TechKnowledge is a series of Technology Stories looking at how technology has evolved over the years and how it will continue to evolve in the future. The series is targeted at youth looking to understand how technology has been evolving and how it will evolve further. It is our intention to make a ten part series but as of yet only four parts are complete.
Part 1: 'Smaller, Faster, Cheaper and More…' looks at how technology has evolved by things getting smaller, faster, cheaper and much more. It investigates Moore’s law and how it has helped create a future technology roadmap.
Part 2: 'Connecting Everything Everywhere…' discusses different connectivity options available to connect various devices, gadgets and appliances to the internet. It highlights the fact that this is just the beginning, and everything that can be connected will eventually get connected.
Part 3: 'Satellites - Our Friends In The Sky…' discusses the fact that they are our friends and helpers in the sky. In discusses how satellites are useful as a connectivity option, how it helps us map and navigate, how we can use location based services, how we can watch broadcast video or listen to broadcast radio, and last but not least, how satellites are helping us observe and monitor the earth.
Part 4: 'Devices and Gadgets - Our Companions and Life Savers…' looks at the fact that we use a variety of electronic devices/gadgets in our everyday lives to make it more convenient, efficient, and even keep us connected. From smartphones and laptops to smart home appliances and wearable tech, these devices simplify tasks, enhance productivity, and provide instant access to information and communication. They help us manage work, stay in touch with loved ones, and access entertainment on the go. Gadgets like fitness trackers promote healthier lifestyles, while others automate household chores, saving time and energy. Overall, the connected devices & gadgets have become essential tools in modern life, blending seamlessly into our routines and transforming how we live and interact.
Over the years we have made a lot of tutorials explaining mobile wireless technology (list here). Here is another one that came up as part of a discussion where many experienced telecom engineers seemed to be struggling explaining what telecoms mean. Slides and video embedded below:
Over the years we have looked at the standards development, infrastructure development and even country specific mission critical solutions development in various blog posts. In this post we are sharing this short new tutorial by Mpirical on mission critical services in LTE and 5G. The video is embedded below:
Private Networks has been a hot topic for a while now. We made a technical introductory video which has over 13K views while its slides have over 25K views. The Private Networks blog that officially started in April is now getting over 2K views a month.
In addition, there are quite a few questions and enquiries that I receive on them on a regular basis. With this background, it makes sense to add these Introductory video series by Firecell in a post. Their 'Private Networks Tutorial Series' playlist, aiming to demystify private networks, is embedded below:
The playlist has five videos at the moment, hopefully they will add more:
Introduction to different kinds of mobile networks: public, private and hybrid networks
We recently made a beginners tutorial explaining the need for The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), its working, structure and provides useful pointers to explore further. The video and slides are embedded below.
Since the industry realised how the 5G Network Architecture will look like, Network Slicing has been touted as the killer business case that will allow the mobile operators to generate revenue from new sources.
According to global technology intelligence firm ABI Research, 5G slicing revenue is expected to grow from US$309 million in 2022 to approximately US$24 billion in 2028, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 106%.
“5G slicing adoption falls into two main categories. One, there is no connectivity available. Two, there is connectivity, but there is not sufficient capacity, coverage, performance, or security. For the former, both private and public organizations are deploying private network slices on a permanent and ad hoc basis,” highlights Don Alusha, 5G Core and Edge Networks Senior Analyst at ABI Research. The second scenario is mostly catered by private networks today, a market that ABI Research expects to grow from US$3.6 billion to US$109 billion by 2023, at a CAGR of 45.8%. Alusha continues, “A sizable part of this market can be converted to 5G slicing. But first, the industry should address challenges associated with technology and commercial models. On the latter, consumers’ and enterprises’ appetite to pay premium connectivity prices for deterministic and tailored connectivity services remains to be determined. Furthermore, there are ongoing industry discussions on whether the value that comes from 5G slicing can exceed the cost required to put together the underlying slicing ecosystem.”
I recently published IDC's first forecast on 5G network slicing services opportunity. Slicing should be an important tool for telcos to create new services, but it still remains many years away in most markets. A very complicated undertakinghttps://t.co/GNY4xiLFBV
Earlier this year, Daryl Schoolar - Research Director at IDC tackled this topic in his blog post:
5G network slicing, part of the 3GPP standards developed for 5G, allows for the creation of multiple virtual networks across a single network infrastructure, allowing enterprises to connect with guaranteed low latency. Using principles behind software-defined network and network virtualization, slicing allows the mobile operator to provide differentiated network experience for different sets of end users. For example, one network slice could be configured to support low latency, while another slice is configured for high download speeds. Both slices would run across the same underlying network infrastructure, including base stations, transport network, and core network.
Network slicing differs from private mobile networks, in that network slicing runs on the public wide area network. Private mobile networks, even when offered by the mobile operator, use infrastructure and spectrum dedicated to the end user to isolate the customer’s traffic from other users.
5G network slicing is a perfect candidate for future business connectivity needs. Slicing provides a differentiated network experience that can better match the customers performance requirements than traditional mobile broadband. Until now, there has been limited mobile network performance customization outside of speeds. 5G network slicing is a good example of telco service offerings that meet future of connectivity requirements. However, 5G network slicing also highlights the challenges mobile operators face with transformation in their pursuit of remaining relevant.
For 5G slicing to have broad commercial availability, and to provide a variety of performance options, several things need to happen first.
Operators need to deploy 5G Standalone (SA) using the new 5G mobile core network. Currently most operators use the 5G non-standalone (NSA) architecture that relies on the LTE mobile core. It might be the end of 2023 before the majority of commercial 5G networks are using the SA mode.
Spectrum is another hurdle that must be overcome. Operators still make most of their revenue from consumers, and do not want to compromise the consumer experience when they start offering network slicing. This means operators need more spectrum. In the U.S., among the three major mobile operators, only T-Mobile currently has a nationwide 5G mid-band spectrum deployment. AT&T and Verizon are currently deploying in mid-band, but that will not be completed until 2023.
5G slicing also requires changes to the operator’s business and operational support systems (BSS/OSS). Current BSS/OSS solutions were not designed to support the increased parameters those systems were designed to support.
And finally, mobile operators still need to create the business propositions around commercial slicing services. Mobile operators need to educate businesses on the benefits of slicing and how slicing supports their different connectivity requirements. This could involve mobile operators developing industry specific partnerships to reach different business segments. All these things take time to be put into place.
Because of the enormity of the tasks needed to make 5G network slicing a commercial success, IDC currently has a very conservative outlook for this service through 2026. IDC believes it will be 2023 until there is general commercial availability of 5G network slicing. The exception is China, which is expected to have some commercial offerings in 2022 as it has the most mature 5G market. Even then, it will take until 2025 before global revenues from slicing exceeds a billion U.S. dollars. In 2026 IDC forecasts slicing revenues will be approximately $3.2 billion. However, over 80% of those revenues will come out of China.
The 'Outspoken Industry Analyst' Dean Bubley believes that Network Slicing is one of the worst strategic errors made by the mobile industry, since the catastrophic choice of IMS for communications applications. In a LinkedIn post he explains:
At best, slicing is an internal toolset that might allow telco operations or product teams (or their vendors) to manage their network resources. For instance, it could be used to separate part of a cell's capacity for FWA, and dynamically adjust that according to demand. It might be used as an "ingredient" to create a higher class of service for enterprise customers, for instance for trucks on a highway, or as part of an "IoT service" sold by MNOs. Public safety users might have an expensive, artisanal "hand-carved" slice which is almost a separate network. Maybe next-gen MVNOs.
(I'm talking proper 3GPP slicing here - not rebranded QoS QCI classes, private APNs, or something that looks like a VLAN, which will probably get marketed as "slices")
But the idea that slicing is itself a *product*, or that application developers or enterprises will "buy a slice" is delusional.
Firstly, slices will be dependent on [good] coverage and network control. A URLLC slice likely won't work reliably indoors, underground, in remote areas, on a train, on a neutral-host network, or while roaming. This has been a basic failure of every differentiated-QoS monetisation concept for many years, and 5G's often-higher frequencies make it worse, not better.
Secondly, there is no mature machinery for buying, selling, testing, supporting. price, monitoring slices. No, the 5G Network Exposure Function won't do it all. I haven't met a Slice salesperson yet, or a Slice-procurement team.
Thirdly, a "local slice" of a national 5G network will run headlong into a battle with the desire for separate private/dedicated local 5G networks, which may well be cheaper and easier. It also won't work well with the enterprise's IT/OT/IP domains, out of the box.
Also there's many challenges getting multi-operator slices, device OS links to slice APIs, slice "boundary controllers" between operators, aligning RAN and core slices, regulatory questionmarks and much more.
There are lots of discussion in the comments section that may be of interest to you, here.
My belief is that we will see lots of interesting use cases with slicing in public networks but it will be difficult to monetise. The best networks will manage to do it to create some plans with guaranteed rates and low latency. It would remain to be see whether they can successfully monetise it well enough.
For technical people and newbies, there are lots of Network Slicing resources on this blog (see related posts 👇). Here is another recent video from Mpirical:
Dr. Seppo Virtanen is an Associate Professor in Cyber Security Engineering and Vice Head of Department of Computing, the University of Turku, Finland. At 5G Hack The Mall 2022, he presented a talk on Cybersecurity and 5G.
In the talk he covered the following topics:
Cybersecurity and Information Security
The CIA (Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability) Model
Achieving the goals of the CIA model
Intrusion and Detection
Intrusion detection, mitigation and aftercare
Smart Environments
Abstraction levels
Cybersecurity in smart environments
Cyber security concerns in smart environments
Security concerns in Smart Personal Spaces
Security concerns in Smart Rooms and Buildings
Security concerns of a participant in a smart environment
Cyber Security Concerns in Smart Environments
Cyber Security in the 5G context
Drivers for 5G security
Securing 5G
This video embedded below is a nice introduction to cybersecurity and how it overlaps with 5G:
People involved with mobile technology know the challenges with uplink for any generation of mobile network. With increasing data rates in 4G and 5G, the issue has become important as most of the speeds are focused on download but upload speeds are quite poor.
Speedtests are still the 5G killer app (#5GKillerApp) right now. Fantastic speeds from Verizon 5G Ultra Wideband (UWB) #5GBuiltRight. Upload speeds 250+ Mbps but notice how to hold the phone right to get these speeds 🤫https://t.co/DS18IOw8AW
People who follow us across our channels know of many of the presentations we share across them from various sources, not just ours. One such presentation by Peter Schmidt looked at the uplink in details. In fact we recommend following him on Twitter if you are interested in technical details and infrastructure.
The lecture highlights the influences on the mysterious part of mobile communications - sources of interference in the uplink and their impact on mobile communication as well as practices for detecting sources of RF interference.
The field strength bar graph of a smartphone (the downlink reception field strength) is only half of the truth when assessing a mobile network coverage. The other half is the uplink, which is largely invisible but highly sensitive to interference, the direction from the end device to the base stations. In this lecture, sources of uplink interference, their effects and measurement and analysis options will be explained.
Cellular network uplink is essential for mobile communication, but nobody can really see it. The uplink can be disrupted by jammers, repeaters, and many other RF sources. When it is jammed, mobile communication is limited. I will show what types of interference sources can disrupt the uplink and what impact this has on cellular usage and how interference hunting can be done.
First I explain the necessary level symmetry of the downlink (from the mobile radio base station - eNodeB to the end device) and the uplink (from the end device back to the eNodeB). Since the transmission power of the end device and eNodeB are very different, I explain the technical background to achieving symmetry. In the following I will explain the problems and possibilities when measuring uplink signals on the eNodeB, it is difficult to look inside the receiver. In comparison, the downlink is very easy to measure, you can see the bars on your smartphone or you can use apps that provide detailed field strength information etc. However, the uplink remains largely invisible. However, if this is disturbed on the eNodeB, the field strength bars on the end device say nothing. I will present a way of observing which some end devices bring on board or can be read out of the chipset with APPs. The form in which the uplink can be disrupted, the effects on communication and the search for uplink sources of disruption will complete the presentation. I will also address the problem of 'passive intermodulation' (PIM), a (not) new source of interference in base station antenna systems, its assessment, measurement and avoidance.
The slides are available here. The original lecture was in German, a dubbed video is embedded below:
If you know of some other fantastic resources that we can share with our audience, please feel free to add them in the comments.
Jim Morrish, Founding Partner of Transforma Insights has kindly made an in-depth Edge Computing Tutorial for our channel. Slides and video is embedded below.
Network Slicing is a hot topic on our blogs and it looks like people can't get enough of it. So here is a short introductory tutorial from Wray Castle.
The video embedded below explores what Network Slicing is, how it is used, and how it is deployed in the 5G network, as well as (briefly) the role of MEC (Multi Access Edge Computing) in support of specific use cases and potential slice deployments.
I come across a question relating to the different type of RAN architectures once per month on an average. Even though we have covered the topic as part of some or the other tutorial, we decided to do a dedicated tutorial on this.
Having been writing about Open RAN for a while, I thought it was important to make simple beginners tutorials for O-RAN. As my full time job* is with a company that is heavily involved in Open RAN and O-RAN, I had an insiders view for doing this project.
I am making a series of videos for Parallel Wireless to help the industry become familiar with the technology and terminology. The playlist is embedded below:
Four of these are ready and more will be added as and when I get some time. Here is a summary of the videos available. Some of them also have a corresponding blog that I am linking below.
Introduction to O-RAN Philosophy: This explains the basics of O-RAN and how O-RAN is transforming the mobile networks industry towards open, intelligent, virtualized and fully interoperable RAN.
Introduction to O-RAN Timeline and Releases: This part looks at important timelines from the O-RAN Alliance, understand the O-RAN Software Community (OSC) and the role it plays in O-RAN, and finally, looks at the O-RAN Open-Source Software releases.
Introduction to O-RAN Architecture: This part looks at how the basic OpenRAN architecture is evolving into the O-RAN Alliance based Intelligent, Virtualized and Fully Interoperable RAN. It starts with a high-level ORAN architecture and then delves into details of Service Management and Orchestration (SMO), Non-Real-Time (Non-RT) RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC), Near-RT RIC and O-Cloud.
O-RAN Technical Steering Committee (TSC) & Workgroups: This part looks at O-RAN Technical Steering Committee (TSC) & Workgroups (WGs). The O-RAN TSC decides or gives guidance on O-RAN technical topics and approves O-RAN specifications prior to the Board approval and publication. The TSC consists of Member representatives and the technical workgroup co-chairs, representing both Members and Contributors. Within the TSC, there are 10 work groups, 4 focus groups, Open-Source Community and Minimum Viable Plan Committee. These have all been discussed within the video.
I am hoping that I will be able to do a few more parts and add a lot more information to the basics so a handy resource is available for anyone interested. Feel free to add links, suggestions, etc. in the comments below.
*Full Disclosure: I work for Parallel Wireless as a Senior Director, Technology & Innovation Strategy. This blog is maintained in my personal capacity and expresses my own views, not the views of my employer or anyone else. Anyone who knows me well would know this.
We often get questions about 5G Service Based Architecture. Luckily, we have a tutorial that we can redirect people to. It's available here and the video just crossed 50K views. One of the questions that people often want to understand, is about the Application Function (AF) and how does it fit in the Applications Architecture.
To explain this, we made a tutorial. The slides and videos are embedded below. In that we have used the examples from our XR, V2X and Private Networks tutorials. All links are available at the bottom of this post.
5G & Security are both big topics on this blog as well as on 3G4G website. We reached out to 3GPP 5G security by experts from wenovator, Dr. Anand R. Prasad & Hans Christian Rudolph to help out audience understand the mysteries of 5G security. Embedded below is video and slides from a webinar they recorded for us.
You can ask any security questions you may have on the video on YouTube
Nokia recently delivered some lectures virtually to Bangalore University students. The talks covered a variety of talks from LTE to 5G, Security & IMS. The playlist from Nokia is embedded below. The video contains following topics:
Part 1: 5G - General Introduction and IoT Specific Features Part 2: 5G Overview Part 3: Network Security Practices and Principles Part 4: LTE Network Architecture - Interface and Protocols Part 5: IMS - IP Multimedia Subsystem
I have received quite a few requests to do a 5G Network Slicing tutorial but have still not got around to doing it. Luckily there are so many public resources available that I can get away with not doing one on this topic.
This Award Solutions webinar by Paul Shepherd (embedded below) provides good insights into network slicing, what it is, how it efficiently enables different services in 5G networks, and the architectural changes in 5G required to support it.
Then there is also this myth about 3 slices in the network. The GSMA slice template is a good starting point for an operator looking to do network slicing in their 5G networks. The latest version is 3.0, available here.
As this picture (courtesy of Phil Kendall) shows, it's not a straightforward task.
That is 37 attributes each of which can take multiple values. The permutations are massive.
Alistair URIE from Nokia Bell Labs points out some common misconceptions people have with Network Slicing:
Multiple slices may share the same cell and the same RU in each slice
Single UE may have up to 8 active slices but must have a single CU-CP instance to terminate the common RRC
Slicing supports more than 3 slices
Back in March, China Mobile, Huawei, Tencent, China Electric Power Research Institute, and Digital Domain have jointly released the Categories and Service Levels of Network Slice White Paper to introduce the industry’s first classification of network slice levels. The new white paper dives into the definitions, solutions, typical scenarios, and evolution that make up the five levels of network slices. It serves as an excellent reference to provide guidance in promoting and commercializing network slicing, and lays a theoretical foundation for the industry-wide application of network slicing.
Phase 1 (ready): As mentioned above, the 5G transport network and 5G core network support different software-based and hardware-based isolation solutions. On the 5G NR side, 5QIs (QoS scheduling mechanism) are mainly used to achieve software-based isolation in WAN scenarios. Alternatively, campus-specific 5G NR (including micro base stations and indoor distributed base stations) is used to implement hardware-based isolation in LAN scenarios. In terms of service experience assurance, 5QIs are used to implement differentiated SLA assurance between slices. In terms of slice OAM capabilities, E2E KPIs can be managed in a visualized manner. This means that from 2020 on, Huawei is ready to deliver commercial use of E2E slicing for common customers and VIP customers of the public network and common customer of general industries (such as UHD live broadcast and AR advertisement).
Phase 2 (to be ready in 2021): In terms of isolation, the 5G NR side supports the wireless RB resource reservation technology (including the static reservation and dynamic reservation modes) to implement E2E network resource isolation and slicing in WAN scenarios. In terms of service experience assurance, features such as 5G LAN and 5G TSN are enhanced to implement differentiated and deterministic SLA assurance between different slices. In terms of slice OAM, on the basis of tenant-level KPI visualization, the limited self-service of the industry for rented slices can be further supported. In this phase, operators can serve VIP customers in common industries (such as AR/VR cloud games and drone inspection), dedicated industry customers (such as electric power management information region, medical hospital campus, and industrial campus), and dedicated industry customers (such as electric power production control region and public security).
Phase 3 (to be ready after 2022): In this phase, 5G network slicing supports real dynamic closed-loop SLAs based on AI and negative feedback mechanism, implementing network self-optimization and better serving industries (such as 5G V2X) with high requirements on mobility, roaming, and service continuity. In addition, industry-oriented comprehensive service capabilities will be further enhanced and evolved.
A more technical presentation from Nokia is available here. The video below shows how innovations in IP routing and SDN work together to implement network slicing in the transport domain.
If you know some other good resources and tutorials worth sharing, add them in the comments below.
Mats Näslund is a cryptologist at the National Defence Radio Establishment outside Stockholm, an agency under the Swedish dept. of defence. As part of his work, he represents Sweden in technical LI standardization in 3GPP. Mats also has a part time appointment as adjunct professor at KTH. Her recently delivered a HAIC Talk on Lawful Intercept in 5G Networks. HAIC Talks is a series of public outreach events on contemporary topics in information security, organized by the Helsinki-Aalto Institute for Cybersecurity (HAIC).
The following is the description from HAIC website:
Our societies have been prospering, much due to huge technological advances over the last 100 years. Unfortunately, criminal activity has in many cases also been able to draw benefits from these advances. Communication technology, such as the Internet and mobile phones, are today “tools-of-the-trade” that are used to plan, execute, and even hide crimes such as fraud, espionage, terrorism, child abuse, to mention just a few. Almost all countries have regulated how law enforcement, in order to prevent or investigate serious crime, can sometimes get access to meta data and communication content of service providers, data which normally is protected as personal/private information. The commonly used term for this is Lawful Interception (LI). For mobile networks LI is, from a technical standpoint, carried out according to ETSI and 3GPP standards. In this talk, the focus will lie on the technical LI architecture for 5G networks. We will also give some background, describing the general, high-level legal aspects of LI, as well as some current and future technical challenges.
The premises of virtualization is to move physical network functions (PNF in hardware) into software and to design them in a way so that they can be deployed on a NFVI (Network Functions Virtualization Infrastructure, a.k.a. the cloud).
MANagement and Orchestration (MANO) is a key element of the ETSI network functions virtualization (NFV) architecture. MANO is an architectural framework that coordinates network resources for cloud-based applications and the lifecycle management of virtual network functions (VNFs) and network services. As such, it is crucial for ensuring rapid, reliable NFV deployments at scale. MANO includes the following components: the NFV orchestrator (NFVO), the VNF manager (VNFM), and the virtual infrastructure manager (VIM).
NFV Orchestrator: Responsible for onboarding of new network services (NS) and virtual network function (VNF) packages; NS lifecycle management; global resource management; validation and authorization of network functions virtualization infrastructure (NFVI) resource requests.
VNF Manager: Oversees lifecycle management of VNF instances; fills the coordination and adaptation role for configuration and event reporting between NFV infrastructure (NFVI) and Element/Network Management Systems.
Virtualized Infrastructure Manager (VIM): Controls and manages the NFVI compute, storage, and network resources.
For the NFV MANO architecture to work properly and effectively, it must be integrated with open application program interfaces (APIs) in the existing systems. The MANO layer works with templates for standard VNFs and gives users the power to pick and choose from existing NFVI resources to deploy their platform or element.
Couple of good old tutorials, good as gold, explaining the ETSI NFV MANO concept. The videos are embedded below. The slides from the video are probably not available but there are other slides from ETSI here. If you are new to this, this is a good presentation to start with.
NFV MANO Part 1: Overview and VNF Lifecycle Management: Uwe Rauschenbach | Rapporteur | ETSI NFV ISG covers:
ETSI NFV MANO Concepts
VNF Lifecycle Management
NFV MANO Part 2: Network Service Lifecycle Management: Jeremy Fuller | Chair, IFA WG | ETSI NFV ISG covers:
Network Service Lifecycle Management
If you have any better suggestions for the slides / video, please feel free to add in the comments.
Cloud native is talked about so often that it is assumed everyone knows what is means. Before going any further, here is a short introductory tutorial here and video by my Parallel Wireless colleague, Amit Ghadge.
If instead you prefer a more detailed cloud native tutorial, here is another one from Award Solutions.
Back in June, Johanna Newman, Principal Cloud Transformation Manager, Group Technology Strategy & Architecture at Vodafone spoke at the Cloud Native World with regards to Vodafone's Cloud Native Journey
Roz Roseboro, a former Heavy Reading analyst who covered the telecom market for nearly 20 years and currently a Consulting Analyst at Light Reading wrote a fantastic summary of that talk here. The talk is embedded below and selective extracts from the Light Reading article as follows:
While vendors were able to deliver some cloud-native applications, there were still problems ensuring interoperability at the application level. This means new integrations were required, and that sent opex skyrocketing.
I was heartened to see that Newman acknowledged that there is a difference between "cloud-ready" and "cloud-native." In the early days, many assumed that if a function was virtualized and could be managed using OpenStack, that the journey was over.
However, it soon became clear that disaggregating those functions into containerized microservices would be critical for CSPs to deploy functions rapidly and automate management and achieve the scalability, flexibility and, most importantly, agility that the cloud promised. Newman said as much, remarking that the jump from virtualized to cloud-native was too big a jump for hardware and software vendors to make.
The process of re-architecting VNFs to containerize them and make them cloud-native is non-trivial, and traditional VNF suppliers have not done so at the pace CSPs would like to see. I reference here my standard chicken and egg analogy: Suppliers will not go through the cost and effort to re-architect their software if there are no networks upon which to deploy them. Likewise, CSPs will not go through the cost and effort to deploy new cloud networks if there is no software ready to run on them. Of course, some newer entrants like Rakuten have been able to be cloud-native out of the gate, demonstrating that the promise can be realized, in the right circumstances.
Newman also discussed the integration challenges – which are not unique to telecom, of course, but loom even larger in their complex, multivendor environments. During my time as a cloud infrastructure analyst, in survey after survey, when asked what the most significant barrier to faster adoption of cloud-native architectures, CSPs consistently ranked integration as the most significant.
Newman spent a little time discussing the work of the Common NFVi Telco Taskforce (CNTT), which is charged with developing a handful of reference architectures that suppliers can then design to which will presumably help mitigate many of these integration challenges, not to mention VNF/CNF life cycle management (LCM) and ongoing operations.
Vodafone requires that all new software be cloud-native – calling it the "Cloud Native Golden Rule." This does not come as a surprise, as many CSPs have similar strategies. What did come as a bit of a surprise, was the notion that software-as-a-service (SaaS) is seen as a viable alternative for consuming telco functions. While the vendor with the SaaS offering may not itself be cloud-native (for example, it could still have hardware dependencies), from Vodafone's point of view, it ends up performing as such, given the lower operational and maintenance costs and flexibility of a SaaS consumption model.
If you have some other fantastic links, videos, resources on this topic, feel free to add in the comments.
