Amazon Web Services (AWS) has no plans or ambition to seize control of the wireless network industry, according to David Brown, the cloud giant’s VP of Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). 

“While other cloud providers have decided to do acquisitions in the space of telco, we’ve actually not done that specifically because we see a lot of value in partnering with existing independent software vendors (ISVs) in the space,” he told SDxCentral, adding that many operators are running services from multiple ISVs and prefer to continue with that model. 

AWS, as such, sees its role as helping those ISVs and network infrastructure vendors to port services to AWS. “We’ve been doing that across the Ericssons, the Nokias, the Mavenirs, the Altiostars, Samsung, pretty much anybody in the space has been working with my teams to determine how best do we help them actually move and run on AWS,” Brown said.

The world’s largest public cloud provider is not looking to invest in one vendor or software provider so it can push network operators in that direction, he said.

“One thing that does differentiate us in the market is just how much we’ve actually done. You’ve always got to look at who’s doing press releases and who’s launching stuff,” Brown said. 

Indeed, AWS has already expanded beyond the confines of its regional data centers with Outposts, Wavelength, and Local Zones, which collectively provide enterprises or operators with more distributed clouds for specialized use cases.

Wavelength, a service that marries operators’ 5G networks with AWS’ edge compute service, was first launched with Verizon last year, and is also commercially available with SK Telecom in South Korea, KDDI in Japan, and will be deployed soon with Vodafone in Europe. “We have a pretty substantive edge compute working today in production with customers running production workloads,” Brown explained. 

That level of maturity helped AWS land a far-reaching deal with Dish Network that will see the greenfield network operator house everything it can in the cloud, including radio access network (RAN) compute functions in the distributed unit. “We’re partnering with Dish to build what is going to be the world's first 5G network built entirely on public cloud infrastructure,” he said, adding that trials are also underway with Telefónica in Germany and other operators he declined to name.

“In the case of open RAN, the fact that there are very well-defined APIs gives us a lot of opportunity for deeper integration, and so whether that’s running on an Outpost down at a cell site, or all the way up through the RAN, we’re able to do it pretty well,” Brown added. 

Those RAN sites will be running on AWS’s 1U size Outposts, which are equipped with the Amazon-designed Graviton2 processor, that will start shipping by September, according to Brown. 

“When you put an Outpost in a cell site, you can manage that Outpost as if it was in an AWS data center, so your development team can actually write some software and deploy that to that remote location or 10,000 remote locations in exactly the same way as if it was all running within a region,” he explained. 

AWS is also optimistic about the performance lift and lower costs it claims network operators can realize by using its Arm-based Graviton2 processors. “A customer running a workload today on an x86 processor, if they are to move that workload to Graviton2 you’d actually see it cost you 40% less to run the same workload and it only consumes about half the power of the Intel or the x86 processor,” Brown said. 

“We’re managing virtually from the infrastructure layer all the way up, as opposed to other frameworks like the [Google Cloud] Anthos and the [Microsoft Azure] Arcs of the world, which is really just a layer on top of some infrastructure that the provider has to manage,” he said. 

One of the factors that makes the rise of cloud computing more interesting or unique in the wireless sector is that data centers and RAN sites are widely distributed, Brown explained. 

“It’s not like I’m taking over a data center that they don’t want to be running anymore,” he said. “This is their core competency, this is the thing that makes them successful as a telco or not successful as a telco, and so we really do feel the weightiness of that as a cloud provider. We need to partner with them deeply on their workloads, make sure that we do a phenomenal job in running those workloads while we continue to give them enough control and enough insight and visibility into those workloads so that they can continue to run the telco business, which is really about the network."

Wireless carriers increasingly realize how the cloud has benefited many other industries, and “I think we’re well positioned to do that again in the telco space, and I expect it to move relatively quickly,” Brown said. 

 “What we’re doing with Dish is really a milestone and will spark a lot of the ecosystem. I think that the large players are definitely watching closely,” he said. “We’re going to move as fast as they want to move. Speed matters in business. Those that move quickly I think are going to get ahead. Those that take a little longer are probably going to want to hurry up and catch up.”