The move 5G Standalone and cloud native requires an overhaul of technology stack and organizational workflows
While the industry is already beating the 6G drum, there’s still a lot left to do with 5G. The move to 5G Standalone (SA) and leveraging a cloud-native core network will hopefully have a breakout year in 2024, helping operators move the needle more materially on delivering new customized enterprise services. To best understand the dynamics around 5G Standalone, it’s important to look at the principles of cloud-native computing and how it applies to telecommunications.
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), as the name suggests, is a vendor-neutral consortium dedicated to making cloud native ubiquitous. The group defines cloud native as a collection of “technologies [that] empower organizations to build and run scalable applications in modern, dynamic environments such as public, private and hybrid clouds. Containers, service meshes, microservices, immutable infrastructure and declarative APIs exemplify this approach.”
CNCF writes that the cloud native approach “enable[s] loosely coupled systems that are resilient, manageable and observable. Combined with robust automation, they allow engineers to make high-impact changes frequently and predictably with minimal toll.”
Some of the key watch words there are scalable, microservices and automation.
Spirent Communications Vice President of Product Management Anil Kollipara provided additional commentary on the legacy operator approach to providing connectivity to people and places following a scale up methodology–delivering more capacity by deploying more equipment. “Then came the era with the move towards multimedia as the killer application. That resulted in data-led growth vs. connectivity-led growth.” This, he said, prompted a shift from a scale up approach to a scale out approach.
“The only way you could do that is in software,” Kollipara continued. “That’s where the evolution of SDN came into the picture. Now the problem is as you start scaling out, the number of elements in the network have started increasing.” Now the move is from data-led to application-led. “It is important that the applicant and the end user using the application has a ubiquitous experience. The cloud needs to be fungible to be able to meet that kind of requirement.”
The telco industry is running behind in the move to cloud-native, Kollipara argued. “The legacy architecture of the applications that were built, that work beautifully and perfectly in a telecom world, do not apply in the cloud native world. The virtual world or the cloud native world is expected to fail. It shouldn’t be any surprise when you see failures happen. But the architecture of the applications needs to be resilient to handle those kinds of failures.”
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For its part, Ericsson also highlighted the role of the application as operators pursue cloud-native. The network equipment provider counts the four “main areas” of cloud-native as: “Application design and development; technology and infrastructure; processes and ways of working; [and] management and orchestration.” According to the company: “These four aspects do not exist in isolation. They all influence each other, and so none of them should be overlooked at any point in time. For example, if applications, infrastructure and orchestration all follow cloud-native design patterns, yet the ways of working and organizational setup and model does not take advantage of cloud-native setup, the full potential will not be reached.”
More specific to cloud-native applications built on microservices and containers, Ericsson recommends three principles:
- “Improve granularity and increase speed of software upgrades and releases”
- “Automate through embedded features in the NFVI layer”
- And “adapt software architecture to make much better use of cloud data center resources.”
As for the timing to the transition to 5G Standalone and cloud-native—cloud-native in the sense of an upgraded core, new applications and the other principles of cloud-native outlined above—what’s the outlook for more scaled adoption? “As we all know, the most of the first phase of 5G build is done,” Prakash Sangam, founder and principal with Tantra Analyst, told RCR Wireless News in an interview. “New investment will come only when most of the current network capacity is consumer. 5G-Advanced could spur some of the new build, but the upgrade needed to simply support [5G-Advanced] is minimal.”
Looking in more detail at that capacity trend and the outlook for more advanced enterprise service deliver via network slicing, Sangam noted emerging partnerships between traditional telecom vendors and hyperscalers who could leverage existing on-premise infrastructure and enterprises to essentially provide the last mile and customer touchpoint. “For the time being,” Sangam said, “slicing has to be sold, curated and managed by experts. Strong traction in the enterprise segment is key for slicing. I don’t think enterprise/industrial players, other than a few focused people at large industrial conglomerates…really understand the technology.”
And, he added, even if enterprises were ready to buy a network slice, “I don’t think the operators are…ready.” He said enterprise adoption would start with use cases/applications requiring enhanced mobile broadband and at some point expand to include ultra reliable low latency communications and other 5G features. On that potential future state, Sangam said, “Enterprise usage has to start with eMBB. Also not sure whether operators have the appetite to invest more for those things until they see good returns on the 5G eMBB investment.” Based on a conversation with a hyperscaler executive, Sangam relayed a sense of frustration “on how slow operators more, how risk-averse they are, and more importantly, they always look at it from immediate ARPU gain point of view, no other metric.”
But 2024 could be a big year for 5G Standalone and everything that goes with, according to Steve Douglas, head of market strategy with Spirent Communications. 5G Standalone deployments were “sluggish” in 2023, Douglas wrote in an op-ed, “largely due to the technical challenges of deploying and integrating new, cloud-native 5G core technologies.” But, he said, this year, he expects the market to accelerate. “What’s changed? For the first time, the demand for new 5G SA capabilities, and the supply of network equipment and devices to enable them, are fully aligned.”
He continued to explain, “Suppliers see a 5G market that’s ready to scale. And for good reason: demand for next-generation 5G SA capabilities has officially begun ramping up.” Douglas identified primary use cases driving investment as enterprise private networks, gaming and extended reality and government/military applications. “Demand for 5G SA will continue to grow for use cases like these throughout 2024, but don’t expect an explosion of new 5G SA deployments overnight. Rather, customers will pursue a controlled growth strategy, starting with smaller initial deployments and then scaling out over the next few years.”