Telecom Operators and the Public cloud

When are we going to see a telecom operator moving his network to the public cloud ?

I am not talking about OSS/BSS systems which some operators have already migrated into the public cloud.

i am talking about the real thing , where today tier-1 operators are migrating their network using an openstack private cloud in the world of NFV.

investing in a private cloud is a Huge investment which require those operators to maintain huge data centers.

so while trying to free themselves from vendor lock-down , they actually invest in those private clouds .

those telco companies are new to the cloud and NFV environments, meanings that they need to train and invest in their manpower in order to have the ability to manage at scale this Cloud migration .

nevertheless openstack made a long progress but still stability issues and other problem are there.

telecom operator would probably like to keep the subscribers info in-house , there are also regulations which needs to reviewed and figured out prior to any change .

But, i expect that this day is near , as i know that that there are big financial organizations(banks) which are already negotiating about their migration to Google public cloud , so i don't see any reason why telecom companies won't do the same .

we are seeing a lot of interest coming from AWS ,Azure and google .

a good example is the AWS and Ericsson partnership which was announced on 22th of Feb 2016.

and we can see that AWS has "enhanced networking" features , DPDK/SRIOV technologies are supported , which are required in order to support high line rate(10GB) and High throughput which is essential for Telecom VNFs.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/enhanced-networking.html

if you are interested in hearing more , please comment on this article .

i will be more then happy to write another article on this subject which fascinate me .

Regards

Guy Ben Baruch

Telco NFV Cloud Expert.