Few would argue that the telecommunications network of the future will be heavily cloudified to glean as much operational and financial efficiency from those operations as possible. However, the construct of that cloudification remains a work in progress with the cloud and telecom ecosystems continuing to test their eventual depth of involvement.

This issue was highlighted by a recent survey and report from Accenture, which among other juicy details found that 98% of communication service provider (CSP) executives said growing data demands from the consumer and enterprise sectors “have outstripped the current capabilities of networks.”

Andy Walker, global communications and media industry lead at Accenture, told SDxCentral  that both sides of this utopian partnership are actively engaged with the other side on this push, but there remains a gap when it comes to the rubber hitting the road. This gap is especially precarious for telecom operators that are tasked with implementing this change while continuing to run a network.

Cloud promises vs. cloud reality

“I wouldn't single out any one group but there's tons of promises on all the things you can do with cloud, and then there's the overall question of can your organization actually deliver on that? Can you transform yourself to take advantage of all those potential benefits? And I think that there's certainly a gap,” Walker said. “I think the gap varies by company, and data quality, and how much time and effort and energy they can put into it given the fact that they've got to sort of reinvent the plane while they're flying it.”

Walker added that this challenge is especially difficult for European-based operators that “tend to be a little bit slimmer so they tend to not have the level of resources to be able to work on these things.”

Telecom operators are also challenged by having legacy vendors sowing seeds of doubt about the operational validity of cloud-based network platforms like open radio access network (RAN) and cloud-based core technologies.

“For every cloud-focused company coming out and stating they have figured out open RAN, you have a legacy vendor behind the scenes telling the operator that it doesn’t work,” Walker said. “If you’re a telecom exec, you are hearing these conflicting messages. That’s normal, but it does then bring in the question as to why do I need to go super heavy, super-fast into some of these technologies like open RAN or a cloud core?”

Accenture finds hyperscalers are boosting their telecom efforts

That level of concern is placing more pressure on the cloud ecosystem to make sure that their platforms can indeed handle complex telecom networks. Especially those that are made up of legacy components and architectures.

“It's really easy if you don't have life-or-death implications associated with your network to have great ideas, but the telcos do have to deal with very real life and death challenges and expectations that are placed upon them,” Walker noted of that challenge. “And to some degree they still have regulated utility structures in place around them. Yeah. Even as they are cloudify the network and doing all this neat and cool stuff they're still subject to rules and regulations.”

Hyperscalers are aware of these challenges and are putting resources toward easing concerns.

Ishwar Parulkar, chief technologist for telecom and edge cloud at Amazon Web Services (AWS), recently 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 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.”

Who wants to run a telecom network?

Parulkar also echoed colleague Jan Hofmeyr, VP for AWS EC2, who during an interview at that hyperscaler’s re:Invent show late last year stated, “our goal is, I want to make AWS the best place to run a 5G network.”

This goal is distinctly different than running a 5G network, something Walker said is the ongoing dance between operators and hyperscalers.

“I think the question is really going to be one of service levels in terms of both metrics and levels of support, and all the quality metrics and making sure they're signed up to those and then in which case the hyperscaler – the compute – becomes a real utility with very high standards associated with it,” Walker said, adding “which has an irony associated with it in that you're hiring these companies because they're nimble and can bring new technology, can do all sorts of amazing things, but sooner or later if it gets deployed, they actually have to build operations and all the rest of that to support these levels of nines that are required.”

Operators have been very clear that while they are working more closely with hyperscalers to take advantage of cloud infrastructure and economics, they are still in control of their networks.

“AT&T’s 5G mobility core runs on AT&T hardware in the AT&T data centers and operated by AT&T,” Igal Elbaz, SVP and network CTO at AT&T, told SDxCentral in an interview last year.

So where does that leave operators and hyperscalers?

Accenture's Walker noted that while the telecom space does not produce the profit margins of hyperscalers, it’s still a high-margin business. But, with that comes the business of having to directly serve very large customer bases.

“I don't think anyone wants to deal with consumers and running call centers and all the different complaints. My bill doesn't match up and my roaming didn't work and all the things … it's a headache,” Walker said.

Traditional telecom operators are used to that challenge and are thus likely to continue taking on that customer-facing burden. But the rest of a telecom network’s operations appear to remain in play.