Dish’s “network of networks” helps enterprise get “edge to cloud in a simplified manner”
Dish Network, amidst a greenfield 5G network buildout in the United States, is using AWS to host its RAN and 5G Core. Dish chief network officer & executive vice president Marc Rouanne told attendees of this week’s AWS re:Invent event that AWS is helping Dish achieve the flexibility and scale they need to become a “network of networks” to help provide customized services to enterprise customers based on speed, latency and other requirements.
Rouanne was one of several executives sharing the keynote stage with AWS CEO Adam Selipsky. Others included NASDAQ CEO Adena Friedman, 3M senior VP Shaun Braun and United Chief Digital Officer Linda Jojo. Each of the executives highlighted success stories using AWS as the foundation of their business strategies.
“It’s not just one size fits all like we used to do,” said Rouanne. “Enterprise 5G customers need customizable services — individualized 5G networks matched to enterprise needs. This customizability will be “a game changer for businesses across the industry and enterprises.”
Dish says it will be the first telecom company to run its service on the public cloud, leveraging AWS. It announced a partnership with Spirent Communications to enable automated, large-scale 5G core testing.
“Our ambition is to be able to offer one or many slices to any enterprise. Each enterprise could have many slices: Some high-speed slices, some very secure slices, some monitoring slices. … The problem is that they will have different requirements, so they will have different features. They will have different capabilities. Some may optimize for latency, some may optimize for cost, some may optimize for reliability or redundancy or security — or all of it. Which means that the testing of the slice has to be specific,” said Rouanne at the time.
5G SA will be enterprise “game changer”
Rouanne emphasized AWS’s essential role in helping Dish manage the advanced network automation needed to deploy advanced 5G services at scale for consumers, business and enterprise. Driving automation at scale is AWS’s Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) software.
Dish’s plan is to make business edge computing solutions nearly trivial to set up and use. Driving “innovation at the speed of the cloud” is Dish’s aspiration.
Dish recently selected Rakuten Symphony for network assurance and observability, turning to the company and its observability framework (OBF) to collect the telemetry data from all of Dish’s network functions. Dish says it will enable the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning to operate and optimize Dish’s 5G network.
