New paper offers key principles to modernize and monetize telco networks
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Communication service providers (CSPs) have invested billions in 5G spectrum and network upgrades, aiming to create a new normal for telecom. They envision transforming from traditional telcos to “TechCos” that look and act like the cloud software leaders now dominating the digital marketplace. They’ll use open, automated, software-driven networks to drive down costs and complexity. And they’ll have the agility to quickly, continually bring differentiated service offerings and new vertical use cases to market.
It’s a compelling vision for the future. In the present, however, most of the groundbreaking new offerings are still TBD, and operators are struggling to monetize their investments. What’s holding up 5G transformation? There’s a short answer and a long answer. The short one: we still haven’t completed the transition to 5G. CSPs have deployed 5G radios and a handful of new use cases, but the truly transformative 5G capabilities require open, software-driven networks and operations. And most CSPs are still struggling to adopt them.
For the long answer, download the new VMware white paper OPEN for Business: Breaking Down Barriers to Network Monetization. Based on insights from industry leaders seeing early wins in their transformation journeys, the paper provides a detailed diagnosis of the barriers holding up CSP transformation. And it lays out five key principles that successful CSPs are applying to break through them.
From Telco to TechCo
Leading CSPs know where they want to take their organizations. Instead of providing one-size-fits-all connectivity, they aim to create a versatile, software-driven platform that can continually reassemble network resources in new ways to meet new customer needs. Unfortunately, while CSP leaders have a clear picture of the destination, they face significant barriers to getting there:
- Rigid infrastructures that are purpose built to provide the same generic connectivity, to the same regions
- Siloed operations that use specialized tools and processes for different domains and vendors, keeping costs high and deployment timelines long
- Lack of end-to-end visibility, making it difficult to capture all network data in one place for analysis and AI/ML model training
- Limited ability to innovate, with timelines for adding new services still measured in months, and onboarding new vendors still a long, painful process
The good news is that we already have the platform to overcome these challenges. Indeed, 5G was designed explicitly to catalyze telco transformation. It mandates adoption of disaggregated architectures, bringing CSP networks into the modern cloud world of microservices, container orchestration, and infrastructure-as-code (IaC). It introduces agile software methodologies like continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) toolchains that accelerate new features and innovations. It mandates open APIs, with new components like the RAN intelligent controller (RIC) to run multi-vendor applications close to users. And it assumes new capabilities for closed-loop automation and service customization.
In short, 5G provides an ideal platform to unlock a new generation of high-value services and revenue streams. But before that can happen, CSPs have to actually operationalize the more advanced 5G changes.
The Path Forward: 5 Principles of Telco Transformation
The new VMware white paper lays out the key principles that CSP leaders should keep in mind to accelerate their transformation journeys and unlock new monetization opportunities. At the highest level, these include:
- Changing CSP culture from operator to innovator: If CSPs want to stand alongside today’s cloud leaders, they need to start acting like them, and those efforts must be led from the top. Senior leaders must be fully committed to open architectures and cloud software models, and ready to champion change at all levels of the business. That includes updating KPIs to align with transformation goals (such as prioritizing avoiding problems over fixing them). Critically, CSPs must up-skill and re-skill teams to support new ways of working, and be willing to work with new partners and vertical industry experts for solution design and go-to-market.
- Building a platform for continuous service innovation: CSPs tend to be siloed in their approach to telco services, treating them as almost standalone offerings. The most agile digital leaders don’t work that way, building platforms to host many applications and use cases. Adopting this approach requires CSPs to think differently about how they work with vendors. But by building an open, software-driven cloud platform, they gain the freedom to continually roll out new innovations from new places. They can launch services like fixed wireless access, software-defined edge solutions, and programmable network APIs more quickly and easily.
- Streamline operations: The hardest part of telco transformation isn’t building an open, multi-vendor cloud platform but operationalizing it. Successful CSPs embrace “NetOps”— DevOps software approaches adapted for telco networks and services. They break down vendor- and application-specific silos, and they build horizontal functions like service creation, fulfillment, and assurance that work the same way, using the same tools, for all applications.
- Break down data silos to unleash automation: Legacy toolsets fragment operations into domain- and vendor-specific silos, with no holistic source of network data or abstraction. This makes end-to-end automation impossible and remains the biggest reason CSP operations are so slow and expensive. By adopting a common horizontal cloud platform for all services and applications, CSPs gain a framework for broad visibility and consistency across network layers and teams. And they create a shared data lake for analysis and model training—the foundation of closed-loop automation.
- Commit to open multi-vendor innovation: Openness is central to CSP transformation. It’s the ability to tap into new innovations, wherever they come from, that enables you to continually respond to new opportunities and changing customer needs. But it does require a different approach to working with vendors, and a willingness to create new shared governance and engineering models.
Of course, no CSP is likely to attempt all of these changes at once. But keeping these principles in mind throughout the transformation journey will go a long way towards putting CSP businesses on a more agile and efficient footing for the future.
Start Your Transformation
We still have work to do to take telecom to the open, software-driven future. But there’s a clear path to get there, with partners like VMware to help at every step of the way. We’ve spent decades in the world hardware disaggregation and agile DevOps methodologies, and we’re helping CSPs around the world adopt open, cloud-native approaches.
To find out how your organization can take the next step in your network transformation and monetization journey, download the full white paper now.
