Why The Cloud Native Telco Still Needs Work
The Mobile Network, Tuesday, March 12th, 2024
Telcos feel they are yet to see the full benefits of cloud-native operations. TMN talks to operators, vendors and cloud platform providers about the cloud-native journey.
Telcos hope to gain new revenues and enable new business models by offering network capabilities as a platform, witness the ongoing programmes on areas like network APIs and programmable network slices. Achieving this relies on an underlying network architecture that is software-based, automatable and flexible. In other words, to get to these new revenues and service capabilities operators will rely on a cloud-native network, just like the hyperscaler platforms with whom they hope to compete and co-operate.
However, despite operating networks which include containerised functions from core to (in a few cases) the RAN, many operators say that they are yet to unlock the full benefits of cloud-native operations.