Tour the world’s leading cities—say London, Paris, Tokyo, Sydney—and you’ll keep seeing the same tech company logos: Amazon, Microsoft, Google, all the usual names. Know what you won’t see? AT&T. Xfinity. Telus. It’s one of the odd legacies of telecommunications that most of the biggest names in our industry remain basically regional brands.
Part of this, of course, stems from spectrum licensing and regulatory frameworks. But much of it is simply momentum. Since their origins, Communications Service Providers (CSPs) have been in the business of operating physical networks tied to specific geographies. So, it’s made sense to view their business and market through that lens. But is that still the best perspective?
Modern telcos have access to the same public cloud infrastructure as every other business. As CSPs cloudify their networks for 5G and beyond, they’re already building a foundation for cloud agility and portability. Which means the hurdles to take their presence, services, and virtual operations literally anywhere, can more simply be overcome. If you’re with a North American telecom, for example, what’s preventing you from working with neutral hosts and hyperscale clouds, and bringing your unique brand and service experience to customers in London or Tokyo or anywhere else? Put another way, what’s stopping European or Asian operators from entering your market and competing for your customers? For that matter, what’s stopping hyperscalers from doing that themselves?
So far, most CSP organizations don’t seem to be asking these questions. Which suggests that, as an industry, we’re still not fully grappling with what cloud means for the future of telecom. It’s time to think bigger.
Disruptor or Disrupted?
When it comes to advocating digital transformation, few industries can match the enthusiasm of CSPs—at least when it comes to talking to enterprise customers. We talk about driving agility and automation in manufacturing, healthcare, retail, and every other vertical industry. We paint a picture of operations that follow the sun 24/7/365, where businesses can quickly pivot to new markets and opportunities, respond to supply chain disruptions, all without missing a beat. But turn your gaze to CSPs’ own operations, and we don’t seem to be buying what we’re selling.
Many traditional telecom businesses are simply not agile. The CSP stack is still rigid, stovepipe, regional in nature, captive in territory. This gap between what CSPs say about cloud agility and business transformation, and what they do in their own operations can’t help build credibility with customers. More urgently though, it leaves our industry ripe for disruption.
We’re entering a world where practically every part of the network—network functions, 5G cores, subscriber management—can now run as virtualized software in the telco cloud. Even when it comes to the radio access network (RAN), there are already neutral hosts in many markets that offer access to local radio infrastructure (with more likely to launch in the coming years). Most markets also offer some form of shared access spectrum licensing, similar to Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) in the United States, making spectrum available too.
Solutions like these may not be ideal for offering basic connectivity in new markets, but they could absolutely support a CSP’s branded private mobile network solution now, and a variety of other enterprise and edge offerings in the future. Indeed, a few forward-looking telcos are already doing this. Verizon, for example, now offers its Private 5G solution across Europe and Asia-Pacific. Using shared access spectrum, Verizon Private 5G currently blankets the UK’s largest port. But so far at least, they seem to be one of the few CSPs taking the potential of global cloud reach seriously.
Bottom line, it is now possible to spin up an end-to-end CSP network solution quickly, anywhere, just like any other cloud workload. For the first time, telcos can leave behind the territorial and technological encumbrances of the past, and transform themselves into global “TechCos,” where traditional borders and market barriers no longer apply.
If there’s one big lesson to take from recent decades, it’s that when a market can be disrupted, it will be. Eventually, some TechCo is going to take that next logical step to become the first “global telecom.” The only questions are when and which side you’ll land on. Will your business be the one disrupting? Or will you find yourself scrambling to react as someone else upends the playing field and rewrites the rules for our industry?
Tapping Cloud Agility
If we accept that most telecom networks and operations are soon-to-be software, then we need to face up to all the implications that entails. It’s not that physical infrastructure no longer matters, but it becomes largely interchangeable, commoditized. A service is now largely a collection of software, packaged up with a dynamic manifest to get it from Point A to Point Z in the most efficient and performant way possible. And if you’ve done your job correctly, all the ancillary physical “stuff” to connect that software with the physical world gets abstracted away, addressable as an API.
That’s what being a TechCo looks like. But while this level of business agility is now possible, it doesn’t happen automatically. You have to update your technology stack and operational approach to enable true service portability. In particular, you need to have a framework that allows you to use the same software and the same consistent operations across any cloud and access infrastructure.
Right now, there are roughly a dozen major hyperscalers operating worldwide, and while all provide similar services, every one of them works differently. Each has its own unique architectures, host options, configurations, and processes. If you have to keep re-platforming your workloads, changing up processes, retrofitting and retesting for every public and private cloud you use, you can’t be truly agile. Fortunately, you can build all the infrastructure and service portability you need with VMware Telco Cloud.
VMware: Your Partner for a Cloud-Connected World
VMware can help you implement a cloud-agnostic services layer that extends horizontally across your end-to-end network and operations. Our Telco Cloud abstracts away all the vendor-specific idiosyncrasies of the various cloud infrastructures your workloads might be running on. And it allows you to maintain a single, consistent technology stack and single set of operations no matter where you take your business.
Think of it like developing smartphone apps for Android and iPhone. Wouldn’t it be great if you could write your app once and immediately deliver it to both Android and Apple users, without having to worry about the technical details of each ecosystem? That’s what VMware delivers right now—for 12 global hyperscalers and counting.
With a VMware telco cloud and neutral host partners, you can instantiate a full, end-to-end network, defined and deployed in any data center—your own or any hyperscaler’s, in any market. You gain multi-cloud portability, consistent operations, and a foundation for end-to-end programmability and automation—all the key ingredients for transitioning from telco to TechCo. And indeed, if you look at the CSPs taking the biggest steps today to expand their capabilities, grow in new markets, and differentiate their brands, they’re using VMware technology to help them do it. With a Telco Cloud underlaying their networks, they’re moving beyond geographical borders and into the cloud-connected future.
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Ready take the next step in your journey from traditional telco to agile cloud TechCo? Learn more about building a telco cloud, automating a telco cloud – from the core to the RAN – with unified intelligence and service assurance.
