Pausing to reflect with media and analysts in London yesterday (August 3) on decent quarterly growth of 4.5 percent within its enterprise division, Vodafone provided some useful colour on its strategy and progress with ‘mobile private networks’ (MPNs; private LTE and 5G, by any other name). Vodafone Business said it has so far deployed 60-odd private networks in 20 countries, including in a couple of non-op/co markets where it has no licensed spectrum.
Amid good detail about its broader exploits – including a “significant” increase in software-definable network (SD-WAN) sales and a useful 7.4 percent uptick-contribution from its IoT business; plus some candour about its own ‘telco-to-techco’ transformation (cloud migration, AI operations, service in-sourcing) and cultural revolution (50,000 staff up-skilled; 3,500 software engineers hired, and counting) – the UK-based firm put focus on private networks as “one of [its] most mature and exciting spaces”.
And while Scott Petty, chief technology officer at Vodafone Group, responding to a prompt, suggested Vodafone’s MPN drive is hardly impacting the company’s revenue growth, as yet, the message from in Paddington was that the enterprise market is buzzing; the suggestion was Vodafone is busily reskinning the kind of bog-standard MPN kit bundle available from most vendors to present a fuller service proposition in advance of its mass-market explosion in three-to-five years.
Jennifer Didoni, head of cloud, edge and private networks at Vodafone Business, and Petty’s counterpart at the roundtable session at the company’s group headquarters in London, said: “We have deployed over 60 MPNs in 20 different countries – some of which are not in the Vodafone footprint. So we are talking about Uruguay, Australia. Wherever possible, we can serve our customers globally, and provide the physical network equipment and the management tooling.”
Said “management tooling” is being developed by Petty’s engineering team at Vodafone’s Innovation Hub in Malaga, in Spain; its work presumably goes with the company’s strategy to in-source more system integration capabilities and services, and strike a more even balance with its outsourced functions. It is being layered into the company’s MPN 2.0 proposition, which has developed over a number of years already on a core network from specialist vendor Athonet, since acquired by HPE.
Clearly and logically, Vodafone will work with traditional 5G vendors; and Petty acknowledged separately that most of the trickery is in the RAN, still. But Vodafone’s MPN 2.0 core is geared for more varied, flexible, and scalable deployments, the story goes. “One of the reasons we selected Athonet is it is super-open; it also offers a lot of APIs, which allows us to build feature-rich capability on top of that core network, and it is also integrate-able into multiple different types of radio, including both open RAN and our traditional networking capabilities,” said Didoni.
She continued: “What that does is allow us to build isolated MPNs, as you see more of in the market right now – a lot of customers are running proofs with completely isolated MPNs, where the core and radio and spectrum all belong completely to the customer. But we are starting to see more and more customers look at how to expand to multiple sites or countries, where you get into different regulatory environments and complications.” She gave the example of a factory customer running automated guided vehicles back-and-forth to a warehouse two miles down the road.
“Rather than build an MPN between the two sites, they want to retain a secure and reliable service on the public network. Because we have this open core which integrates with multiple radios, we can integrate via a shared public RAN, and hand over [to a private RAN on either side]. That is [only] an emerging use case… but we have selected a product stack we think will scale and expand to most of the scenarios that we see our customers needing in three to five years from now, when they have very large estates of MPNs, across multiple countries.”
Didoni went on: “Because then, all of a sudden, [the IT team has] these isolated islands of technology, which they really need to control and monitor… Which is why it is important to have that interoperability with the public network, and secure management and KPIs… to connect into their IT estates so they can do that monitoring themselves.”
Indeed, there was talk in Paddington that most private 5G vendors are selling boxes to system integrators to figure out with their edge-cloud installations. The suggestion from Vodafone is that its MPN product, slotted into Didoni’s portfolio with edge and cloud products, will be more highly integrated. She commented: “At the end of the day the performance of these [Industry 4.0] apps is a factor of two things: how well that application was built on the cloud, and how well it was connected to the people, places, and things that need to consume it.”
“In the past, developers would have a lot of rich options from the cloud or IT infrastructure, and they took the network as a given – it was a pipe in the ground and performance was what it was, and you worked around it. Now with SD-WAN, and 5G, you suddenly have this programmable network – so you can be flexible, and scale up and down as much as possible in the network, as with the cloud. Which is why 5G and cloud are so complementary – because they are practically exposing infrastructure, whether computing or networking infrastructure, to an application, and they can be dynamic and responsible and agile according to its needs.”
She added: “Not all of this is available today, but that is the direction we are going with this portfolio.” She made clear, as well, that interest from enterprises is developing fast, suddenly. “The number of RFPs has picked up a lot in the last six months, and customers are saying, not just that they want an island PoC, but that they want someone to help them decide which types of MPN architecture they need – depending on the country and how to secure it, and how to ensure visibility between all their sites.”
They also want to know how to make sure the OT side is as happy as the IT side, she said – suggesting considerable corporate sensitivity to how edge networking and computing infrastructure is to be used and managed.
Didoni said: “Because there is a bit of tension sometimes between the buyer groups we are serving, where a factory manager may want a completely dedicated 5G network with their own computing system on-premise, and the CIO/CTO says, ‘Well, that is not part of my domain of control – so how do I connect and control that?’ That is where Vodafone brings a level of integration across multiple sites for its customers, and not just in our ability to inter-operate with the network, but also in our ability to monitor, control and support our customers’ end-to-end estates.”
