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AT&T struggles to defend open cloudiness of Ericsson deal
More than a year into the Ericsson-led rollout, there is very little evidence AT&T's radio access network is as multivendor and virtualized as the telco makes out.
Ericsson has landed a deal to provide cloud infrastructure and packet core software to Three UK and will replace Nokia and Microsoft's Affirmed Networks in the process.
Three, the smallest of the UK's four mobile networks, has for several years been running its mobile core on a mixture of products from Nokia and Affirmed Networks. The big Finnish vendor stumps up the infrastructure while Affirmed, owned since 2020 by Microsoft, contributes the packet core software. As the effective control center of the whole network, the core is often thought of as the brains of the operation. But Three's electronic gray matter is now up for a transplant.
Various company-specific and industry upheavals have made that necessary. The existing Nokia infrastructure platform, a product dubbed Nokia CloudBand infrastructure software (CBIS), is reaching the end of its natural life. In mid-2023, just a few months before Three revealed its mobile data core was up for tender, Nokia also said it would be quitting the cloud infrastructure market to focus on applications development, naming IBM-owned Red Hat its primary infrastructure partner. Data traffic on Three's network, meanwhile, has exploded with the telco's offer of unlimited data usage and fixed wireless access, threatening to burst the seams of the current core.
Microsoft is also getting out of telecom – or, at least, getting out of network applications. It has already sold most of Metaswitch, another telco software company it bought in 2020, to Alianza. In public, it has been somewhat coy about its plans for Affirmed, promising continued support for customers. But Iain Milligan, Three's chief network officer, has evidently been told Affirmed is up for sale. "Microsoft have ended that product line, and they're actively looking to sell their Affirmed suite," he told Light Reading.
It's a disappointing move by the US software giant from Milligan's perspective because Microsoft had originally featured in Three's tender. "Microsoft were part of our procurement process right up to the point where they then decided to end the product line," he said. "They essentially exited the process at that stage because of it, which was a bit challenging."
That obviously left Three with fewer options than it previously had, but the company has now picked a replacement, which Light Reading can exclusively reveal as none other than Nokia's big Nordic rival Ericsson. And having formerly split the core between two vendors – Nokia for the infrastructure platform and Affirmed for applications – Three will be taking the whole caboodle from the Swedish supplier.
Throat choking
The shift from two vendors to one is not surprising. Back in October 2023, when Three announced the tender at Informa's Network X event in Paris, the operator had said it wanted a single head to slap ("throat to choke" was the actual and often-used expression, but it sounds more violent), partly to avoid being sucked into work on integrating one vendor's applications with another's infrastructure. With Ericsson, the same vendor brings the packet core software and the cloud platform, with Ericsson's CBIS equivalent simply known as cloud-native infrastructure solution (CNIS). Unlike CBIS, it is obviously not about to be scrapped.
Yet if the transition to a "full stack" is not a surprise in the context of Three's goals, it may look counterintuitive amid all the industry talk of running network applications on cloud platforms that can support multiple different vendors and types of workloads. In Europe, perhaps the best recent example of that is Telefónica Germany's decision last year to run a 5G packet core from Nokia on AWS infrastructure for some of its customers.
Milligan says the public cloud option was explored but dismissed for two reasons, the first of which relates to those throat-choking concerns. "When you take on the multivendor approach, you find it very rare for the application owner to take full accountability for the deployment," he said. "What you then have would be on the Three side us having to become a full integrator, and Three doesn't have the scale to be at an engineering level the full systems integrator."
The other concern was quite simply that forthcoming UK rules under the Telecom Security Act (TSA) prohibit heavy reliance on the public cloud for telco workloads. "The TSA is restricting heavily the amount of network control plane and network decision-making tools that can be in the public cloud," said Milligan. "You'd be buying an AWS, a Microsoft or a Google just for the badge. It wouldn't be a public cloud hyperscaler capability thing, because the TSA from March 27 restricts 80% of the ability to do that."
Nokia, however, is not completely out of the picture. It provides core network products for Three's voice services and databases, and these are to remain despite the data core shift. "What you find is that a lot of operators don't want to mess with voice because it's far more complicated," said Milligan. "It's also quite good from a diversification perspective to have multiple vendors there in any case."
What's more, it is because Three is not overhauling the voice core that Milligan expects to be able to complete the Ericsson transition in less than a year. That will involve deploying new products at about 20 sites across the UK. "It's going to be three to six months to build out the first data center, and then it's a rack and stack and truck roll across 19 data centers," said Milligan. "If it was voice and databases, then you're talking years. But because this is data only, and because we already have the distributed data centers, we can do it quite aggressively."
The biggest packet core in Europe
Nokia will probably frame this as no great setback. Its partnership with Red Hat means it is abandoning CBIS in any case, and the packet core win for Ericsson is a loss for Affirmed and parent company Microsoft, not Nokia. Yet it's inconceivable the Finnish company, with its focus on core network applications, did not participate in Three's tender. And its need to partner with someone else for cloud infrastructure would not have disqualified it. Back in October 2023, Three had indicated it would recognize Nokia and Red Hat as a complete stack, rather than two separate vendors, given the tight relationship between them.
Three was evidently more impressed with Ericsson and its ability to cope with all that network traffic. Indeed, Three describes the new core as the largest in Europe, saying it will more than triple the peak capacity to about nine terabits per second. It will also have the capability to support standalone (SA) 5G, a later version of the standard that severs remaining links with the older and less advanced 4G network, although Milligan says there are no immediate plans for an SA launch. "We've not actually signed a deal to do 5G SA at this stage, but what we are building will enable 5G SA when we're ready to do it," he said.
The news, of course, comes only weeks after UK authorities conditionally approved a merger between Three and Vodafone. And that deal, when it eventually goes ahead, will mean combining two separate mobile networks, with obvious consequences for the suppliers they use. Vodafone, however, has also opted for an Ericsson core, having previously relied on Cisco, and the Swedish vendor features prominently in each telco's radio access network. After the government's decision to ban Huawei drove operators into its arms, the UK for Ericsson just keeps on getting better.
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