Mobile network operators and cloud providers are in a long-term, complicated relationship. Mistrust still runs deep in some areas while difficult conversations and hard work over many years has resulted in a general acceptance that carriers and clouds are mutually beneficial by necessity, not choice.

Is the cloud meeting wireless operators halfway, or eating their networks in small, deliberate bites? Time will tell, but there is now a widespread belief that clouds and carriers need each other, which means going it alone isn’t a viable option.

“Operators have little choice. They tried playing in the cloud space and did not succeed,” said Sid Nag, VP of cloud services and technology at Gartner. Mobile operators have, since those operator-led cloud initiatives went sour, sunk tens of billions of dollars into “building out 5G superhighways and they need a way to drive traffic on these highways,” he explained. 

“The cloud providers own the applications, so they can drive the bits on these highways,” Nag said. Conversely, it’s the network operators that own vast swaths of spectrum for 5G, so cloud providers “have no choice but to form alliances with telcos to use 5G to drive adoption of cloud and now edge. So the synergy between the two are very complementary,” he added.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), the global cloud leader and best positioned telco cloud provider due to its early start, heritage in the cloud space, and comprehensive view of the network, is trying to limit its ambitions in the telco space to allay operators' outstanding concerns.

Those worries are well founded, according to Nick McQuire, chief of enterprise research at CCS Insight. Many operators are concerned about Amazon and other cloud providers’ ultimate goal in the wireless network space, particularly with respect to the point where the cloud could become a direct competitor for wireless connectivity, he said.

The flip side of that, however, is that AWS could strike a deal of such a strategic size that a mobile network operator becomes its preferred edge network provider for Amazon’s retail, logistics, and robotics businesses, McQuire explained. “You can get to a point where that level of strategic alignment may exist between a telco and Amazon, and I think that’s where the telcos would like to go because then you’ve got this mutual dependency.”

Mistrust is more abundant in project-led deals that are narrow, including instances where an operator moves network workloads to AWS or uses AWS Outposts, Wavelength, or Local Zones for edge computing, McQuire said. 

David Brown, VP of Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) at AWS, recently told SDxCentral the cloud giant has no plans or ambition to seize control of wireless networks. “What we’re trying to do in every one of those spaces is help the telco at the end of the day provide more reliable, more scalable, more efficient” services, he said.

“We innovate on their behalf to allow them to more successfully serve their customers and innovate faster. That’s the view that we’re taking. … There’s certainly no ambition on AWS doing any more than that,” Brown said.

Operators that are still concerned about cloud providers’ long-term goals in mobile network infrastructure can limit risk by working with multiple clouds instead of going exclusive with one, according to Patrick Filkins, senior analyst at IDC.

“Running internal carrier network workloads shouldn’t be a problem, but if the customer has allegiance to a particular cloud provider for third-party apps it could prove challenging,” he said.

Patrick Kelly, founder and principal analyst at Appledore Research, framed his analysis along similar lines, batting down concerns about the unintended consequences operators could face as a result of giving one cloud like AWS too much power. 

“This is a big ocean with many whales,” he said.

Nonetheless, some mobile operators are especially nervous about scenarios where connection points into a 5G environment run through a cloud, McQuired added. 

“As telcos go more cloud native and they start to expose those services into the cloud environments, will AWS disaggregate that and then actually control that API layer? In which case, will it then put the telcos in this compromised position where they become a backend service and they don’t control the customer?” he said.

“Now that won’t always be the case, but there’s always that nervousness,” McQuire concluded.