You can do what with your phone?

As we continue to predict how the world will look according to 5G, Telcos are also considering how to deliver on the promise that the new standard holds. Fundamentally it will improve user experiences by delivering new, faster (one millisecond end-to-end round trip delay) and more seamless (1000x bandwidth per unit area) services. This entails providers improving their ability to deliver and support a heavy line-up of data-intense services.

It’s a big shift; both in customer expectations and in technology. It requires new approaches to network operations; new skills and effective ways of providing a bridge from what is, to what will be. Consumers will be looking for exquisite personalized services delivered instantaneously to their smartphones. The world will be real-time. Meanwhile, the enterprise and society will expect far more.

The GSMA suggests that 5G will cover a third of the world’s population by 2025, approximately 1.4 billion connections. Providing a thought-provoking context for the impact of 5G on network operations, the GSMA says:

“5G will see a major shift in how cellular networks are designed and what they are used for. Mobile operators will use new network architectures…Advanced software will enable the mobile network to adapt to the needs of the service, rather than the other way around.”

The 1.4 billion connections won’t, of course, all be enthusiastic gamers on their morning commutes thrilled with faster speeds. They’ll be connections changing the way society functions, becoming the base enabler of autonomous driving, remote robotic surgery, smarter manufacturing, and, yes, great fun gaming. A bigger focus than ever before will bring data analytics to the top of the agenda; the ability to assimilate huge volumes of data and extract the meaning from it in real-time to drive ever-more responsive services and deliver the fundamental requirement of IoT; the ability of machines and systems to talk to each other and react accordingly.

Enormous commercial opportunity

Autonomous cars will be communicating in real-time with traffic systems and other vehicles. Smart homes and office buildings will be sensing environmental influences to activate internal building systems. Transportation systems in smart cities will be more in evidence. Virtual Reality will become a widespread, well, reality. Healthcare will embrace remote intervention and prevention capabilities. IoT, in short, will lean heavily on 5G.

It’s time to make sure not just that your network can take the weight, but also that your entire approach to network architecture – the creation of 5G-capable infrastructures – and servicing customer needs is geared around an enormous commercial opportunity and potential new revenue streams.

Planning for transition and beyond

I’d like to explore how to put this ‘bridge’ in place; allowing the crossing-over from a 3G/4G world into 5G while taking a view that also goes beyond that. Any CSP needs to be concerned with the long-term value of investments and/or the sustainability of changes to network management, technology and company culture; it’s not just about the opportunity to come but the many opportunities that may then come after that.

Network changes undertaken in response to the requirements of 5G will stand the network in very good stead for many years to come. These changes may well dictate bringing new skills into the business, restructuring teams, and basically becoming the sort of organisation that can thrive in a substantially redefined competitive environment. Solutions should be robustly future-proofed; capable of evolving as demands on the network evolve, which they certainly will.

The NFV path to innovation

NFV is a prime enabler in the essential network transformation. My colleague, Gabriele Di Piazza, discusses the essential agility that NFV brings to network infrastructure automation and orchestration in his blog: The network is at the epicentre of all that happens next; Multi-access Edge Computing is right there alongside it. Network operators can react faster when they decouple core network functions from hardware appliances.

An Ericsson spokesperson puts it in perspective:

“NFV is now a prerequisite for having the kind of network that you need to be able to address the IoT workload for 5G. Furthermore, the time is now for operators to formulate their strategies to transition their core network in preparation for 5G in 2020.”

Changes made to the network now need not be regarded as fixed in stone or, in other words, embedded in the machine. At VMware we’re delivering solutions that enable CSPs to build the bridge now, work with containerised applications, but also lay the foundations for the road ahead after the transition, wherever that may lead. Without NFV there is no easily operable solution to grasp the enhancements that 5G will bring.

Telcos should consider that NFV is a mandatory first step towards 5G, but effective deployment depends on a partner, architecture and technology strategy to pin down the journey path and streamline network operations.

What do you think? Have you made the shift to NFV ahead of the arrival of 5G? If not, do you think you need to be exploring why not? Is it something you’d like to explore further? Contact me if you want to continue the discussion.

Co-authored by:

Kevin Shatzkamer, Vice President, Service Provider Strategy and Solutions, Dell EMC

Honore’ LaBourdette, VP Global Market Development, Telco Business Group, VMware

Some of their main challenges CSPs face include:

• Slowing growth & innovation due to increasing technological complexity
• Rising CAPEX and OPEX for legacy network infrastructure
• Price/Margin erosion due to disruption in existing businesses models
• Uncertainty in new business models – new value chains, new competitors
• Operational transformation requires workforce and process retooling

Dell EMC and VMware are teaming together to help solve these challenges and are excited to demonstrate of the value of Dell Technologies end-to-end for service providers.

As a starting point, at Mobile World Congress Americas last fall, we announced the Dell EMC NFV Ready Bundle for VMware to simplify and accelerate NFV deployments for service providers.  This bundle includes open standards-based Dell EMC Cloud Infrastructure (compute, networking, Service Assurance Suite and management tools) and a choice of a Virtual Infrastructure Manager (vCloud Director or VMware Integrated OpenStack) with vSAN or Dell EMC ScaleIO.

The Dell EMC NFV Ready Bundle for VMware was just the beginning of joint, pre-validated solutions between both companies.  Dell EMC and VMware are on a journey to integrate and demonstrate the value of our joint solution in other areas as well.

SD-WAN is another area where both companies are working together to expand SD-WAN opportunities for service providers.  According to IDC’s Worldwide SD-WAN Forecast, 2017-2021, SD-WAN sales will grow at a 69% compound annual rate and will hit $8.05 billion by 2021.

Enterprises are increasingly searching for cost-effective and simpler alternatives to WAN connectivity for their sprawling branch networks. SD-WAN addresses many enterprises needs around WAN costs, simplified operations and improved application performance.  For service providers, offering SD-WAN as a Service is a new revenue opportunity because they can manage WAN services for enterprises.  This is appealing to enterprises that don’t want to manage the WAN network, or applications, and would prefer to outsource these services to a service provider.

To help with SD-WAN adoption, Dell EMC and VeloCloud, which is now part of VMware, offer the Dell EMC SD-WAN Ready Nodes for VeloCloud to accelerate SD-WAN revenue for service providers. VeloCloud can also go one step further by hosting and operating SD-WAN service on behalf of the service provider to accelerate adoption.  We will also be demonstrating leading edge joint SD-WAN solutions for service providers at Mobile World Congress.

We understand that the industry is constantly moving and evolving, and Dell EMC and VMware will continue to integrate capabilities that service providers want.  Our goals as both companies is to significantly reduce deployment complexities by offering more joint pre-architected and pre-validated solutions that integrates industry leading Dell EMC hardware and VMware software, reduce installation complexity, and provide confidence that the joint solutions are ready to work in production for service providers.

Co-authored by Sumit Verdi and Kaela Loffler, VP Marketing Netrounds

Service assurance is paramount to the success of CSPs deploying services that meet the demanding expectations of customers today. To operate an on-demand network, CSPs must proactively ensure that they are continually meeting their SLA commitments.¹

“NFV is shifting from a technology focus to operations, from ‘How do we do this?’ to ‘How do we operate this?’” wrote Sandra O’Boyle, the Senior Analyst at Heavy Reading focusing on CEM and Customer Analytics, in her recent article titled NFV Service Assurance – In Need of Big Data, Small Data, or Both?

O’Boyle also added that “CSPs are very clear they do not want to be over-run with meaningless events and data being pushed up from the resource later to the service management layer, and want to be able to prioritize customer-impacting events and automate fixes.”²

And active testing and monitoring is the key piece of the service assurance toolbox that CSPs need in order to ensure success with dynamic services. Active test data provides real time views on network service quality from the customer perspective and allows CSPs to automatically test services after each deployment or change.

To help our CSP customers take control over infrastructure health as well as service quality VMware and Netrounds developed our joint Active Assurance solution. The combined solution provides end-to-end service and infrastructure visibility, service monitoring and analytics, and service remediation to drive optimal network performance and deliver higher Quality of Experience for subscribers.

This solution helps our agile CSP customers to:

• Test services from the end-customer perspective
• Conduct ongoing real-time monitoring of services
• Adapt automatically to dynamic service and infrastructure changes
• Isolate issues and resolve problems faster through correlation across infrastructure and service metrics
• Reduce manual activities for testing and troubleshooting
• Maintain a comprehensive view of end-to-end service, virtualization, infrastructure, and inter-site transport quality with Netrounds and VMware vRealize Operations

The combination of VMware vRealize Operations and Netrounds offers service onboarding, active testing, continuous and scheduled monitoring and assurance for all deployed services, and closed-loop triggering for scaling and healing to minimize service degradations in real time. Where vRealize Operations continually monitors all infrastructure components responsible for the delivery of the service, from the underlying hardware to the hypervisor, networking, and virtual machines that make up the VNF and the service itself, Netrounds provides real-time insight into how the end customer is experiencing the service.

The VMware operations workflows leverage Netrounds’ programmable flexibility to drive on-demand tests for enhanced service performance analysis. Netrounds active monitoring will proactively detect service degradation for a VOIP service, for example, before it hits the end customer. This SLA violation will trigger a workflow that manages resource uplift for the media-plane telephone VMs. The workflow will also trigger an automatic test that validates that the service works according to the SLA after the resource change.

Next step? Proactively find and fix the issue before your customer notices a degradation in their service and calls in with complaints.

To read more about Active Assurance from VMware and Netrounds, read our solution overview here. Attending Mobile World Congress in Barcelona? Make sure to stop by VMware’s booth in Hall 3 Stand 3K10, from February 26 to March 1, to see Active Assurance live in action.

Keen to go a little deeper with a one-on-one demo and discussion? Contact us at demo@netrounds.com to schedule a meeting. We look forward to meeting you there!

References:

¹VMware and Netrounds Active Assurance Solution for Communications Service Providers Solution Overview

²Heavy Reading (2017). NFV Assurance and Analytics Survey. September 2017. n=105 service providers