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Telecom infrastructure the open source way
The Service Provider technology landscape is complicated at the best of times, and like most technology-based industries, the only real constant is the state of continuous change forced by evolutions. Many external factors contribute to the complexity of modern service providers, none more present than the major standards-based evolutions for the core and radio technologies in mobile service providers. Combine this with the myriad of companies offering solutions to overcome individual use-case demands and needs, and the complexity increases exponentially.
November 13, 2023
2 Min Read
Sponsored by Canonical
Scale and complexity brings similar challenges, big or small. Be it hybrid cloud, public cloud, on-prem large datacenter or highly distributed infrastructure— Canonical open source technology building blocks provide a unified approach to enabling service providers to meet any current or future use-cases, from OpenRAN, next generation Core (5G and beyond) or AI at the edge.
Open source software is becoming increasingly visible in the telecommunications space, starting with VNFs, which mostly run on OpenStack and CNFs living in the Kubernetes world. Thanks to that interest and connecting traditional telco ecosystems with open source innovators, we now see many excellent open source telco projects. Some of them matured enough to be running in Tier 1 mobile networks already - such as ETSI OSM, OpenRAN, Magma, OMEC amongst others.
This paper will walk you through different telecom infrastructure components step by step from an industry perspective, and discuss how open source software can greatly improve the price performance for you.
Introducing open source solutions into highly regulated and secure environments is not easy. In this paper, you will also find solutions to the most common issues people face when they introduce open source to their networks. There are many ways to categorise telecom infrastructure. In this paper, we will do it based on the compute power of the piece as follows:
We start with the smallest ones, user equipment (UE) which are typically single CPU devices, phones, drones, robots or routers all benefit from dedicated OS.
Higher up, we have the cell tower sites, where infra is needed to run radio access network (RAN) software and edge compute next to it in the form of MEC, hosting third party workloads that require low latency.
After this, we have Evolved Packet Core (EPC), typically for private mobile network use cases like IoT, CBRS or smart city.
Next, we enter the realm of big data centers, going to the core network and main operator clouds with huge OpenStack or Kubernetes based environments hosting the beating heart of the telecom network.
The last category, even though this is not an operator owned infrastructure, is public clouds. Many mobile network operators (MNOs) see benefits of using hybrid-cloud approach for scalability and opening up completely new business models.
Now let’s go into the details of each category and see what type of infrastructure delivers best price performance.
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