TelecomTV TelecomTV
  • News
  • Videos
  • Channels
  • Events
  • Directory
  • Smart Studio
  • Surveys
  • Debates
  • Perspectives
  • DSP Leaders World Forum
  • DSP Leaders
  • Great Telco Debate
    • |
    • Follow
    • |
    • Subscribe
  • |
  • More
  • Webcasts
  • Surveys
  • Debates
  • Perspectives
  • Great Telco Debate
  • |
  • Follow TelecomTV
  • |
    • Subscribe
    • |
  • About
  • Privacy
  • Help
  • Contact
  • Follow TelecomTV
  • About
  • Privacy
  • Help
  • Contact
  • Sign In Register Subscribe
    • Subscribe
    • Sign In
    • Register
  • Search

Cloud

Cloud

Cloud and telco are becoming ever more closely entwined, but how does it end?

Ian Scales
By Ian Scales

May 5, 2020

via Flickr © Ed Dunens (CC BY 2.0)

via Flickr © Ed Dunens (CC BY 2.0)

  • Possibly quite unexpectedly, according to Martin Creaner,  author and strategic thinker on telecoms
  • Martin has worked as an executive with Motorola and BT, and served over a decade as President & CEO of the TM Forum
  • He now thinks telecoms, as we know them, are heading into disruption and disaggregation

According to Martin Creaner there are so many different currents dragging the telco world forward that over the coming  years the blueprint for the new telco is going to be an entirely disruptive model, he claims. And one of the currents is going to be virtualisation.

“I’m seeing the rise of what I’m calling the cloud-dependent telco, where pretty much everything to do with the telco is moving into the cloud,” he says. 

Indeed, Creaner was an early spotter and namer of the underlying forces of which he still speaks. Back at the turn of millennium he had identified COTS (Commodity Off-The-Shelf) hardware as key to the progress of the OSS/BSS market. Essentially COTS was the ‘white box’ of its  day, and as today with NFV,  there were two advantages  -  reduced costs and  a greater degree of compatibility between the programs that ran on them. And there was agility. 

That meant the COTS approach was also disruptive to the incumbent OSS BSS suppliers who rather liked locking their customers up in proprietary systems. Always the way.   

Then as now, Creaner says he’s less interested in the minor battles around the underlying virtualisation architectures - which is better than which etc - and  much more interested in where all that virtualisation takes the telco industry as a whole..  When everything is virtualized and completely plastic, elastic and hypercharged by ever-more powerful underlying silicon, what does that mean for the telco and the various business models which rely on it?

We know what the drivers for virtualisation and software driven networks are. They are our old favourites: reduced costs and greater agility. This, with only slight changes in the language used to describe it, has been the case for at least 20 years. 

Martin and I remembered that even today’s poster-child, ‘microservices’, had an echo. Back around the turn of the century, microservices were the elements that could be assigned to a telephone package as a new contract was being assigned a customer  - things like call answering.  “So essentially the same as now,” says Martin.

Fast forward to the introduction of NFV in the mid 20 teens. 

“With NFV, the vendors were thinking of the telco as a model where they had the expertise and could pull together all the software piece parts and generate a much more efficient telco. 

“But in my view it’s actually moving in a totally different direction,” says Creaner. “With Google’s announcement of Anthos for the telecoms industry, it’s actually saying ‘we have a brilliant cloud and we’re now going to turn the full weight and power of that cloud towards the telco world’ - and by the way they’re also going to bring in their edge cloud which, in my view, is Google’s strategy to get adoption of their edge.”  

Google won’t be alone of course. All the big cloud players will be offering their own versions of this approach. Even the telcos’ traditional vendors will be offering full cloud solutions in the long run. 

And all the capability could  be assigned to the public cloud and even managed on the telco client’s behalf. Under that scenario the telco essentially becomes  the owner of a RAN (or part owner of several shared RANs) and the owner of some spectrum and a customer base. 

 “At some stage, and relatively quickly, small telcos might say: ‘You know what? We’re just jumping on board that Google wagon and we’re going to forget about our core network. So now we are a spectrum owner, a transport network owner, most of  which we’ll lease.“  

Not forgetting, of course,  the rise of the heterogeneous access network which will involve access from a variety of fixed networks, Wi-Fi and shared small cell networks.

At this point telecoms networks might have become so virtual that they exist only as temporary data trails over a vast and enormously complex multi-cloud.

************************************

 

We want to hear from you!

Take part in our 5G and Security survey and receive a free copy of the downloadable report ahead of general release.

Related Topics
  • Analysis & Opinion,
  • Business Models,
  • Cloud Native,
  • Global,
  • Google,
  • Kubernetes,
  • News,
  • NFV,
  • Privacy,
  • Spectrum,
  • Telco & CSP,
  • Telecoms Vendors & OEMs

More Like This

Digital Platforms & Services

Microsoft cloud strength drives second quarter results

Jan 26, 2021

Digital Platforms & Services

What’s up with… Telefónica, IBM, ONF, Verizon

Jan 26, 2021

Digital Platforms & Services

Telefónica, IBM and Red Hat join forces to accelerate digital transformation with open hybrid cloud

Jan 26, 2021

Digital Platforms & Services

OVHcloud teams with IBM and Atempo for trusted, secure cloud storage

Jan 25, 2021

Sustainability

Telenor heralds the ‘society-as-a-service’ age: dystopian nightmare or IT mission accomplished?

Jan 25, 2021

Email Newsletters

Stay up to date with the latest industry developments: sign up to receive TelecomTV's top news and videos plus exclusive subscriber-only content direct to your inbox – including our daily news briefing and weekly wrap.

Subscribe

Top Picks

Highlights of our content from across TelecomTV today

1:4:29

Great Telco Debate: Live Debate – Day 2 (On-demand)

1:18:20

Great Telco Debate: Live Debate – Day 3 (On-demand)

43:08

Developing an ecosystem for vRAN

2:23

The TelecomTV Snapshot: The Great Telco Debate 2020 - CSP Highlights

  • TelecomTV
  • Decisive Media

TelecomTV is produced by the team at Decisive Media

Menu
  • News
  • Videos
  • Channels
  • Directory
  • Smart Studio
 
  • Surveys
  • Debates
  • Perspectives
  • Events
  • About Us
Our Brands
  • TelecomTV Tracker
  • TelecomTV Perspectives
  • DSP Leaders
  • DSP Leaders World Forum
  • The Great Telco Debate
Get In Touch
[email protected]
+44 (0) 207 448 1070

Request a Media Pack

Follow
  • © Decisive Media Limited 2021. All rights reserved. All brands and products are the trademarks of their respective holder(s).
  • Privacy
  • Terms
  • Legal Notices