Top 5 factors crippling RAN and 5G operations – SDxCentral

There is a lot of interest in combining network and service operations end-to-end, from the RAN to the edge to the core — to facilitate the delivery of a modern cloud infrastructure suited for 5G and beyond. While communication service providers (CSPs) are being motivated by the potential benefits — network agility, operational efficiency, lower costs (capex and opex) and the ability to launch new revenue streams — several elements stand in the way of reaching their goals. They include:

1. Siloed tools

As today’s network evolved over many generations, efforts to integrate operations, across dispersed network domains, are often challenged by technology silos. Tools optimized for part of the RAN, for example, may be denied access to critical information residing in other areas of the RAN. As CSPs add new 5G and AI applications across the network, more tools are introduced into the mix, leading to further disparate silos, tools and processes.

2. Multi-vendor operations that impeded end-to-end automation

Many CSPs are automating network operations today. But their efforts are impeded by the complexities of modern networks that span multiple vendor solutions each with its own tools. Automation across one or two siloes isn’t going to solve the problem as it’s still separate tooling. The full benefits won’t become apparent by automating the lifecycle management of a few network functions. What is needed is unified automation at scale, regardless of the vendor or network domains.

3. Quantity of alarms and lack of visibility = slow resolution times

With so many siloes, tools, vendors, clouds, devices and data in play, it is no wonder that the number of alarms has gotten out of hand. Administrators who formerly might have to deal with five alarms are now more likely to see 500 alarms triggered by one event. One NOC recently got a burst of 2000 alarms following the loss of electricity to a single RAN site. All of this adds up to sluggish resolution times. Network operators spend hours sifting through the logs of disparate systems to find out what is going on. Instead, CSPs need a fast and automated way to collect, correlate and detect root causes for immediate resolution.

Perhaps the biggest challenge in RAN and more broadly, the entire network end-to-end, is how to bring all analytics into a single place. The brilliant minds of telecom operators make it possible to find that root cause needle in a networking haystack. Despite the lack of integrated tools and automation they still manage to make everything work. But it often entails heroic efforts and long hours to do so due to there being such massive, multi-faceted networks with so many components and systems that connect so many users and devices.

4. Complex security and privacy requirements

Complex security and privacy requirements are key inhibitors of technological advancement among CSPs, according to Ernst & Young (EY).

“Changing imperatives in privacy, security and trust emerges as the top risk facing telecoms companies in 2024,” said Michael Curtis, EY Global Industry Markets Media Relations. “According to the annual EY report, Top 10 risks in telecommunications, cyber-resilience is under pressure, with generative artificial intelligence throwing into question existing data governance strategies.”

For example, 74% of telco respondents believe they need to do more to mitigate against “bad actors” who could use AI to support cyber-attacks and other malicious activities. Meanwhile, privacy regulations are being instituted across the planet, with AI fears leading to yet more rules that CSPs must comply with.

5. Lack of innovation hamstrings time to market

PwC research identified that CSPs find their current capex process to be a deeply flawed and frustrating experience. 64% say that it is driven by technology and not business commercial objectives. Thus, they are spending either to maintain the existing technology stack or are implementing best-of-breed tools that don’t necessarily integrate well with the other platforms and systems they operate.

PwC estimated that CSPs could be wasting up to 20% or $65 billion in capex each year. A good portion of this spending could be invested into RAN modernization efforts that make it far easier to implement 5G services and speed innovation. In an increasingly competitive marketplace, the PwC research finds that the  lack of timely innovation is one of the big factors in industry churn levels being so high. But innovation these days requires investment in cloud-based platforms, more open architectures and the adoption of containerization, areas that lie outside of the comfort zone of some RAN operators.

Some CSPs prefer to go it alone in certain areas of technology. Yet the pace of advancement is so fast today that no one company can easily keep abreast. CSPs must reach out to those who possess the necessary software and cloud expertise. Just as civilizations, inventors and innovators depend on those that came before them, so CSPs increasingly must find the right partner ecosystems within which they can foster the level of innovation they need to launch unique 5G offerings that differentiate them in the market.

“New go-to-market ecosystems will drive growth beyond connectivity, propelled by partnership, with a shift from vertical integration to open ecosystems,” said a recent Accenture research report.

So, what now?

Overcoming these challenges will require an ecosystem-enabling, unifying approach to network operation and management. The VMware Telco Cloud Platform is a flexible, horizontal platform that is optimized for network workloads end-to-end, from the RAN to core. It eliminates siloes, enhances security while maintaining privacy, increases visibility and accelerates time to market. By disaggregating network components, the platform simplifies operations through the automation of virtualized and cloud-native functions across multi-vendor environments. It enables the implementation of automated orchestration, root-cause analysis and lifecycle management across an end-to-end network.

Instead of spending days trying to sift through logs in disparate systems, the service assurance capabilities within the Telco Cloud platform helps operations teams understand what is going on in a couple of minutes across the entire network with automated alarm consolidation, ticketing and remediation. As well as reduced opex and capex, it raises agility via end-to-end network programmability, creating ways to foster innovation and monetize new network services.

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