Telcos are under increasing pressure to scale their network operations and to see the return on their 5G investments
As telecommunications providers continue the shift towards multi-vendor, multi-cloud and cloud-native architectures, their operations are only become more and more complex. There is increasing need to scale their network operations and to see the return on their 5G investments. According to Timea Laszlo, the product manager at VMware, they can’t do these things without moving from “rule-based” to “end-to-end” automation.
At the Telco AI Forum, Laszlo detailed the key differences between each level of automation and argued that telcos shouldn’t wait to begin their journey towards fully automated network operations.
Laszlo told event attendees that most telcos are on level 1 or level 2 automation, which means there may be some amount of automation, but largely, they are still manually operating their networks. “When we go above these levels to 3,4,5 that’s when we actually change the way we operate the networks,” she said, adding that level 3 means the automation is conditional or rule based. “So auto-scale, auto-heal can work in situations where it can be controlled by a rule, but humans still need to make a decision in unexpected situations,” she explained.
“When we go to the upper levels — for example level 4 — we can extend this to cross-domain use cases. It’s more complex, we have more data, and the network can adapt to some unexpected situations, but it still requires human involvement. When we talk about level 5, that’s the fully automatous network, which is self-learning without human interactions,” she continued. Level 5 networks frees telcos up to focus on revenue-generating innovations and services, she said.
The ‘magic’ of automation
Because telcos are moving towards open and cloud-native networks, they need to operate tools and applications from multiple vendors and these different elements must work together. Further, telcos operate with five nines, and therefore, cannot afford outages. Ensuring the successful integration of different tools and applications takes requires a great deal of testing, which takes time and trust, stated Laszlo.
“Automation really helps,” she claimed, commenting that while it’s hard for telcos to “let go” of some of the control and management of their networks, it’s important that they “empower their teams [and] let [automation] do the magic.” She added, as well, that telcos should “include the automation from the beginning” and “select vendors that are aligned with their automation vision.”
“Telcos are under huge pressure right now to reduce cost and progress towards 6G networks, and think all of this will encourage them to adopt automation more and more,” she concluded. “We can expect significant progress is the next five to 10 years.”
Watch the full session and more on-demand at the Telco AI Forum website.
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