The extension of the public cloud to telecom networks is one of the most important technology trends with far reaching consequences for both cloud providers and telcos. Cloud providers are making an aggressive bid for telcos to host their network infrastructure on the public cloud. They argue that this will help telcos cut their costs, evolve their service offering and satisfy the requirements of their investors and shareholders, pitching it as a win-win for telcos and cloud providers. The pitch should not be simply viewed as such, but rather one must look at it from the perspective of integrating public clouds with telecom networks, which comes with a variety of fundamental trade-offs to assess. In the process, the telco network would be subsumed by the cloud where the cloud provider stack operates at different locations along the core-edge-access continuum, and the telecom network provides the connectivity plumbing between the disparate parts. This end-vision will take many years to play out – if it does at all. For the time-being, telecom executives face a myriad of complex options and decisions on how to evolve their networks, while facing stringent cost optimization constraints and deadlines to execute on these decisions.
To read the full article download the Insight Note here:
The Insight Note addresses the following topics:
- The challenges facing telcos and what led to the status quo.
- The strategies pursued by the cloud providers to win telco business; and where the economic benefit lies for the cloud providers.
- The difference between telco workloads and IT workloads.
- The options available for telcos.
- The decision criteria that telcos need to consider for telecom cloud platforms.
- The impact on the ecosystem – what all this could potentially mean!
Side note: This topic dominated MWC2023 where cloud providers were out in force to sell telcos on their solutions. We have published a note on this: “Industry Update – Mobile World Congress MWC 2023: Velocity or Suspended Animation?” which you can download here. You also see more of our reports and white papers at the Xona Partners web site.