Much has changed in the five years since Facebook pushed into wireless infrastructure with the Telecom Infra Project (TIP), and yet much remains the same.
Mobile network infrastructure is still controlled by a small group of vendors, operators are slow to embrace change, and software, albeit more pervasive than ever, oftentimes increases complexity because it has to strike a balance between new and old.
But stress cracks that appeared on the surface a few years ago are beginning to tunnel down to the foundation of telecom. Facebook is emboldened by this and seemingly committed as ever to tear proprietary legacy models down to its benefit and many others.
The social media giant’s purview is almost boundless. Its connectivity work spans shared fiber networks, subsea networking cables, network asset sharing in rural areas, satellites for backhaul and connectivity, unlicensed 60 GHz spectrum, WiFi, and disaggregated mobile infrastructure for network cores and radio access networks (RAN).
“There is a strategic business rationale behind this because obviously if we get more people online this is good for Facebook, but it’s good for everybody with a digital property,” Facebook Connectivity VP Dan Rabinovitsj told SDxCentral in a phone interview.
“Our mission is to get more people online to a faster internet,” and that includes those without access or those that will benefit from faster and more reliable internet, he said, claiming that Facebook isn’t merely motivated by self-serving interests, such as getting more people onto its family of apps.
Facebook Sees No Silver Bullet for Connectivity Challenges“There is no silver bullet to solve the connectivity challenges in the world,” Rabinovitsj said. “These problems are very, very hard to solve and so our job is really to work through partners to drive business models and tech innovation that actually creates sustainable outcomes for connectivity.”
TIP’s recently released OpenWiFi project is an example of how far Facebook is willing to pull on this thread, extending beyond the confines of mobile and fixed networking infrastructure. It also helps underline Facebook’s ultimate vision for mobile networks.
“What we want to do is try to make cellular more like the WiFi market with more suppliers, a faster pace of innovation, way more opportunities for companies to come in and innovate on the delivery of service and feature development,” Rabinovitsj explained.
Facebook this week also announced that Magma, an open-source network core project it open sourced and brought under the Linux Foundation earlier this year, will be integrated with Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) edge computing services.
That integration “allows service providers to deploy 4G, 5G networks by basically obtaining an AWS kind of pre-installed version of Magma,” Rabinovitsj explained. Carriers can tap into the offering for macro networks or other use cases, and enterprises can use a Magma core running on AWS for private networks, according to Facebook.
Open Source Starts Eating Telco Stack“It’s kind of the first example of seeing the possibility that open source could start to finally eat the telecom stack a little bit. Open source has been eating the world everywhere else for a long time,” Rabinovitsj said, adding that Magma will eventually be supported by “all the public cloud companies” in a similar fashion.
Facebook last year under TIP’s OpenRAN Project Group began the Evenstar project to develop general purpose open RAN designs and “we’re actually delivering commercial, ready to go macro radio units,” Rabinovitsj said.
Vodafone intends to use some of the first Evenstar radios in its 5G open RAN network in the southwest of England and Wales. While Vodafone and many other large operators are using open RAN in less populated areas, that will start to change, according to Rabinovitsj.
“There’s nothing about Evenstar that’s special or unique to any particular deployment modality,” he said. “A lot of these large operators are starting in certain areas basically to kind of test and prove out that the tech is all good and works. And after that they have all said their plan is to push this hard through their entire network.”
Rabinovitsj said he expects to “see some reasonable shift of share toward the open RAN ecosystem” during the next two to three years. “This is not going to stay in rural areas forever for sure.”
Open RAN Not Late to 5G PartyAlthough 5G deployments are well underway, the industry-wide transition is still in its early stages, according to Rabinovitsj. “There’s a lot of work to get done, so there’s plenty of room and plenty of time for open RAN to intersect with what I would call the fat part of the 5G transition.”
He also noted that the most substantial benefit of 5G over 4G LTE is in improved network deployment models and lower costs. “There’s a lot of opportunities that are not necessarily very obvious big benefits for people, just to be blunt. The speed difference between 4G and 5G, outside of the use of millimeter-wave spectrum, is really nominal. It’s not dramatic,” he said.
Operators are using this moment to move workloads and a “big chunk of the telecom stack into the cloud,” he added.
Open RAN commitments from operators have also evolved from talk to action during the last 18 months, Rabinovitsj noted.
“We finally have the committed pragmatic operator community pushing this really hard, and they are not backing up. They’re all heads down trying to get this into commercial production,” he said. “Talk is one thing, but seeing all this now come together in commercial deployments is critical. … We have a ton of work ahead of us, but I think now people feel confident that the work is going to materialize in a real change.”