DISH partnered with Dell Technologies for IT and enterprise expertise
DISH Wireless is in the midst of building out a brand new, nationwide 5G network architected using cloud-native and Open RAN principles, with Kubernetes-based management at its heart. Beyond consumer mobile broadband services, DISH Wireless Chief Network Officer Marc Rouanne sees the firm building a “network of networks” designed to let enterprises shape their connectivity based on their own unique needs.
In an interview during Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Rouanne described DISH’s unique value proposition as three-fold. First, the Standalone 5G architecture allows data from microservices to be exposed to APIs. For enterprises, “That’s a big thing,” Rouanne said, “because they can consume a policy manager, a subscription manager, they can even onboard the software on their premise so they can shape it the way they want.”
The second primary value driver is in the ability for granular observation of the network. “We [can] see a lot of things,” Rouanne said. “We see the behavior of the chipsets, of the different links that we have in the network, of the compute, the memory and everything. We see the traffic behavior and we can shape it…Enterprises want to know, ‘Is my truck connected, is my sensor connected?’ So the consumption of data is bringing a lot of opportunities for them to extract value and services.”
Finally and, “maybe the most important,” is what Rouanne described as a “network of networks.” “We can allow [enterprises] to build their own network. It’s not our network anymore; it’s theirs. A lot of enterprises think they can differentiate out of connectivity and the data that comes from it,” he said.
Rouanne rightly noted that DISH Wireless is conducting a greenfield network build which, at face value, may seem easy as compared to a brownfield integration. However, if you dig deeper and consider that DISH is “cloud-native from the radio all the way,” it’s clear that constructing a high-performance, multi-vendor network is very much a complex exercise in ongoing interoperability testing and validation; deploying in the field requires a focused approach to system integration. Similarly, delivering this technology to enterprises adds another level of complexity given the variability of user needs and integration of legacy IT/OT systems with an advanced 5G network.
That’s where Dell Technologies comes in. Rouanne explained why IT and enterprise domain expertise was key to DISH’s strategy: “We knew we would be a cloud company or a software company so we wanted a partner that was very strong in that domain of compute and software and storage and all the enablement of the technology. We also wanted a partner that’s very strong in the enterprise ecosystem [to bring] use cases but also [for] tailoring the network.”
To the interoperability testing and verification process, Dell Technologies is investing in its Open Telecom Ecosystem Lab (OTEL), a hardware and software agnostic platform that allows stakeholders to put multi-vendor solutions through their paces while drawing on DT’s CI/CD pipeline. This hastens time to market (and time to value) and facilitates the creation of pre-validated designs.
Back to Rouanne on DISH’s partnership with Dell Technologies. “[Dell}…is building labs for interoperability and testing. That’s exactly what we wanted.” He compared Dell’s and DISH’s goal of bringing life to bespoke networks and Dell’s long-standing expertise in customized PCs. “We thought [Dell’s] DNA would fit the diversity and the on-demand requirements of the edge and I think we were right. [Dell’s] doing it so we’re pretty pleased about that.”
