Jake Saunders, ABI Research Vice President, Asia-Pacific & Advisory Services, and Don Alusha, Senior Analyst, joined Cloud Core Plaza to share their expert insight into Telco Cloud's evolution and how 5G Core will enable innovative services.
Saunders explained that containers are essentially a “software abstraction” or virtualization technology. Containers are attractive because they are lightweight in terms of memory and computational processing. They therefore can provide operating system virtualization for the applications, compute and storage functions being carried out in the cloud. Telcos can opt to deploy containers in a virtual machine configuration or on bare metal servers. There are, however, consequences regarding performance, security and application maturity.
As mobile operators upgrade and innovate their network architectures, they are evaluating Cloud-native Network Functions (CNFs) and Container as a Service (CaaS) platforms from different vendors. However, what are the challenges to decouple the CNF and the CaaS platform?
Alusha described how the ongoing adoption of 5G standalone network provides low latency and high bandwidth capabilities for telcos to create services that are more differentiated. With 5G core networks, telcos can customize their 5G offerings or packages to create value for different segments of the population, for different type of users, for different type of services and for different types of industries. There are, however, challenges that the industry has to address. Chief among them is to promote the development of 5G end devices and terminals so that users can enjoy 5G services without necessarily changing SIM cards and phone numbers on their devices. With different generation of cellular networks in the ecosystem and with the ongoing network cloudification, the ecosystem is becoming more complex than ever. That in turn, raises a key question - namely how can telcos enhance core network stability and reliability?
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