative distributed cloud and an all-scenario data pool, with diversified computing clusters. It is designed to help carriers increase revenue, reduce costs, improve efficiency, and achieve new growth.

1. Huawei has launched its fully-collaborative distributed cloud solution, allowing operators to deploy its applications and network functions without the cost of deploying their own data centers and by using Huawei’s expertise in managing both IT infrastructure and telco payloads. This translates to maximized network value and efficient end-to-end services with distributed cloud solutions. The Huawei Cloud stack is also cloud-native, allowing operators to deploy containerized business and operation systems, and to operate in an agile, flexible, cost-effective, and robust environment. The Huawei Cloud operates in 27 regions across 170 countries, and Huawei claims to be hosting more than 2,800 Content Delivery Network (CDN) nodes globally in its hosted cloud solution.
2. Huawei’s OneStorage solution includes a storage resource pool with multi-cloud connections that includes precise storage allocation according to Service-Level Agreements (SLAs), a single engine for unified management, and open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for the creation of new services. According to Huawei survey data:
   1.  Business Support System (BSS): In the next 2025, Charging Data Records (CDRs) of 5G users will increase by 6.5X over 4G, which requires high system performance.
   2.  Video Service: Subscribers will increase by 4X in the future. The data growth will pose challenges to energy consumption and costs.
   3.  Business-to-Business (B2B Services): Multi-cloud leads to difficult internetworking and complex Operations and Maintenance (O&M), causing the data volume to go up by 5X.This means that operators need to process more diversified data. Data applications will need to be more inclusive, data protection will ever be more important, and higher data center efficiency will be required. Moreover, future networks will likely be more content-oriented, especially with Metaverse and Augmented Reality (AR)/Virtual Reality (VR) applications. In these scenarios, part of content rendering will likely take place at the edge of the network, particularly for enterprise use cases, meaning that telco operators will require much more storage at the edge.

The Huawei OneStorage solution streamlines the management and operations between various platforms, devices, and data centers, implementing unified resource management, intelligent allocation, and multi-cloud convergence. In practice, this ensures that data center resource utilization increases, on average, from 35% to 65%, and provides higher data security and lower energy consumption.

By the end of 2021, 327 operators worldwide had selected Huawei storage. Once operators in Latin America adopted Huawei’s all-flash solutions, the bill runtime was slashed by 67%, and efficiency improved by about 3X; while in Western Europe, the Huawei data migration solutions have helped operators achieve all-online services without interruption, improving migration efficiency by about 60%.

These ICT components will be necessary for the future of telco operators; for them to build digital platforms and operate their networks in a carbon-efficient manner. Huawei’s fully collaborative distributed cloud, advanced data storage solutions, and capabilities to deploy multiple processing platforms highlight the vendor’s willingness to innovate outside the connectivity-based domain and help telco operators also grow past this domain.