Carriers Seeing Pressure to Move to Stand-alone 5G

Non-stand-alone 5G networks tied to a core 4G network worked well in 5G's first phase, but they can’t handle network slicing and other things the new generation of wireless is promising, speakers said Monday during Fierce Network’s Cloud Native 5G Summit.

All the “exotic” services 5G promises need a stand-alone (SA) network, Prakash Sangam, principal at Tantra Analyst, said. Given the level of investment in 5G, and the slow growth in the return on investment, carriers are reluctant to invest even more, Sangam said. “They’re kind of in a catch-22 situation,” he said: Carriers need new apps and services that require SA to invest more capital, while app developers are waiting for broader deployments of advanced networks to develop new use cases.

“How do you get out of the quagmire?” Sangam asked. Providers in China and India started with SA networks and could surge ahead of the U.S., he said.

The wireless industry promised a lot with 5G and has fallen short so far, said Sylwia Kechiche, senior director-industry analysis at Opensignal. But this is just the beginning “and we have to be clear about that,” she said. We’re still not seeing ultra-low reliability or massive IoT because 3rd Generation Partnership Project releases haven’t been implemented. It takes time between when a release is approved, and it comes “into play,” she said.

Starting with non-SA launches let providers deploy 5G quicker, Kechiche said. The benefit was carriers could offer 5G speeds without overhauling their networks and Opensignal is seeing faster download speeds, she said. We’re still not seeing expected latency improvements, which will require a SA network, she said. Fixed wireless access works better on a 5G non-SA network than on a 4G network, Kechiche said. “Operators, eventually, if they want to offer additional use cases, will have to upgrade to SA.”

The wireless industry is seeing “steady progress” in cloud-native 5G deployments, with about 40 SA 5G networks launched, said Ramesh Nagarajan, Google Cloud head-network modernization and partnerships. The industry is also seeing a rise in virtualized radio access networks, he added. “This architecture brings unprecedented scalability and agility” to the RAN, which traditionally has been a “notoriously complex” part of the network, he said.

Adoption of cloud-native technology is “rapidly evolving” and accelerating and the impact is “deepening,” Nagarajan said: We’re moving from “early experimentation” to “real-world deployments.” The increase in data demands on networks is driving the need for automation, he said. Carriers are bringing application programmable interfaces closer to cloud developers, and that trend is also accelerating, he said.

The challenges of moving to a cloud-native world aren’t all technical, with a “cultural shift” also necessary, Nagarajan said. Some operators have “deeply traditional processes” in place, he said.

The move to cloud native networks is in very early stages, and the level of maturity “is not so high,” said Philippe Ensarguet, Orange vice president-software engineering. The telecom industry is “10 years back at best” compared with the tech industry, he said. Operators need to “move from the vertical world” to “something that is much more horizontal,” sharing “at least the infrastructure and the automation layer” of the network, he said.

Carriers are moving operations to the cloud in stages, Shawn Hakl, Microsoft vice president-5G strategy operations support systems, said. Most started with business support systems (BSS) “because that was easiest,” he said. But even changing BSS “is a challenging thing, and it’s not enough to just migrate, you’ve got to replatform,” he said. Carriers are slowing moving operations support systems (OSS) to the cloud, but these systems raise significant issues in terms of the amount of data that has to be addressed and protecting data privacy, he said. “It’s much more sensitive information,” he said.

“You’re seeing a slow move starting with BSS, then OSS, and now you’re seeing the core network workloads” moving to the cloud, Hakl said.

The telecom “ecosystem has not fully evolved” and isn’t “fully cloud native,” said Shujaur Mufti, a senior manager in Red Hat's telecom unit. “There is some work required, there is some vision required,” he said.