T-Mobile US last week linked its 5G network to Google’s edge cloud infrastructure, which highlighted the growing integration between the telecom and cloud ecosystems and how cloud hyperscalers are further bolstering their platforms to support telecom-specific needs.

Dan Hays, partner at consulting firm PwC, noted in a recent interview with SDxCentral that this push is important to gain operational trust from legacy-minded operators.

“Everyone assumes, hey, I go to my hyperscaler and I buy storage and compute and whatever,” Hays said, but he noted that those services will be different from what the hyperscalers offer to more general enterprise customers.

Hays explained that one of PwC’s clients was looking to run telecom traffic in a virtualized environment using a hyperscaler, but was concerned about recent cloud outages that had impacted some services.

“They said ‘will you help broker a conversation with the hyperscaler to talk about this because we can't handle that type of outage? We're building a very critical infrastructure and we can't handle that type of outage,’” Hays said. “We had the conversation with the hyperscaler and the hyperscaler essentially said the public doesn't understand. The telecom loads are not running on the same infrastructure as the rest of the enterprise loads that are running on these platforms. [The hyperscaler] said they have way more redundancy, way more quality-of-service management, because they know that the telecom loads are critical infrastructure. They said, 'we'll show you the data that we don't go down,' which was really interesting.”

Ishwar Parulkar, chief technologist for telecom and edge cloud at Amazon Web Services (AWS), explained to SDxCentral that the hyperscaler is well aware of the “carrier-grade resiliency” needs of operators.

“The cloud was designed to be highly available,” Parulkar said. “The enterprise workloads might be one category, but the cloud runs government workloads, we run financial workloads — the NASDAQ Stock Exchange now runs on AWS — so we have a lot of other very critical workloads that have been running for a while. … And the requirements of those are a very high bar. So we continuously work on making the cloud very highly available and building more and more capability into it to make it highly available.”

Parulkar said that the challenge for hyperscalers is to now change the mindset of operators.

“From hardware rack-level redundancy to looking at availability zones, and having availability and resiliency at the software layer is what has changed. And sometimes it takes a little while to accept and understand the change; understand you need to look at the same metrics or five-nines in a different way,” Parulkar said. “But these are some of the things that we are definitely actively working on. And once we go through a detailed analysis, the operators see that. … At a basic level it might not be so evident how the model is different, but there is a difference in the model from going from hardware redundancy to software-layer reliability.”

Telecom driving 5G toward cloud economics

T-Mobile’s latest deal shows that those efforts are paying off.

The carrier is connecting its enterprise-focused 5G Advanced Network Solutions (ANS) platform into Google’s Distributed Cloud Edge (GDC Edge) to support 5G applications and use cases. This will allow GDC Edge customers to leverage T-Mobile’s 5G network to support those opportunities.

“This partnership brings together the powerful combination of 5G and edge computing to unlock the expansion of technologies such as [augmented reality] and [virtual reality] from limited applications to large-scale adoption,” Mishka Dehghan, SVP for strategy, product and solutions engineering at T-Mobile Business Group, said in a statement.

T-Mobile unveiled the 5G ANS service last year. That platform is a selection of 5G network and edge services targeted at enterprise and government customers.

Google’s GDC Edge is targeted at telecom providers wanting to run 5G core and radio access network (RAN) assets at the edge. It includes hardware and software components.

Google has touted Verizon and Bell Canada as two telecom operators using the GDC Edge platform. The Verizon deal was announced in 2021, where Google joined its cloud rivals AWS and Microsoft Azure in supporting the carrier’s broad edge initiatives. Bell Canada added Google to its ongoing work with AWS.

T-Mobile had previously announced work with AWS, which further showed the telecom operator’s growing confidence in the cloud ecosystem. That work was tied to AWS’s recently launched Integrated Private Wireless on the AWS platform that acts as an infrastructure bridge for operators that want to offer a private network service tapping into AWS’s infrastructure to end users. T-Mobile was one of the initial telecom partners on that platform, which it tied into its ANS service.

Parulkar said these partnerships are growing from the hyperscaler’s specific work with telecom operators.

“We are now at a phase where we are building custom services for telcos,” Parulkar said. “These are not just enhancements to the cloud or added features to run workloads, but services that directly address customers.”

Parulkar said AWS's specific efforts began with its private 5G work, which was initially unveiled in late 2021, and has since been updated. That platform integrates small cell radio units, AWS’s Outposts servers, a 5G core, and RAN software running on AWS-managed hardware. AWS also handles the spectrum management of this service.

Parulkar noted that AWS has accelerated that work with the Integrated Wireless Platform on the AWS platform and the AWS-managed Telco Network Builder. This work also includes AWS layering in data and analytics that can allow operators to glean more revenues from their network operations while also reducing costs.

“It's something that plays into us defining the network itself,” Parulkar said of those newer platforms. “It's become a value-add in terms of value and something that gives telcos more comfort in terms of accepting and moving forward very quickly with looking at building cloud-native networks because some of the problems that they are not so familiar with are now taken care of.”

Gabriele Di Piazza, senior director of product management for Google Cloud’s Global Telecom Industry team, previously explained that telecom operators are also increasingly taking advantage of cloud automation capabilities that are important for managing the distributed nature of modern telecom networks.

“It’s a big challenge. It's millions or billions of devices, it's tens-of-thousands or hundreds-of-thousands of distributed locations. Things like access networks, things like radio networks, things of what's happening in fixed networks, fixed wireless and so forth. It's very difficult to think of networking independent from the automation aspect because the more this bubble of compute is being consolidated and now eventually redistributed out, it creates a new paradigm of how you need to manage your things,” Di Piazza said.

He added that Google is bridging this paradigm using its cloud automation efforts.

“The main driver for us is how do we bring to the telco industry, cloud economics?" Di Piazza said. "Because otherwise you see a curve that is not even linear, but it's actually growing much faster because the complexities of new networks, new services, new devices is actually growing, not going down. If we cannot infuse this cloud economics, we wouldn't meet our objectives.”