Episode 17: Telstra, Telefonica and Telus Edge Strategies, Plus More Private 5G Living on the Edge

Inside Living on the Edge episode 17, Jason and Dan discuss the wide ranging strategies that mobile network operators are taking from network deployment to hybrid cloud. More on Private 5G with the Economist and AWS.
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Moving core to cloud for 'suckers,' tweets BT exec after AWS outage — But a European telco backlash against these sorts of deals has begun. "Hope the folks at AWS fix their big problem and re-light their big candle – in the meantime I re-refer you to this," tweeted Neil McRae, chief architect of the UK's BT. His other tweet, the one to which he was re-referring his followers, reads: "So still want to put your network core into the public cloud? #suckers."

Scott Petty, the chief digital officer of Vodafone, has been similarly scathing. "Our view would be that's too risky and that you are almost outsourcing a core competency," he said at a recent press event when discussing the AT&T arrangement with Microsoft. "You need to be able to work effectively with all the key players and move workloads around."

So determined is Vodafone to avoid Snap's fate that it has even started investing in its own software tools, allowing it to move IT workloads from one environment to another. Over the next few years, it plans to add another 7,000 software engineers to the 9,000 it currently employs.

European stakeholders, meanwhile, are pushing ahead with Gaia-X, a vague plan to create sovereign data infrastructure for Europe. It has been championed by bigwigs such as Timotheus Höttges, the CEO of German telco incumbent Deutsche Telekom. "If we find partners here in Europe who are driving this Gaia-X or the open-source standard for cloud infrastructure, this might help us as well in the edge environment," he told analysts on a recent call.Morgan Stanley Telecoms CTO Symposium: Telefonica Strategy for Systems and Network Evolution — 5G and Edge computing as enablers for new services requiring low latency and locality
• There are services that require 1 ms of latency and cloud platform (as we know it today) can not provide support to them.
• Edge computing, which brings the cloud closer to the customer. There are applications "on-premise" that can be hosted in the edge cloud.
Telco Edge Cloud
• Considered a complement to hyperscaler edge that allows providing differential MNO features, and further distributed topology following network core sites to deploy app loads.
• GSMA operator platform definition concluded as reference to guide telco edge implementations.
• Integration between 5G core and the telco edge platform to enable such features and provide a key differentiation to traditional cloudTelstra Purple launches new hybrid cloud service — The new service aims to help customers navigate their public cloud platforms from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, alongside Telstra Private Cloud, which has been built on Dell Technologies and VMware software to host customer data onshore.
Available as a self-serve solution, Telstra Hybrid Cloud can also be fully managed by the Telstra Purple team, who is responsible for updating, patching and 24x7 monitoring, while organisations maintain control of their day-to-day virtual machine operations.Crown Castle, American Tower approach the edge differently — “As long as we own the really important pieces of network, fiber, small cell hubs, tower sites where we can put these edge data centers, we believe we are best positioned for that,” he continued. “And we don't see the need for those metro data centers to augment our offering.”

It’s a different approach than tower company peer American Tower, which ramped up edge ambitions with a recent $10.1 billion deal to buy CoreSite. CoreSite’s portfolio adds 25 data centers, 21 cloud on-ramps and over 32,000 interconnections in eight major U.S. markets – significantly building on American Tower’s existing three metro and six edge data centers.

He sees CoreSite as a way to boost growth rates o