MUMBAI – Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited (Jio), a subsidiary of Reliance Industries Limited, and Google Cloud are embarking on a comprehensive, long-term strategic relationship with a goal of powering 5G in enterprise and consumer segments nationwide. In addition, Reliance will also take advantage of Google Cloud’s scalable infrastructure thereby enabling its retail business to achieve better operational efficiency, modernize and scale for growth, and deliver better performance and experiences to customers.

Jio and Google Cloud to unlock the transformational impact of 5G

To further Jio’s mission to digitize India with faster and better connectivity, Google Cloud will provide a complete end-to-end cloud offering for fully automated lifecycle management of Jio’s 5G network and services. Google Cloud’s deep expertise and innovation, combined with telco-specific capabilities for security, performance, and resilience, will help Jio’s 5G service to meet the demands of customers, thereby strengthening Jio’s position as one of the leading network and largest service providers in the country.

Edge Cloud infrastructure from Google Cloud provides an open, highly scalable and high-performing platform for supporting Jio, which in turn empowers hundreds of millions of Jio subscribers that are expected to use the 5G service. In addition, Jio and Google Cloud will collaborate to bring a portfolio of 5G edge computing solutions to help industries address real business challenges. Jio will explore building new services across gaming, healthcare, education, and video entertainment sectors. These services will use Jio’s 5G network, software and Google Cloud’s innovations in AI/ML, data and analytics, and other cloud-native technologies—delivered by Jio and powered by Google Cloud.

Retail Businesses to migrate to Google Cloud

As part of the partnership, Reliance will also augment its compute workload for retail business taking advantage of Google’s AI/ML, ecommerce, and demand forecasting offerings. This will help Reliance to rapidly grow its new commerce business to leverage Google Cloud with increased reliability and performance, as well as scale up as needed to respond to customer demand. Jio will also adopt Google Cloud’s scalable, serverless data analytics platform to advance its data-led innovation strategy.

“Cloud solutions is a key area where we are collaborating with Google. Jio will use Google Cloud’s cutting-edge technologies to power Jio’s 5G solutions and for powering the internal needs of key Reliance growth businesses like Reliance Retail, JioMart, JioSaavn and JioHealth,” said Mukesh Ambani, Chairman and Managing Director, Reliance Industries Limited.

“We are delighted to announce a new 5G partnership with Reliance Jio to help Indian consumers connect to a faster and better internet and support businesses in their digital transformation and help Jio build new services in sectors like health. education and more. As part of this collaboration, Reliance will also shift its core retail businesses to Google Cloud infrastructure which will enable them to scale up and improve customer experience,” said Sundar Pichai, CEO, Google and Alphabet.

Reliance Industries-led subsidiary, Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited (Jio) and Google Cloud are embarking on a comprehensive, long-term strategic relationship to power 5G in enterprise and consumer segments nationwide.

Additionally, Reliance will also take advantage of Google Cloud’s scalable infrastructure thereby enabling its retail business to achieve better operational efficiency, modernize and scale for growth, and deliver better performance and experiences to customers.

Mukesh Ambani, Chairman and Managing Director, Reliance Industries Limited said, “Cloud solution is a key area where we are collaborating with Google. Jio will use Google Cloud’s cutting-edge technologies to power Jio’s 5G solutions and for powering the internal needs of key Reliance growth businesses like Reliance Retail, JioMart, JioSaavn and JioHealth.”

“We are delighted to announce a new 5G partnership with Reliance Jio to help Indian consumers connect to a faster and better internet and support businesses in their digital transformation and help Jio build new services in sectors like health. education and more.
As part of this collaboration, Reliance will also shift its core retail businesses to Google Cloud infrastructure which will enable them to scale up and improve customer experience.” said Sundar Pichai, CEO, Google and Alphabet.

Jio and Google Cloud to unlock the transformational impact of 5G:

To further Jio’s mission to digitize India with faster and better connectivity, Google Cloud will provide a complete end-to-end cloud offering for fully automated lifecycle management of Jio’s 5G network and services. Google Cloud’s deep expertise and innovation, combined with telco-specific capabilities for security, performance, and resilience, will help Jio’s 5G service to meet the demands of customers, thereby strengthening Jio’s position as one of the leading network and largest service providers in the country.

Edge Cloud infrastructure from Google Cloud provides an open, highly scalable and high-performing platform for supporting Jio, which in turn empowers hundreds of millions of Jio subscribers that are expected to use the 5G service. In addition, Jio and Google Cloud will collaborate to bring a portfolio of 5G edge computing solutions to help industries address real business challenges. Jio will explore building new services across gaming, healthcare, education, and video entertainment sectors. These services will use Jio’s 5G network, software and Google Cloud’s innovations in AI/ML, data and analytics, and other cloud-native technologies—delivered by Jio and powered by Google Cloud.

Retail Businesses to migrate to Google Cloud

As part of the partnership, Reliance will also augment its compute workload for retail business taking advantage of Google’s AI/ML, e-commerce, and demand forecasting offerings. This will help Reliance to rapidly grow its new commerce business to leverage Google Cloud with increased reliability and performance, as well as scale up as needed to respond to customer demand. Jio will also adopt Google Cloud’s scalable, serverless data analytics platform to advance its data-led innovation strategy.

Casa Systems partnered with Google Cloud to make it possible to integrate the company’s cloud-native 5G standalone core with a hyperscaler public cloud. The advantage of this type of integration, according to Casa, is that it makes it possible to deliver ultra-low latency applications even when the control plane and user plane are separated by hundreds of miles.

Casa said its engineers worked closely with engineers at Google Cloud’s ISV/SaaS Centre of Excellence to field test the solution. The field test demonstrated that it’s possible to separate the control plane and user plane of Casa’s cloud-based 5G SA core across hundreds of miles while still delivering a latency of just 10 milliseconds.

Casa said that during the field test it deployed its 5G SA core in multiple locations and placed the control and user plane functions at different locations. In this case, the control plane was located in Google Cloud’s North Virginia Region and the user plane was placed in Casa’s Andover, Massachusetts, facility.

Casa added that there are other advantages to using the hyperscale public cloud with a 5G SA core. For example, this type of integration will also make it possible for service providers and enterprises to provision services that are deployable anywhere —from the network edge to public clouds, private clouds, and carrier networks.

But Casa Systems isn’t the only company working with a hyperscaler to deliver a cloud-native 5G core. Nokia announced earlier this year that it had teamed with Google Cloud to jointly build cloud-native 5G core solutions for service providers and enterprises. And like Casa Systems, Nokia is also working with Google Cloud’s Anthos for Telecom solution, which is a platform Google built specifically for delivering workloads to the network edge on Google Cloud.

Cloud-native networking is gaining traction with telecom providers because it makes it possible for them to develop applications faster and scale them to a much larger number of subscribers than is possible with traditional applications. Cloud native applications also require less management and have lower operational costs.

Although some operators may move to 5G SA without the benefit of a cloud-native architecture, many experts view having a cloud-native network as being critical to 5G and without it, operators won’t be able to take full advantage of 5G standalone networks.

Frederick, Maryland. – – Spirent Communications plc (LSE: SPT) today announced a collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide automated 5G testing capabilities to communications service providers (CSPs) building 5G networks on AWS. Spirent’s market-first Landslide 5GC automation package is designed to help carriers quickly deploy 5G networks on AWS, significantly reducing operational costs, time, and resources compared to manual testing.

By combining AWS’s continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI / CD) pipeline with Spirent’s vendor-independent 5G testing capabilities, CSP objectively provides mobile network capabilities and services across a wide range of requirements, including compliance. , You will be able to verify quickly and continuously. Capacity and performance dimensions. The integrated solution is aimed at mobile carriers who want to accelerate the delivery of 5G services on AWS.

Doug Roberts, General Manager of Spirent’s Lifecycle Services Assurance Business, said: “The competition for new 5G technology continues, but it is so complex and new that we have established the critical 5G core testing and validation needed for the success of these complex networks and services. There is a real lack of expertise and resources to provide. To the market. ”

With the introduction of 5G network validation on AWS with Spirent’s Landslide 5GC automation package, operators can easily take advantage of fully integrated 5G test automation capabilities to accelerate both 5G network capabilities and service deployment and updates. Can be tested and verified. It provides a continuous delivery framework using AWS CodePipeline and its security and observer best practices and is available in all AWS Regions. This solution is completely isolated, highly extensible, and supports many parallel tests, while enabling some types of network tests that can be automatically triggered as part of the 5G network application pipeline. ..

“Manually establishing such complex test requirements is a very time-consuming process, usually months,” says Roberts. “Thanks to the new collaboration with AWS, service providers can leverage Spirent’s 5G expertise and proven testing techniques to easily integrate automated 5G testing and validation into AWS for months. You can test with confidence, significantly reduce time to market, and analysis shows that you can achieve significant cost savings compared to traditional manual testing methods. It is shown. ”

CSPs can trigger tests and complete validation without the need for additional manual testing or the development of their own test suite. You can reduce the risk of service failures by testing multi-vendor 5G core elements and accelerate test automation without having to build from scratch.

Bell Canada will incorporate Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Wavelength into its 5G network edge, making it the first Canadian operator to use Wavelength, which is Amazon’s cloud platform that’s designed specifically for edge computing. The Canadian service provider also said AWS is its preferred public cloud provider.

Bell’s alliance with AWS is similar to Verizon’s AWS partnership. Verizon made AWS its preferred cloud provider for business applications and then a year later announced it was using AWS Wavelength for its 5G edge network.

AWS Wavelength zones are sites where AWS compute and storage services are embedded within a telecom company’s data centers at the edge of the 5G network. These zones allow data traffic to reach application servers within the zones without leaving the mobile provider’s network. This means that the distance that the application data has to travel is shortened, which improves performance. And because the traffic avoids taking multiple hops between different sites across the internet, like most wireless traffic must travel, it is faster and more secure.

Bell didn’t reveal where it was planning to deploy AWS Wavelength Zones, nor how many it will have. Verizon has 10 AWS Wavelength Zones in cities across the U.S. and KDDI, which also is using AWS Wavelength, has two zones in Japan.

Bell said that it will work with AWS to modernize its applications and services and use AWS advanced capabilities like machine learning and analytics. In addition, it noted that one of the big benefits of AWS Wavelength is that it will open Bell’s network to AWS developers that want to create low-latency applications for services such as immersive gaming, ultra-high-definition video streaming, self-driving cars, and smart manufacturing that will run on the company’s 5G distributed network.

Bell launched 5G a year ago and now its service is available to approximately 35% of Canada’s population. The company said it is on track to cover up to 70% of Canada’s population by year-end.

Bell is pouring a lot of money into its network. The company just increased its capital investment plan from $1.2 billion to $1.7 billion and will use that funding to accelerate its 5G footprint and expand its fiber footprint.

Spirent has partnered with Amazon Web Services to allow service providers building 5G networks on AWS to leverage automated 5G testing capabilities that can reduce their operational costs and time-to-market.

The partnership gives those carriers access to Spirent’s vendor-neutral Landslide 5GC Automation Package in combination with AWS’s Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipeline to help them validate mobile network functions and services for performance, capacity, compliance and other requirements. Parallel tests also can be supported.

Manually setting up all these types of tests could prove to be too time-consuming and complex for some service provider organizations, forcing them into months-long testing and validation programs, Spirent said. By using Landslide on AWS, the operators just need to trigger the tests and complete validation.

Anil Kollipara, senior director, product management at Spirent, told Fierce Wireless via email that Spirent also provides the same testing capabilities through a number of other cloud providers and virtual machine and container platforms.

“Any business providing 5G capabilities (VNFs, CNFs, NFVI, Services, etc.) to CSPs needs to have test automation built into their offering,” he said. “As such, AWS is one such avenue where we see CSPs consuming our test automation software. In other cases, this could be the VNF vendors or even the system integrators.”

This week’s news comes just days after Telefonica validated AWS as an option for 5G SA core deployment in Brazil, a project which included Spirent as the provider of testing for the end-to-end system. AWS in recent months has been working more closely with other operators, such as Verizon, on 5G efforts as well.

Brazilian mobile market leader Telefonica Brasil (Vivo) performed tests with Amazon Web Services (AWS) for the native operation of the core of a 5G standalone (5G SA) network in the cloud, and the results were validated for the performance parameters of a 5G SA network.

According to a report in Teletime, the use of a cloud core is a viable option for the evolution of mobile networks even in the face of the need for immediate evolution to standalone networks (which in Brazil has become an obligation of the 5G notice).

The provision of SA 5G functionality has also been identified as a priority by Brazil’s National Telecommunications Agency (Agencia Nacional de Telecomunicacoes, Anatel).

The tests were carried out in Brazil, but are valid for the other operations of the Telefónica group. Technologies from different network function providers were used in the proof of concept with AWS: Nokia, Oracle, and Mavenir.

Spirent Communications helped validate the end-to-end system, using its core network testing product to verify control plane functionality and high-load testing for user plane performance running in AWS South America Region and on AWS Outputs.

The tests showed that Telefónica’s Vivo can build its 5G core on AWS going forward, as one of the latest operators looking at cloud infrastructure for standalone 5G.

“Thanks to this project, Telefonica has reached a clear milestone in its 5G plans in Brazil and also for its deployment strategy in the group, where cloud-native 5G platforms allow a wide range of private and public infrastructure options,” said Telefonica Cayetano Carbajo, Director of Core, Service Platforms and Transportin Telefonica CTIO.

Telefónica on Friday said it reached a clear milestone for cloud-native 5G plans in Brazil, validating Amazon Web Services (AWS) Outposts as “an effective infrastructure option” to deploy core technology for standalone (SA) services in the country.

Telefónica is looking to increase automation and drive new revenues with cloud-based SA 5G platforms. In Brazil, the work with AWS means the operator’s Vivo brand has a way to build out 5G more quickly and introduce new network processes – with Telefónica calling out Continuous Integration, Continuous Deployment, and Continuous Testing (CI/CD/CT).

“Thanks to this project, Telefónica has reached a clear milestone in its 5G plans in Brazil and also for its deployment strategy in the group, where cloud native 5G platforms allow a wide range of private and public infrastructure options,” said Cayetano Carbajo, director of Core, Transport and Service Platforms for Telefónica’s global CTIO team, in a statement.

Testing by Telefónica’s Vivo brand demonstrated functionality, onboarding and spinning up network functions over AWS, in both the AWS South America Region and on-prem data centers via AWS Outposts.

A trio of vendors provided SA 5G core software, with network functions from Mavenir, Nokia and Oracle. Spirent Communications helped validate the end-to-end system, using its core network testing product to verify control plane functionality and high-load testing for user plane performance running in AWS South America Region and on AWS Outputs.

The tests showed that Telefónica’s Vivo can build its 5G core on AWS going forward, as one of the latest operators looking at cloud infrastructure for standalone 5G.

In the U.S. Dish Network is building out a brand-new SA 5G network with open radio access network (open RAN) architecture and using AWS to host, the first major telco to do so. Mavenir, Nokia and Oracle are suppliers for its 5G core.

Fabio Cerone, managing director of EMEA Telco for AWS, in a statement expressed excitement that Telefónica’s Vivo validated AWS Outposts “as one of their best options” for deploying a 5G core network.

“With the option to build their 5G Core on AWS, Telefónica is opening the door to leveraging AWS’s breadth and depth of cloud services across their on-premises locations,” Cerone continued. “With AWS, Telefónica can fully automate their network and dynamically scale and allocate their 5G network capacity to meet the needs of their business and consumer customers.”

Mavenir just disclosed tighter integration with AWS, collaborating to offer cloud-based network functions to telcos on AWS computing infrastructure.

The suite of cloud-based 5G products delivered on AWS include containerized and micro-serviced converged 4G/5G packet core, IMS, messaging, orchestration, AI, telco analytics and open RAN products.

Verizon also is working with AWS in the U.S., tapping the cloud player for mobile edge compute efforts.

Speaking earlier this week at a J.P. Morgan investor conference, Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg talked about the partnership with Amazon and how the carrier is creating applications for customers seeking super low latency and ultra-high throughput – both with public and private 5G MEC.

“There are other companies that are thinking about offloading their software, their radio technology and being run on a cloud infrastructure. That’s a different way,” Vestberg said, according to transcript. “We are virtualizing our networks as well. But we’re not doing it on standard cloud infrastructure.”

That’s one of the big differences, he said, between Amazon’s efforts with Verizon versus with Dish

Verizon Business and Amazon Web Services said Monday they are expanding their 5G collaboration to bring private mobile edge computing (MEC) to U.S. enterprise customers.

The solution will deliver a completely dedicated edge compute infrastructure on-premise that enables ultra-low latency, higher levels of security and deeper customization that fully integrates Verizon’s Private 5G networks and Private Edge platform with AWS Outposts, according to the announcement.

This allows Verizon enterprise customers to use the private MEC to deploy real-time enterprise applications like intelligent logistics, robotics, predictive maintenance, factory automation and more to help lower costs and improve efficiency.

Corning Inc., a materials science and advanced manufacturing company, will be the first company to leverage the solution, according to the announcement.

The solution will have use cases in factories, warehouses, and large business campuses and it supports unified connectivity, compute and storage without having the customer having to own the networking and IT infrastructure.

According to Verizon, the MEC solution will support a wide range of industrial applications, like autonomous mobile robots, predictive maintenance, quality assurance and near real-time monitoring and hazard alerts.

“Verizon’s Private 5G Edge platform will give customers a reliable, secure, high bandwidth, low latency connection to AWS services, APIs, and tools running on AWS Outposts,” the Verizon announcement said. “Additionally, two smaller AWS Outposts — 1U and 2U form factors — will give customers options to deploy AWS on-premises in space-constrained locations.”

The edge computing collaboration between the two companies began with the Verizon 5G Edge with AWS Wavelength, which was launched in August. The companies have announced the general availability of 5G mobile edge computing via Wavelength Zones in 10 cities across the U.S.

Private MEC is a natural expansion on the collaboration between the two companies, said Dave Brown, vice president of Elastic Compute Cloud at AWS, in a statement.

“Customers are already leveraging AWS Wavelength’s ability to provide ultra-low latency access to end users for use cases like video distribution, inference at the edge, AR/VR, and connected vehicles,” Brown said. “Now, Private 5G MEC from AWS and Verizon brings ultra-low latency to dedicated, closed, on-premises environments for use cases such as autonomous mobile robots, quality assurance, and hazard alerting.”

5G is clearly a new revolution which supports various new technologies – autonomous cars, augmented and virtual reality – by providing low latency and higher bandwidth on the network. For the first time, with 5G, telecom network workloads are shifted to cloud and becoming the service-based architecture (SBA) where network will be used to push services to subscribers. Additionally, edge clouds are being introduced which further extends 5G capabilities and delivers faster, reliable services by physically putting processing and storage capacity closer to the end user.

It is seen that telcos and hyperscalers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud are looking to make the most of opportunities which arise with 5G cloud and edge cloud. The concept of cloud-based 5G is completely new for telcos who are experienced in proving the last mile connectivity at every part of the continent or country. Hyperscalers are good at providing the agility, availability and innovation applications and have smooth operations globally. To tap the opportunities in edge, hyperscalers came up with new solutions – Outposts and Wavelength, Azure Edge Zones, Google Anthos – to stay in the hunt to deliver services from cloud to edges.

Additionally, the Open RAN movement, not just the edge, opens the door for telcos and hyperscalers to strategise the revenue model as it will involve more vendors participating in RAN innovation.

Cases where telcos and hyperscalers will work together
Despite having vast experience in managing services and operations of huge networks, due to cloud adoption for 5G, telecom networks cannot explode the network requirements like various upgrades of software component, network equipment and purpose-built hardware resources. Telecom networks need to build and strengthen the cloud-based platform and orchestrate the network function effectively to deliver agility in application deployments. Hyperscalers can help in this case to quickly roll out the infrastructure and platforms to monitor those components and scale or upgrade when needed.

The main reason for having edge cloud closer is for the end user to process and deliver data as swiftly as possible. This process also holds the state of data which is important for applications deployed at the edge. Telcos will need hyperscalers in this case so that it is possible to manage and distribute the data across various edges and towards end users.

It will continue to be time consuming for telcos to push NFV infrastructures which form the edge cloud that will be deployed at various data centre locations and further interconnection will be required to manage and orchestrate from a single pane of glass. Hyperscalers can help in this case to provide services around containers and orchestration platforms like Kubernetes to streamline service operations at NFV infrastructure level. Wavelength Zones and Azure Zones for instance can help in this case. This way hyperscalers get more control on the applications and services part of the network but it resolves the issues of faster deployment along with better control.

Recent innovations in telecom networks are capabilities such as zero touch operations and network-as-a-service which brings more power to extend the key forte of operators to manage vast networks. But with this ‘cloudification’, it is important to take into account the 5G services to be offered to customers and customised services offered through edge cloud. Various vendors are going to be involved in edge cloud to deploy their applications in various regions, such as startups, OTT providers, and established software vendors.

As per a KPMG report (pdf), by 2023, with a growth in the adoption of 5G and edge computing, the five target industries (industrial manufacturing, connected healthcare, intelligent transportation, gaming, and environmental monitoring) are forecast to generate US$500 billion in annual revenue into the entire ecosystem, including connectivity, hardware, software and services.

Considering this, it becomes important for both telcos and hyperscalers to join hands considering the proliferation of edge-based services. This will open up new revenue streams for both.

Furthermore, hyperscalers are powerful in terms of finances and capabilities around software applications (automation, reliability, security). But to stay in the 5G and edge game, hyperscalers lack the penetration in last-mile connectivity, and would like to use the extensive and vast network connectivity strength of telcos. Telcos are evolving to software-based nature at various stages – from cloud to edge and far edge – and hyperscalers will help them provide customers of desirable application with low latency.

Telcos also have the upper hand in terms of buying a spectrum from local governments to deploy their networks and procure the necessary licenses and approval to provide telecom services. By partnering with telcos, hyperscalers can theoretically bypass the need for having those licenses to deliver the cloud services.

Conclusion
Hyperscalers and telcos have their own strengths and weaknesses to deliver high performance 5G. Telcos are now advanced due to network automation and network-as-a-service capabilities, while hyperscalers are strong with data analytics, AI/ML, security and lifecycle management of software components and services. But both have their own limitations for 5G. At the customer end, after a spike in internet usage due to Covid-19 last year it is surely necessary that both should collaborate and evolve further to overcome future challenges in delivering services.

Dell Technologies and VMware are building a new edge computing platform with SK Telecom to provide private 5G in a single multi-edge compute (MEC) box to give enterprises more secure and reliable access to data at edge locations.

The new OneBox MEC is based on Dell’s PowerEdge XE2420 server coupled with the VMware Telco Cloud Platform and South Korea-based SK Telecom’s 5GX MEC platform to offer fully integrated private 5G connectivity and edge computing services. The OneBox MEC delivers 5G-enabled edge computing that will boost latency, applications and content delivery at the edge.

Approximately 40 percent of enterprises have issues with the latency of their current networking solutions, according to a recent study commissioned by Dell, SK Telecom (SKT), VMware and Intel. For hospital patient monitoring systems, 61 percent of those surveyed said they’ve experience performance issues, while 45 percent expressed reliability concerns with their current solutions.

The OneBox MEC will help customers use private mobility and edge computing to develop new services where the data is created in industries like healthcare, retail and construction.

The edge computing market is being hailed as the biggest opportunity since the cloud and as the fuel that will power the next wave of digital transformation.

The worldwide edge computing market is expected to reach approximately $250 billion in 2024, with a compound annual growth rate of 12.5 percent over the next four years, according to IDC. Services, such as professional and provisioned services, will account for 46 percent of all edge spending by 2024, followed by hardware at 32 percent, and then edge-related software at 22 percent.

“The edge is the new frontier for innovation,” said Lakshmi Mandyam, vice president of product management for VMware’s Telco & Edge Cloud, in a statement. “The platform we are building with Dell Technologies and SKT will help enterprises innovate at the edge with velocity and bring new and exciting experiences to their customers. Our Telco Cloud Platform provides a foundation on top of which enterprises can deliver edge services on any cloud with agility and a consistent experience.”

SkyHive’s Steele said it bodes well for channel partners that Dell and VMware are continuing their deep technology integration strategy in 2021.

“Integration is a must these days, the less time we have to put into customizing solutions the faster we can get our customer’s solutions and services to market,” he said. “We love seeing new Dell and VMware integrated solutions as we know our customers expect the best and Dell and VMware always deliver.”

“[5G] solves the last few hundred yards and makes it a lot better, but the internet is still the internet and it was never built for real-time applications,” he said.

However, according to Brian Lavallée, the senior director of portfolio marketing for Ciena’s 5G, packet, and submarine networking solutions, that isn’t the full story.

5G, he explained, does more than just add capacity to the network and offer fasting downloads.

“You’re looking at latency down to 1 ms, which is extremely fast, even for gamers,” he continued. That’s a really, really low latency.”

In addition, he brought up the promise of network slicing, commenting that people always seem to forget about this key feature of 5G. With network slicing, a user can get end-to-end guaranteed performance and latency. Further, it’s possible to “bind” the latency, which is particularly valuable for gamers who certainly don’t want their latency to fluctuate while they’re playing.

“This is a bit way out,” he admitted. “We still need 5G standalone version, but when that promise of network slicing arrives, it will guarantee an end-to-end performance, and that goes far beyond the last mile.”

Lavallée’s mention of the “last mile” is a reference to Towfiq’s claim that 5G really only addresses the last mile of the network, but it’s actually the “middle mile”, or where ISPs connect their networks to one another, that causes problems for multiplayer gaming.

Towfiq also challenged cloud gaming, saying that edge computing won’t solve for the online multiplayer category of gaming either.

“Even if you’re close enough to the cloud gaming server, you still have the rest of the internet to contend with for multiplayer, you still have to go to a server somewhere in the world where all other players are meeting you,” Towfiq argued. And because every multiplayer game needs a certain number of players in each game, you can only have a few servers per continent, and therefore you can’t just keep moving every server closer to each gamer. If you were to do that, “the interactive player pool goes down to ultimately one.”

Lavallée agreed that in order for edge-computing to prove useful to online gamers, there needs to be a lot of data centers, but he also believes that there will, in fact, be a lot of data centers.

“There are estimates that there will be about 500% more [edge]data centers built out in addition to the centralized ones,” he provided. “So, the comments from Subspace that you would need a lot more data centers? Yeah, that’s absolutely the case, but that’s also absolutely where the market is going.”

He admitted that you can’t build the data centers closer to everybody and so they will most likely be placed near larger, denser locations. He also acknowledged this issue of player location brought up by Towfiq is a valid one, saying, “One of the issues with massive multiplayer games is, where are the users. If I’m in New York and I’m playing someone in London, [latency]does come into play because wherever you are on the screen, those coordinates have to be sent to the other users as fast as it can.”

So, while edge cloud does help you reduce the latency of a number of gaming factors, latency is still a challenge in a massive multiplayer online game — but there will still be significant improvement from what gamers are experiencing currently.

“And there are ways to play with this, if you’re the developer of the game,” added Lavallée. “That centralized location that processes all of the coordinates, they can do some artificial intelligence and software coding to make it fair to gamers and smooth out the latency, so that everybody [is]experiencing the same latency.”

The final aspect of this conversation to address is the reality that hardcore multiplayer gamers are not necessarily the target user for 5G and cloud gaming because most of those players don’t even use Wi-Fi when playing. Instead, they hardwire-connect directly into their residential broadband, and there is little reason to expect this to change.

“A true gamer looking to shave [off]milliseconds is probably hardwired into the internet, not over a mobile network,” explained Lavallée. “But if you’re gaming on your mobile phone, for example, you will be a little more forgiving because as soon as you hit the airwaves on Wi-Fi, performance isn’t very reliable, but cellular performance is going to be something different. It’s going to be very fast, and that guaranteed end-to-end performance is something that Wi-Fi can never give you.”

Therefore, the real question is, can 5G and edge-computing deliver a better experience for casual and mobile gamers? For Lavallée, the answer is yes, and more importantly, that is a valuable category of users made up of roughly 2.2 billion people. In fact, according to Iron Source, the global revenue from mobile gaming is expected to reach $76.7 billion by the end of 2020, which represents a 12% over 2019.

BELLEVUE, Wash., Nov. 02, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — 5G Americas, the wireless industry trade consortium and voice of 5G and LTE for the Americas, today announced the election of VMware to its Board of Governors. VMware will join the wireless industry’s leading operators and manufacturers who are crucial to the deployment of 5G and beyond throughout the Americas region.

“VMware’s experience in disruptive technologies like edge computing, artificial intelligence, blockchain, machine learning, Kubernetes orchestration and more– is defining the digital foundation that will accelerate the next wave of innovation,” stated Chris Pearson, President of 5G Americas. “We are ecstatic to announce that VMware is joining the 5G Americas Board of Governors as we work towards a transformative connected 5G society.”

With the emergence of 5G, telcos have an opportunity to reinvent themselves, develop new business models, and engage with the larger innovation ecosystem to deliver new services that are more germane in the digital world. This transformation can require a virtualized and containerized telco cloud architecture to modernize legacy networks. VMware focuses on delivering the cost, agility, and scalability benefits of a cloud, tailored to communications service provider (CSP) needs including Telco Cloud Infrastructure, Telco Cloud Automation and Telco Cloud Operations. The company counts more than 100 communications service providers globally as customers serving millions of subscribers.

“As the CSPs scale out their systems with 5G, significant opportunities remain untapped,” said Kaniz Mahdi, Vice President, Advanced Technologies, Telco Edge and Cloud, VMware. “We are thrilled to join the 5G Americas Board of Governors and look forward to bridging the wireless and cloud industries for the digital transformation of our society with fusion of 5G, AI and Cloud.”

The addition of VMware to the association brings added expertise in the growing 5G technology wireless ecosystem, including areas such as those highlighted in 5G Americas white papers involving 5G and the Cloud and 5G at the Edge.

About 5G Americas: The Voice of 5G and LTE for the Americas

5G Americas is an industry trade organization composed of leading telecommunications service providers and manufacturers. The organization’s mission is to facilitate and advocate for the advancement and transformation of LTE, 5G and beyond throughout the Americas. 5G Americas is invested in developing a connected wireless community while leading 5G development for all the Americas. 5G Americas is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington. More information is available at 5G Americas website and Twitter.

Virtual Infrastructure giant VMware said that it is collaborating with Samsung Electronics to work on 5G solutions. Through this alliance, the companies seek to push Samsung’s portfolio of telco offerings from Core to Edge to RAN for both containerized network functions (CNFs) and virtualized network functions (VNFs) with VMware Telco Cloud Platform.

As part of this collaboration, the companies have been working together at Samsung’s lab to optimize and accelerate the readiness of Samsung’s various VNFs and CNFs, such as vRAN, 5G Core, MEC, Management, and Analytics, with the VMware Telco Cloud Platform. Samsung’s VNFs and CNFs have been and continue to be integrated with VMware’s Telco Cloud program.

The VMware Telco Cloud program will support Samsung to accelerate the onboarding and deployment of their 5G-ready services on the VMware Telco Cloud Platform, thereby enabling CSPs to accelerate their time to deploy and time to revenue, said the company.

“With innovative and open 5G networks beginning to transform the landscape, Samsung sees the value in delivering carrier-grade solutions with VMware that help CSPs easily embrace cloud native technology and efficiently deliver our network functions and services across their 5G networks with automation,” said Wonil Roh, Senior Vice President and Head of Product Strategy, Networks Business at Samsung Electronics.

With VMware Telco Cloud Platform, CSPs can deploy a cloud native, software-defined 5G network that will accelerate the delivery of services and applications across distributed telco clouds with operational consistency, integrated lifecycle management and multi-layer automation while maintaining carrier-grade performance, scalability and reliability.

“The infrastructure supporting 5G will depend on virtualized and containerized network functions delivered from software-defined telco and edge cloud platforms,” said Shekar Ayyar, executive vice president and general manager, Telco and Edge Cloud Business Unit, VMware.

“We are thrilled to be working with Samsung to deliver carrier-grade solutions that leverage the VMware Telco Cloud portfolio to help CSPs seize this 5G moment and transform themselves into leading technology innovators,” he added.

The companies said that as 5G continues to gain traction, CSPs will require a cloud native network that will improve the flexibility and efficiency of deploying services into new verticals faster. At the same time, CSPs can only achieve this with a cloud-first automated network designed to simplify management and operations while lowering operational costs.

The wireless world entered 2019 at an inflection point. Landmark developments in 5G, cloud-native software, edge computing, and custom hardware were converging to reshape how enterprises think about connectivity and compute infrastructure. From sports stadiums and retail buildings to airports and urban street corners, no physical environment was left untouched by these rapid changes.

Below are five trends that defined the wireless technology evolution of that era — and whose implications continue to play out today.

1. Software Will Eat the Wireless World

The assumption that “technology equals software” is a simplification, but it captures a real market dynamic. Even cloud computing — itself the engine of the most recent software wave — was being disrupted from within. Cloud-native ecosystems such as Docker and Kubernetes began eroding the proprietary value of vertically integrated cloud providers by making workloads portable across any infrastructure substrate, spanning multiple architectures, providers, and form factors.

For wireless infrastructure, this meant that the intelligence governing how networks are managed, sliced, and optimized was increasingly delivered through software layers rather than proprietary hardware stacks. Network functions virtualization (NFV) and software-defined networking (SDN) accelerated this shift, enabling carriers and enterprises to program their networks rather than re-cable them.

2. Hardware Is Not a Commodity

Despite the software narrative, hardware was staging a quiet comeback. The limits of general-purpose CPUs for workloads such as machine learning inference, packet processing, and real-time video analytics were driving significant investment in specialized silicon: GPUs, FPGAs, SmartNICs, and purpose-built accelerator cards.

The insight here is that software and hardware are not in opposition — the most capable infrastructure stacks require both to be co-designed. Customizable, bare-metal hardware in combination with cloud-native software represents a powerful deployment model, particularly at the network edge where latency budgets are tight and compute resources are constrained.

This trend has continued to accelerate. Custom silicon efforts from major cloud providers and chip vendors underline that differentiated hardware remains a genuine competitive moat.

3. Real Estate Is Being Digitized

Enterprises deploying wireless and compute infrastructure at scale quickly discovered that traditional data centers are not the right model for every use case. Applications such as 5G radio access, mobile gaming, augmented reality, and real-time analytics require compute resources that are geographically distributed and physically close to end users.

This drove a new category of infrastructure deployment: digitizing physical real estate. Large venue operators — stadiums, airports, co-working spaces, shopping centers — became candidate locations for micro data centers and edge compute nodes. Rather than routing traffic to a centralized cloud region hundreds of miles away, operators could process data on-site, reducing latency and improving the user experience for high-density environments.

For DevOps teams, this introduced new operational complexity: infrastructure is no longer confined to a handful of known data center locations, but distributed across dozens or hundreds of edge sites that must be managed consistently.

4. 5G Is Really About Private Networks

Much of the public conversation around 5G focused on consumer smartphones and headline download speeds. But for enterprises, the more strategically significant development was the emergence of private 5G and private LTE networks.

Industrial companies — manufacturers, logistics operators, port authorities, healthcare systems — have connectivity requirements that public carrier networks are poorly suited to meet. These requirements include deterministic low latency, network isolation for security, and the ability to operate independently of public infrastructure. Private LTE and 5G networks, enabled in part by spectrum access frameworks such as Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) in the United States, made it feasible for enterprises to own and operate their own wireless networks on licensed or shared spectrum.

Private 5G deployments allow organizations to apply the same security and access-control policies to wireless connectivity that they apply to their wired networks, closing a significant gap in enterprise network architecture.

5. Edge Computing: The Next Frontier in Cloud Infrastructure

Edge computing refers to processing data at or near the source — on a device, at a base station, inside a venue, or at a regional hub — rather than routing everything to a centralized cloud data center. For latency-sensitive applications such as autonomous vehicles, industrial automation, augmented reality, and real-time video analytics, the physics of light-speed transmission mean that centralized cloud architectures simply cannot meet the required response times.

Edge computing is not a single technology but a deployment philosophy. It encompasses a spectrum of locations and compute tiers:

• Device edge: Processing on the end device itself (smartphones, sensors, cameras).
• On-premises edge: Compute located within the enterprise facility or venue.
• Network edge: Compute co-located with carrier infrastructure such as base stations or central offices.
• Regional edge: Smaller cloud regions positioned closer to population centers than hyperscaler availability zones.

For DevOps engineers, edge computing extends familiar automation and orchestration challenges into environments that are physically distributed, resource-constrained, and sometimes intermittently connected. Tooling choices — container runtimes, orchestration platforms, observability stacks — must account for these constraints.

What These Trends Mean for DevOps and Infrastructure Teams

Taken together, these five shifts have material implications for how engineering teams plan, build, and operate infrastructure:

• Infrastructure-as-code must scale to edge sites. Managing configuration drift across hundreds of distributed edge nodes requires mature automation practices and centralized control planes.
• Hardware selection matters again. Workload-specific silicon choices — accelerators, SmartNICs, ARM-based processors — affect both performance and operational complexity.
• Network and compute teams are converging. 5G private networks and edge deployments blur the traditional boundary between network engineering and cloud infrastructure. Teams that can work across both domains are increasingly valuable.
• Security perimeters are dissolving. When compute nodes exist in co-working spaces, stadiums, and street-level cabinets, physical and logical security models must be redesigned from first principles.
• Observability becomes harder and more important. Distributed edge deployments generate more failure modes and make centralized logging and metrics collection more architecturally challenging.

The trends identified in 2019 were early signals of a structural shift in how compute and connectivity infrastructure is designed. Understanding their trajectory helps engineering teams anticipate where investment and skill development will be most valuable in the years ahead.