Public cloud holds perils, and don’t expect an ‘open’ RAN with it

Splitting up with a public cloud provider threatens to be as complicated, expensive and time-consuming as a celebrity divorce, depending on the equivalent of the prenuptial agreement. Snap, the company behind the Snapchat messaging app, almost sounds resigned to being in permanent relationships with AWS and Google Cloud, whatever happens. Moving services to another provider “would be difficult to implement and would cause us to incur significant time and expense,” it has noted for years in filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

It should worry telecom operators as they snuggle up to the public cloud. Many have been in a flap about vendor “lock-in,” the phenomenon of being stuck unhappily in a partnership like an abused spouse. Yet the same companies that gush about open RAN – an industry attempt to ease divorce proceedings and promote polygamy in the radio access network – risk the opposite in the public cloud.

Take AT&T, for instance. The US telco is not simply running its 5G core network on Microsoft Azure but has sold Microsoft the assets, like a wife handing over worldly possessions to her new husband. Microsoft is now basing its entire pitch to other telcos on its AT&T acquisition. How is this not a serious loss of control and independence for AT&T?

Then there is Dish Network, a lover of the open RAN that has an all-encompassing public cloud deal with AWS. Dish has not sold assets to AWS (as far as we know), but it is going much further than AT&T operationally. About the only things it is holding back from AWS are some RAN functions currently uncomfortable with a public cloud home. These will live on a VMware platform instead.

Shifting the RAN to the public cloud sounds especially perilous, and even Microsoft thinks some network functions will never go there, partly for performance reasons. Yet one of the biggest RAN vendors has been highlighting recent deals with AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. “As a RAN supplier, we will provide our mobile operator and enterprise customers with the flexibility to select their own server platforms and private clouds or use public service clouds,” said Tommi Uitto, the head of Nokia’s mobile business, in a blog this week.

Prison break

What his blog does not mention is the prison-break difficulty of freeing a RAN from a public cloud. But this was quickly acknowledged by the Finnish vendor in response to questions. “RAN is not cloud-agnostic due to the nature of real-time processing,” said Jane Rygaard, Nokia’s head of wireless networks, via email. “So, it wouldn’t be straightforward to move from one [cloud] to another.” In future, a commoner approach to management interfaces and automation layers might ease transition, she did add. Today, it seems, that doesn’t exist.

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