Keith DyerDay Two of CLOUD CITY and we had stories from Mavenir about Cloud RAN and Open RAN, from P1 about security, from Totogi about its genre-changing charging engine, demonstrations of WiFi roaming and single click user ID authentication, and from Salamanca we heard how organizations can make the change to public cloud.
Add that to yesterday’s roster, and you begin to see how widely the impact of public cloud could be felt across the scope of a telco’s operations.
On the GSMA’s conference keynote, TelcoDR’s DR was telling the world that telcos can use the public cloud to leverage network events to improve customer experience. And she added that if they don’t, “you’re screwed”.
On the CLOUD CITY LIVE stage, SiliconANGLE’s John Furrier was having his own “mind blown” by one of AWS’s senior technologists, who was describing how the company’s 5G Hubs can act as locations for edge-based AI to add intelligence to “dumb, cute robots”, or to aid very low latency use cases across a range of access technologies, but most notably 5G. The potential use cases included manufacturing automation, tele-medicine, cloud gaming and much more.
How AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure engage with telcos – and how telcos engage with the cloud platform providers – is still an unanswered question. Amazon is building out a range of locations, from the far edge to the central data centers, so that a telco can deploy software workloads in different environments with AWS’s common deployment, automation and orchestration framework.
But two things are clear again: the cloud providers want to add value to their own customers, sure, but also to their telco partners. They really do appreciate the possibilities of extended 5G coverage and an edge in the network that gives telcos the ability to provide highly personalized and differentiated slices and services, combined with business and application logic from ISVs and enterprises themselves.
Second, the range of possibilities for the public cloud presence within telcos is wide – and we are only at the start of its exploitation.
