NFV, SDN and mobile edge computing, all major aspects of 5G, creates an opportunity for disruption of telecom vendor ecosystem
The sheer complexity of 5G and attendant use cases–mobile AR/VR, autonomous driving, remote control of industrial robotics, etc…, presents an opportunity for infrastructure vendors to make big gains relative to mainstays like Nokia, Ericsson, Huawei, ZTE and Samsung, according to ABI Research.
5G is marked by the softwareization of the network from the edge to the core; the animating principle here is network slicing wherein custom data pipes are automatically provisioned to meet the requirements of a diverse set of use cases, think IoT on one end and mission critical communications on the other. The long view is that software control will create major efficiencies in network and spectral resource allocation.
To that end, ABI Research sees the opportunity for the vendor community to open up to smaller firms with specialized offerings. “Traditionally operators have deployed a handful of infrastructure vendors in their networks, especially in the core network. Stagnating average revenue per user and increasing network traffic are driving operators to be more cost-effective and innovative in network performance and operations management and network upgrades,” Senior Analyst Prayerna Raina said. “The end-to-end digital transformation toward virtualized and software defined networks is creating the opportunity for operators to open their highly proprietary networks and vendor ecosystem to include innovative start-ups.”
Let’s take a look at two companies called out in the ABI report, Affirmed Networks, which has a strong position on network slicing, and Vasona Networks, which is laser-focused on the mobile edge.
Earlier this year, Affirmed launched the Virtual Slice Selection Function (vSSF), which supports network slicing in legacy networks and works in virtualized, multi-vendor network environments. The vSSF tool takes the place of APNs (Access Point Names), which offer some degree of traffic segmentation, albeit in a time-consuming, manual process.
Angela Whiteford, vice president of marketing and product management, told RCR Wireless News in an interview, “When you hear other vendors talk about network slicing, they always talk about in the context of 5G, which is valid because when we hit 5G slicing will go all the way to the radio. The reality is operators need slicing right now. They’re spending money to virtualize. They’re trying to deal with the data growth, and they need to monetize new services today. Slicing allows you to match the requirements of the service to the networks that’s delivering the service. All of it is making the cost as tightly aligned with the service requirements.”
Vasona Networks has a mobile-edge computing platform designed to drive quality of experience in a way that helps operators provide a better end-user experience, while facilitating more efficient network usage for operators. We caught up with Vasona’s VP Marketing and Product Management John Reister at Mobile World Congress Americas to get a closer look at what the company is doing.
“We have a mobile edge that goes in between the RAN and the core,” he said. “It’s able to see the types of traffic that are going on on a cell-by-cell basis, can determine the congestion, can figure out exactly when there’s contention between those services and then manage that contention to improve performance of the time-sensitive services.”
Hear more from Reister in this video interview.
