Google’s UniSuper snafu was a public-cloud warning to telcos

Earlier this month, Google accidentally deleted a $125 billion Australian pension fund called UniSuper, like a hungover teacher fumbling the wrong key and fatally erasing a student’s essay. The fund and all its contents were eventually rescued from the cloud dumpster, but for a week about half a million UniSuper members would have felt like they were in one of those American thrillers about the NSA or some other secretive agency, where the lead character’s identity or lifesavings mysteriously disappear from all computer records, and they effectively cease to exist.

“What if that pension fund had been a 5G core?” is the question some telcos are inevitably asking. In cases where operators have moved all their mobile traffic onto that core, and it’s the only one they have, this would return a swathe of the population to the 1980s – hopefully minus the perms and shell suits – when there were payphones with queues outside, and thumbs denied a daily regime of touchscreen tapping were less gymnastic. Judging by the GDP value ascribed to mobile telecom, it would be an economic catastrophe.

Fear of this mobile meltdown partly explains some telco and government aversion to the public cloud services offered by Amazon (AWS), Microsoft (Azure) and the UniSuper-throttling Google (Google Cloud Platform). In the few examples of core network deals between telcos and public clouds, applications are hosted partly inside telco facilities rather than public cloud data centers. AWS and Telefónica insist on calling an arrangement of this nature a “public” cloud deal, but Microsoft uses “hybrid” cloud to describe its Nexus-branded equivalents.

Economically, the public cloud is attractive because of its scale and because infrastructure is shared. The idea is that customers pay for only what they use (hence the “as-a-service” label) and effectively split server and energy costs with other companies using the same facilities. But these benefits disappear once the AWS, Microsoft or Google technologies are installed in a telco’s own premises (unless, unconventionally, this is being shared), paid for by the telco.

The loneliness of the long-distance RAN

The trouble for the hyperscalers is that public cloud – true public cloud, that is – looks even unlikelier for other telco workloads, and especially the radio access network (RAN), one of the biggest cost items.

Tour just about any mobile network today and you will note various boxes at the base of masts for housing IT resources. Unlike the radio units and antennas atop those masts, the baseband units in these boxes can theoretically be moved into a telco facility such as a baseband hotel (we kid you not) where they can hang out with other once-lonely units and slumber alongside them at night. They could even be replaced by servers in a hyperscaler’s data center.

But this approach will probably be uncommon. For a start, any such centralization would necessitate a hefty investment in fronthaul, the linkage – usually fiber – between those radio and baseband units. For a long time, this could massively outweigh the savings promised by resource consolidation.

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