AWS said the move will deliver more scalable, secure and cost-effective 5G services for Comcast customers
Comcast announced this week that it will migrate its 5G mobile packet core, developed by Nokia, from on-premise infrastructure entirely onto the AWS public cloud. AWS said the move will deliver more scalable, secure and cost-effective 5G services for Xfinity Mobile and Comcast Business Mobile customers, and will allow the company to innovate, deploy new features, autoscale network capacity and perform lifecycle management.
“With this deployment, we have now reached a point in the evolution of the public cloud with capabilities to support network functions, where the 5G mobile core is now a mature and proven workload, that can run on AWS in a variety of deployment scenarios, without the need for experimentation, extended engineering engagement, or deep partner involvement,” wrote Dr. Ishwar Parulkar, Chief Technologist for Telecom and Edge Cloud at AWS in a blog.
Parulkar went on to explain that the first “exercise of building a production network with 5G core on the cloud” began with Dish Wireless in 2021 when the pair signed strategic collaboration agreement. At the time, Dish said it planned to deploy a cloud-based 5G Open Radio Access Network (Open RAN) starting in Las Vegas and to “connect all of its hardware and network management resources” through AWS.
“The initial expectation of telcos from us was to be able to run 5G core workloads on the cloud in live production networks at the scale, reliability, performance, security expected for telco networks. It was expected to be at lower TCO and increased operational simplicity and agility,” Parulkar wrote. “We are now expanding beyond that to tap deeper into the value of the cloud and address use cases not possible with traditional on-premises private infrastructure models.”
As part of the collaboration with Comcast, AWS will also work with the provider to explore new customer service opportunities, as well as ways to optimize network performance and automate additional 5G operations.
“Moving Comcast’s 5G core to the cloud will enable greater resiliency, faster innovation, and enhanced security, leveraging AWS’s secure global cloud infrastructure,” said Jan Hofmeyr, vice president of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Edge at AWS. “We’re excited to work with Comcast to power this state-of-the-art 5G network that will give their customers a better wireless experience, as well as meet the needs of future applications running in this new environment.”
