As the telecommunications industry enters 2023, economic times are uncertain and capital and operational costs are under increased pressure. Customers need to be better understood and served. Communications Service Providers (CSPs) need to understand and manage their environment better. New skills in the workforce need to proliferate, as we prepare for a changing technology landscape.
Fortunately, the industry is focused on these challenges. This time a year ago we predicted that in 2022, the industry would increase its use of data analytics and software-based automation, as both the data sources and technologies including machine learning were sufficiently far along. That prediction held up. This year, areas that haven’t yet taken full advantage of the cloud will do so faster than many expect, responding to this new urgency.
It will happen this year, and continue for some time to come, as the dynamic of analytics and automation moves from a point-solution to a series of industrialized processes for the industry, changing the way we work and serve customers.
RAN is now
Radio Access Networks (RAN) are the last frontier for mobile network architecture transformation, and by far the biggest TCO element for any operator. In their current form, RAN is estimated to take up 60% of a CSPs capital expenditure, and then a stunning 65% of the provider’s operating expense. As a result, now — and for the next several years — RAN is one of the most attractive areas for cloud-based transformation.
RAN is and will remain a distributed edge native application. But with a software centric and cloud-native architecture, highly automated networks can be designed, deployed, operated and maintained very efficiently, and by smaller teams of engineers and technicians than traditional networks, which enable service providers to lower their OPEX, while also achieving greater agility and capital efficiency.
Network cloudification, when combined with resource pooling, also enables the simplification of cell sites, thereby reducing their footprint and resulting in simplification of the cell sites. And new radio controllers, based on open APIs, will also be able to extract more data, and can be combined with machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) for better network performance and enhanced subscriber quality of experience.
Multiple greenfield mobile network operators across the world have already embarked on the Cloud RAN journey since 2019 that has driven a significant amount of operational readiness for the new architecture. On the other hand, existing operators had been rightly concerned with the performance and power utilization, for which the industry has now started delivering an improved set of solutions that are easing the path to start production scale deployment in the brownfield environments. Multiple large tier-1 brownfield operators across Americas, Europe and Asia Pacific have started doing commercial rollouts signifying the beginning of a larger scale adoption in 2023 and onwards. Traditional and new RAN vendors are working in close collaboration with cloud providers, hardware OEMs and integration partners to enable solutions resulting in ecosystem diversity and innovations that our customers are expecting to see.
The Customer Grail
As CSPs embark on their wider network transformation journey, they are also becoming data-driven, harnessing the power of analytics, AI and ML to unify data across different silos, democratize access to data, generate valuable insights and accelerate innovation across the network.
Data analysis of network telemetry, for example, can allow for personalized customer services that are tied to network services themselves, such as personalizing the available bandwidth to a high-paying customer for the strongest possible fidelity. Moreover, network performance data is better seen and acted upon, improving everyone’s experience.
With RAN becoming software-centric, along with a closed-loop automation and control system, there is now an opportunity to extend the same data and analytics framework in a unified architecture to the access of the network, so that it enables network optimization, enhances quality, enables optimization of power utilization by RAN and opens up possibilities of a new frontier of more data-focused use cases.
In 2022, Vodafone, Cardinality.io and Google Cloud announced that they have built a smarter, pan-European cloud-native network performance platform to give Vodafone’s customers a consistently faster and highly reliable mobile experience across Europe. The platform is being implemented across eleven European countries in which Vodafone operates and will transform the way it plans, builds and manages its network over the next five years.
Industrial automation is already happening in other areas beyond the network. AI-based service agents can help people get answers quicker, or steer them to the right human to solve their problem, and do it by leveraging natural language processing in the agent’s local language. In many countries, the changing shape of work to a hybrid of home and office calls for new ways to read and dynamically provision the network. In 2022 we began a partnership with T-Mobile, leveraging Google Cloud’s expertise in data analytics, AI and ML to better understand customer needs, co-create innovative ways to better connect and deliver personalized services for customers wherever they are in the world, and anticipate and solve issues before they become critical.
The way of the future — laying the groundwork
The cloud-based RAN isn’t just about solving the challenges of 2023. Not far away, 6G systems will command hundreds of thousands of radio points, in the form of both tower-based systems, microcells and picocells. It is plainly a network impossible to serve and maintain by traditional means of rolling trucks. Cloud computation may well play a role in planning and optimizing network layouts, and will certainly be at the center of operations and upgrades.
When operational scale itself is part of industrial automation, workforce requirements and workflows will likely also change. More software-defined systems will require more software reliability engineers and site reliability engineers. Data analysis is becoming cheaper, easier to use, more powerful and will reward people across a range of technical proficiencies.
We’ve seen this kind of workforce change before, for example with digital switches and increased business services. That skills retraining is exciting for us and our partners, as it enables telecommunications professionals to build on their deep knowledge of their industry with new ways of working. As much as any industry, telecommunications is tied to innovation and growth, and cloud-based automation will take that further than ever.Â
