analyze Microsoft has provided more information on its efforts to lure telcos to its Azure cloud platform, which is based on intellectual property and skills gained from last year’s partnership with AT&T, under which the telcos chose to put their core 5G Network operations moved to Azure.
Microsoft announced Azure for Carriers In 2020, it said it was adding capabilities to its cloud to support carrier-grade network operations, such as low-latency connectivity and network slicing. The idea is that telcos will be able to take advantage of the elastic capabilities of the cloud and reduce the need for significant capital expenditures on new infrastructure to roll out 5G deployments, much in the same way that enterprise customers adopt the technology.
That apparently appealed to AT&T, as it announced last June that it was not only migrating its 5G mobile network to Azure, but also giving Microsoft access to its IP and technical expertise. That includes handing over the network cloud platform it developed to operate its 5G services to the Windows giant, as well as any engineering team willing to move to Redmond.
OpenStack at 10: A failure on its own, but a success in its own niche
On the surface, this is a far cry from AT&T, which was one of the big-name adopters of OpenStack a few years ago, when the Open Infrastructure Foundation was promoting the open source platform as an ideal solution for telcos building their next-generation mobile networks.only last year, AT&T donated its Open Network Design Specification for Router Chassis, known as Distributed Decomposition Chassis (DDC), to the Open Compute Project.
But AT&T’s move to Azure isn’t a rejection of open source, it may just reflect the telco’s financial health: AT&T is responsible for It was nearly $190 billion in debt last year and is doing everything it can to reduce it.it’s been uninstall Some of its data center operations, presumably, would make more sense to move its 5G network operations to the public cloud than having to build and maintain more of its own infrastructure. It doesn’t help that OpenStack hasn’t lived up to the hype.
Additionally, modern software-defined networking services are often delivered as Linux-based virtual network functions (VNFs) or cloud-native network functions (CNFs), which can be deployed in public clouds, which are also worthless.
Meanwhile, thanks to the partnership with Microsoft, the network cloud technology originally developed by AT&T will be available to other operators in the future. Redmond said it is developing Azure for carriers to cover hybrid infrastructure and support scalable carrier-grade network services, while also aiming to use machine learning techniques to operate self-optimizing networks that should be able to provide additional resources and protect yourself from the threat of attack.
in a Update this weekShawn Hakl, Microsoft’s vice president of 5G strategy, said the company’s efforts are aimed at getting network workloads to run on a carrier-grade cloud, which he describes as a hybrid cloud that spans public and private on-premises cloud infrastructure.
“Telecom services are highly fragmented and will likely become more fragmented over time,” Hacker said. “So the value of creating a carrier-grade hybrid cloud model is that it can meet the needs of the customer’s location — at the edge of the cloud, at the edge of the network, or at the edge of the enterprise.”
You can’t go back – or can you?
But is AT&T getting itself into trouble by partnering with Microsoft? It will almost certainly be difficult and expensive for the telco to resume running its 5G network operations entirely from its own infrastructure, especially since it has effectively relinquished control of its own internally developed network cloud technology. However, as Microsoft points out, AT&T retains the ability to select and manage its web applications running on Azure, which are delivered as VNFs or CNFs, to provide mobile web services to AT&T customers.
In return, Microsoft claims the partnership enables AT&T to deliver new services faster and more flexibly using Azure, which already has a global footprint. That could give it a competitive edge against rival telcos rolling out 5G infrastructure, but it remains to be seen how long Microsoft will maintain that edge when it intends to offer Azure for Operators to all players.
Perhaps the upshot of all this is that even the mighty telcos are doing their own thing versus the sum of running services in the public cloud, just like enterprises. Just like businesses, some believe they simply cannot compete with the economies of scale enjoyed by hyperscalers.
According to Paolo Pescatore, founder and telecom analyst at PP Foresight, the move is inevitable as telecom operators increasingly find their profits squeezed.
“Ultimately, all paths lead to closer collaboration with hyperscalers, which is a double-edged sword for telcos. The increasing role of tech giants in this changing environment will not be the norm for the foreseeable future. Change is all too likely,” he said.
He warned that telecom operators need to exercise caution when choosing which partners to work closely with. ®
