2023 Telco Cloud and Edge

The telco cloud has evolved from in-house carrier platforms to hybrid offerings that include public hyperscaler offerings and in-house offerings. The telco cloud ranges from public regional clouds to even uCPE on premises. Telcos face challenges in managing the diversity of hardware platforms and locations — APIs and standards, and assurance of performance is still evolving. Marc Cohn, Principal Technology Strategist, Spirent explains.

Telcos have domain expertise in procuring network functions and then building a managed service around it. As we move into virtualized telco clouds, the level of complexity increases, providing both challenges and opportunities for the ecosystem. Sunil Khandekar explains.

Automation is key to enabling services across a global ecosystem of Service Providers, says Franck Morales, Vice President, Evolution Platform, Orange Business Services, and Director of MEF. Here is a perspective on how this automation is developing within MEF and across the industry.

Join Jim Carroll of Converge Digest and Kaloom's SVP Marketing and BD, Hitendra Sonny Soni, on a 1-mile stroll in San Jose, California as they discuss trends in Telco Cloud and Edge including: top players, sustainability, killer app, early advantage, 5G workloads, metaverse, AR/VR, OCP, P4 and more.

When we think about Telco Cloud it's clear that there is a need for a robust ecosystem. Software-defined networks drive us toward an API-centric model, explains John Carr, Vice President of Business Development, Neustar.

If you look toward the requirements of tomorrow's likely applications, whether that's private 5G, IoT, AR/VR or metaverse, a common denominator will be the proximity of compute/storage to the end-user. Optical transport will be key to ensure optimal performance. Here's a perspective from Travis Ewert, Chief Operating Officer, Lightriver.

Hyperscalers are keenly focused on migrating as many enterprise workloads as possible onto their clouds. They have the expertise and the infrastructure. However, when it comes to data sovereignty, telcos will have certain advantages, especially if they are partnered with the hyperscalers. Sunil Khandekar shares his perspective.

Securing telco cloud infrastructure, and 5G networks in particular, is top priority. Whenever there is a major shift in technology, hackers will look for new attack vectors. Rodrigo Brito, Head of Cybersecurity Business Line, Nokia, discusses strategic planning.

As applications become highly distributed to edge locations, new opportunities open for telcos. The challenge for telcos is how to gain a foothold in this space when the hyperscale cloud operators already are capturing enterprise workloads. Here is some market analysis from Mauricio Sanchez, Dell'Oro Group.

Tier One carriers have unique cloud environments suited to their specific needs, whereas public cloud operators optimize their infrastructure for a broader mission. The telco cloud NFV model presumes DPDK, OVS and Linux-based environment for virtualization. Spirent Communications' Dave Larson compares the two cloud environments.

From a latency perspective, if someone wants to build a shared-infrastructure, neutral host with Open RAN functionality, Vapor IO is ready for the challenge, say company CEO, Cole Crawford. We have to think about the handoffs between a telco network, a private wireless network, and a hyper scale cloud provider.

The management challenges of telco cloud, private 5G and edge compute depends on the complexity of the deployment and on the geographic footprint. Here's a perspective from Paul Savill, Global Practice Leader of Networking & Edge Compute, Kyndryl.

Telcos need to be in a lot places and have the most demanding requirements, says Zachary Smith, Head of Edge Infrastructure Services, Equinix. The high-intensity workloads driven by billions of packets are what powers the underlying rails of our digital lives. The telco environment usually is a multi-tenant, multi-application proposition. All of these factors point to bare-metal as an enabling solution for telco clouds.

Despite hand wringing at some telcos around the security of Telco Clouds, it's a solvable problem. John Carse , CISO of Rakuten Symphony and Rakuten Mobile , explains how other critical industries like finance or defense that have already moved to cloud have created best practices to secure cloud platforms.

The advent of 5G is driving deep changes in the way that telcos deploy and manage their networks. Telco Cloud infrastructure must adopt a distributed, multi-cloud architecture. It must also be ready to leverage public cloud capabilities to benefit from new business opportunities. Here are the insider views of Ram Venketaramani, Senior Director, Edge Solutions, VMware.

Orange Business Services is pursuing a global Telco Cloud strategy with major hubs now in 45 cities worldwide and soon expanding to the hundreds. Capabilities will include advanced services powered by Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) nodes, as well as hosting cloud-based solutions from multiple vendors. Here is an overview from Franck Morales, Vice President, Evolution Platform, Orange Business Services.

Telco Cloud is entering an exciting phase: actual execution. AT&T is the flagship customer for Microsoft's Azure for Operator Distributed Services which already supports tens of millions of users. Microsoft's VP, 5G Strategy, Shawn Hakl explains what carrier-grade Telco Cloud really entails.