Debating the role of hyperscale cloud providers in 5G

LAS VEGAS – #MWC22 – Mike Murphy has a unique view into the future of 5G.

Murphy has been developing wireless technologies for almost four decades, first at Nortel, then at Nokia and now at Ericsson. Today, he’s the North American CTO for Ericsson, the only network equipment supplier currently providing midband 5G gear to all of the big US operators: AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile.

And here at the MWC trade show, Murphy said there’s one new technological quandary that’s soaking up his attention: How 5G providers will work with hyperscale cloud providers. He said the problem is difficult enough – and important enough – that he has assigned four Ericsson technicians to work on it full time.

“That’s all they do,” he said.

Broadly, Murphy said he’s trying to figure out how the cloud computing market and the telecom market might work together. “How do you converge the two worlds?” he asked.

It’s a question that some of the world’s biggest technology companies – from Dell to Amazon to AT&T to Google to Ericsson to Qualcomm – are struggling with.

That time the hyperscalers invaded MWC

“We are at an inflection point in the industry where the cloud is being adopted more and more by the telecom segment,” said Ishwar Parulkar, the chief technologist for telecom and edge cloud at Amazon Web Services (AWS), here at the MWC show.

AWS, Microsoft (via its Azure cloud) and Google Cloud have all made their intentions plain: They want to bring the telecom industry into the cloud.

To do so, each company created telecom-specific business units, staffed by a large number of well-known telecom veterans, and have been sending phalanxes of executives to the telecom industry’s biggest trade shows.

That’s not really a surprise, of course. A wide range of industries – from media to government to financial services – have already put much of their core digital infrastructure into the cloud. Why shouldn’t telecom?

And to a degree, telecom network operators have already done so. Many have moved significant portions of their systems – from customer service programs to IT operations – into the cloud. The next obvious step is to put their newly virtualized, software-defined network functions into the cloud too.

After all, the cloud is endlessly scalable and instantly available.

At least, that’s the argument.

Cloud native, cloud wary

“No hyperscaler supports five nines,” Ericsson’s Murphy said, citing the 99.999% network-uptime goal that most telecom providers share.

Murphy explained that most of today’s cloud computing providers can’t provide the kind of orchestration, data management and security services that network operators need for their core network services.

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