5G Networks Moving To Cloud With IBM Satellite And AT&T Connection
One of the many interesting aspects of big technology trends is how seemingly independent efforts end up getting intertwined over time. The most recent example is the multi-level link between cloud computing and 5G, with the common ties of hybrid clouds, private networks, and edge computing all coming together to enable a potentially powerful—but also potentially confusing—combination of capabilities.
In two separate, but related announcements, IBM recently highlighted how its new Cloud Satellite private/hybrid cloud platform can be used to get telecom service provider customers to modernize more of their existing infrastructure and how it can help a specific telco provider (AT&T in this case) offer more of the edge computing-type services that these modernization efforts enable. The timing of these announcements seemed a bit backwards in that the IBM Cloud/AT&T partnership news came first, before the launch of the IBM Cloud for Telecommunications that could theoretically enable it, but that may have been due to legal approvals of the press releases more than anything.
Regardless, it makes more logical sense to discuss the second bit of news first, because it helps set the stage for the new applications in the first announcement. To that end, IBM’s Cloud for Telecommunications looks to be an auspicious effort to bring together more than 35 different companies to help modernize 5G network infrastructure. Each of the announced ecosystem partners is offering tools that can help move telcos from the traditional closed-box hardware infrastructure that they’ve used for the last few decades into more modern, cloud computing-like architectures. (See “IBM Brings Open Hybrid Cloud Strategy To 5G And The Edge” for an overview of the company’s initial efforts here.)
This transition is expected to be a long, complicated, but potentially very profitable process, hence the high degree of participation from many large vendors, including Microsoft, Samsung, Cisco, Dell, HPE, Lenovo, and Nokia in addition to IBM. At the same time, the transition is critical to the long-term success of 5G, because many of its advanced capabilities are only possible with the type of more modern, software-defined open infrastructure that this effort is intended to enable (see “Will 5G Networks Move to Open RAN?” for more).
For IBM, the industry-specific focus of this telecommunications cloud effort is conceptually similar to what it did with its recent financial industry launches (see “New IBM Offering Highlights Rise Of Specialty Clouds”). It is also an excellent vehicle for the company to debut its new Cloud Satellite offering, which is a private/hybrid cloud platform akin to Amazon’s AWS Outposts or Microsoft’s Azure Stack, where the core IBM Cloud services can be run remotely or on-premise on a wide range of base hardware.
One of the many challenges in getting telco providers to embrace and leverage cloud-native computing architectures for their core network functions is the highly distributed nature of today’s telco networks.
