Ericsson demonstrates software-as-a-service core network deployment
By James Pearce
Jun 24, 2026
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James Pearce, TelecomTV (00:04):
I'm delighted to be joined today by Ash Simpson, who's going to talk us through Ericsson On-Demand. Ash, over to you.
Ash Simpson, Ericsson (00:11):
Thank you for having me. Yes, what we're showing today is Ericsson On-Demand, which is Ericsson's core in a software-as-a-service offering. So this means we bring all the values of software as a service — self-service, subscription-based model, only pay for what you use, with a fast time to market — all together to the core network. So what we have here is our Core On-Demand, the live service for private wireless, and we're showing how simple it is to have a core network running within the hour. So here we get an overview of the dashboard, or the landing page, which has some key performance indicators and some of the larger metrics that drive your subscription cost. Get an overview of your network, and then you can start to dive in and understand your services that are running.
Ash Simpson, Ericsson (00:58):
So if we wanted to create a new instance, or we want to know a little bit about the services that we have, we can see we're running three instances at the moment across different locations, service types and flavours. You can think of them like your resilience or your availability levels. If we were to create a new service, pretty straightforward — we just choose to create a core network. And anything you see here can be done through the service APIs as well, through the public API gateway. So this way, if you have your own orchestration platforms, or the Ericsson orchestration platforms, you can order a network slice which consumes a SaaS core as well. So we give it a name, we choose a region — which can be set due to different regulatory constraints that you may have — and then you choose the service type and the resilience level, and then you can deploy your network.
(01:42):
So this is pretty straightforward, very simple — takes about 30 minutes or so to build the core from there. At that point, you see a new core instance and it's idle, it's waiting. So if we look into one that we've already done, these will be showing as idle and there'll be some blank details, but this is like your dashboard for the service, at a service level. Setting up the core network is really straightforward. So we chose first the service type. We said it was private wireless, so therefore the agents are going to be optimizing that for private wireless use cases — things like IoT, or retail, or those kind of maybe more machine-type use cases. If we chose fixed wireless, it's going to be optimizing the service for internet access and all the different additional services you need to provide, like firewalling and DDoS protection and all the other services as well.
(02:30):
So here we provide some very basic settings, some operator-specific settings. You need to provide those because when you are onboarded through the process, you enter your identity provider, your encryption keys, and the whole service is unique to yourself. So we can't know this information — Ericsson can't access or see what's running in the core network. So you provide some basic operator information, provide a subnet mask for the core to allocate its own addressing from. And at this point the service is deployed and configured. That takes another 15 minutes or so for the agents. Now we have a core running in the cloud and we need to be able to connect to it. So we just announced that we have our fixed wireless offering now available in the Google Cloud Marketplace. This is showing the private wireless service, so it's a VPN-based offering, but you would have ports and VLANs as opposed to VPN gateways and tunnels.
(03:23):
So we can see here that we have some live tunnels. There are some real UEs attached to this service streaming some 4K video, just for the conference. But if we were to create a new VPN gateway — this is for a different network type, like part of your 3GPP interfaces. So for example, we have here the control plane, the user plane, maybe external data network. You want to send this APN on a secure VPN to a SaaS application or an enterprise application. Other services will have things like charging interfaces, lawful intercept, other VLAN gateways that you can create. So that takes about two minutes — VPN gateway is up — and then you can provision tunnels to connect to that. So maybe this is now we're connecting a large number of retail stores to a private core network and we want to onboard the second, third or fourth store. So it's as simple as just adding new tunnels and configuring them for the retail environment.
(04:18):
At this point the core is deployed. The RAN can attach to those IP addresses from the core network and you can start to use the core service. You may want, again, an additional layer of protection on top of that. Maybe there are some key regulatory constraints that we have. So here you can also create additional security keys, so you could even encrypt the services differently. We provision some subscribers — so again, the subscriber management API is widely available through the gateway, so you can integrate to your existing systems, or you can just very quickly upload some JSON templates and go for it.
(04:55):
Now our subscribers are using the service and we want to understand how it's performing, how it's working. So there are about 20 key performance indicators that are probably of most interest to a SaaS service, so they're available. Again, you can pull all this data into your network management system if you want. So that concludes the day-to-day operations. Then maybe you want to talk to Ericsson support. It's not always practical that no one can access your core network. So you raise a support request, a site reliability engineer is in contact with you, you know who they are and you trust them, and you can create a temporary key to unlock the service for that period of time. So while that engineer is working with you on your core troubleshooting — maybe you're trying to do a UE trace or something like that — they have that access. It's all restricted within the data within your project and your tenancy still, so the engineer can't access anything outside of that.
(05:49):
And then at any point, or when you're finished, you can just revoke that — all the instances are deleted, all the data is deleted, and again your service is secured back. So it's only your own.
James Pearce, TelecomTV (05:58):
Ash, that was fascinating. Thank you very much for joining us.
Ash Simpson, Ericsson (06:02):
Thank you for having me.
I'm delighted to be joined today by Ash Simpson, who's going to talk us through Ericsson On-Demand. Ash, over to you.
Ash Simpson, Ericsson (00:11):
Thank you for having me. Yes, what we're showing today is Ericsson On-Demand, which is Ericsson's core in a software-as-a-service offering. So this means we bring all the values of software as a service — self-service, subscription-based model, only pay for what you use, with a fast time to market — all together to the core network. So what we have here is our Core On-Demand, the live service for private wireless, and we're showing how simple it is to have a core network running within the hour. So here we get an overview of the dashboard, or the landing page, which has some key performance indicators and some of the larger metrics that drive your subscription cost. Get an overview of your network, and then you can start to dive in and understand your services that are running.
Ash Simpson, Ericsson (00:58):
So if we wanted to create a new instance, or we want to know a little bit about the services that we have, we can see we're running three instances at the moment across different locations, service types and flavours. You can think of them like your resilience or your availability levels. If we were to create a new service, pretty straightforward — we just choose to create a core network. And anything you see here can be done through the service APIs as well, through the public API gateway. So this way, if you have your own orchestration platforms, or the Ericsson orchestration platforms, you can order a network slice which consumes a SaaS core as well. So we give it a name, we choose a region — which can be set due to different regulatory constraints that you may have — and then you choose the service type and the resilience level, and then you can deploy your network.
(01:42):
So this is pretty straightforward, very simple — takes about 30 minutes or so to build the core from there. At that point, you see a new core instance and it's idle, it's waiting. So if we look into one that we've already done, these will be showing as idle and there'll be some blank details, but this is like your dashboard for the service, at a service level. Setting up the core network is really straightforward. So we chose first the service type. We said it was private wireless, so therefore the agents are going to be optimizing that for private wireless use cases — things like IoT, or retail, or those kind of maybe more machine-type use cases. If we chose fixed wireless, it's going to be optimizing the service for internet access and all the different additional services you need to provide, like firewalling and DDoS protection and all the other services as well.
(02:30):
So here we provide some very basic settings, some operator-specific settings. You need to provide those because when you are onboarded through the process, you enter your identity provider, your encryption keys, and the whole service is unique to yourself. So we can't know this information — Ericsson can't access or see what's running in the core network. So you provide some basic operator information, provide a subnet mask for the core to allocate its own addressing from. And at this point the service is deployed and configured. That takes another 15 minutes or so for the agents. Now we have a core running in the cloud and we need to be able to connect to it. So we just announced that we have our fixed wireless offering now available in the Google Cloud Marketplace. This is showing the private wireless service, so it's a VPN-based offering, but you would have ports and VLANs as opposed to VPN gateways and tunnels.
(03:23):
So we can see here that we have some live tunnels. There are some real UEs attached to this service streaming some 4K video, just for the conference. But if we were to create a new VPN gateway — this is for a different network type, like part of your 3GPP interfaces. So for example, we have here the control plane, the user plane, maybe external data network. You want to send this APN on a secure VPN to a SaaS application or an enterprise application. Other services will have things like charging interfaces, lawful intercept, other VLAN gateways that you can create. So that takes about two minutes — VPN gateway is up — and then you can provision tunnels to connect to that. So maybe this is now we're connecting a large number of retail stores to a private core network and we want to onboard the second, third or fourth store. So it's as simple as just adding new tunnels and configuring them for the retail environment.
(04:18):
At this point the core is deployed. The RAN can attach to those IP addresses from the core network and you can start to use the core service. You may want, again, an additional layer of protection on top of that. Maybe there are some key regulatory constraints that we have. So here you can also create additional security keys, so you could even encrypt the services differently. We provision some subscribers — so again, the subscriber management API is widely available through the gateway, so you can integrate to your existing systems, or you can just very quickly upload some JSON templates and go for it.
(04:55):
Now our subscribers are using the service and we want to understand how it's performing, how it's working. So there are about 20 key performance indicators that are probably of most interest to a SaaS service, so they're available. Again, you can pull all this data into your network management system if you want. So that concludes the day-to-day operations. Then maybe you want to talk to Ericsson support. It's not always practical that no one can access your core network. So you raise a support request, a site reliability engineer is in contact with you, you know who they are and you trust them, and you can create a temporary key to unlock the service for that period of time. So while that engineer is working with you on your core troubleshooting — maybe you're trying to do a UE trace or something like that — they have that access. It's all restricted within the data within your project and your tenancy still, so the engineer can't access anything outside of that.
(05:49):
And then at any point, or when you're finished, you can just revoke that — all the instances are deleted, all the data is deleted, and again your service is secured back. So it's only your own.
James Pearce, TelecomTV (05:58):
Ash, that was fascinating. Thank you very much for joining us.
Ash Simpson, Ericsson (06:02):
Thank you for having me.
Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.
Ash Simpson, Ericsson On-Demand Service Owner, Ericsson
Ericsson’s Ash Simpson demonstrates the company’s On-Demand platform, a software-as-a-service offering that brings core network functionality to the cloud. He reveals how operators can deploy a complete core network within 30 minutes using a self-service dashboard, with configuration taking an additional 15 minutes. The platform supports both private wireless and fixed wireless deployments, offers subscription-based pricing where users only pay for what they consume, and includes VPN connectivity options.
Recorded May 2026
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