HPE 5G Lab meant to facilitate multi-vendor integration, interoperability
In previous generations of cellular, HPE has largely focused its telco core network efforts on subscriber data management. But with 5G designed as a cloud-native network from core to edge, the company sees a much bigger opportunity that leverages its expertise in enterprise IT.
Domenico Convertino, vice president of product management for HPE’s Communication and Media Solutions business unit, explained to RCR Wireless News: “When we started looking at 5G…we were coming from a presence in the mobile core–2G, 3G, 4G–that was pretty much subscriber data management. Looking at the way 3GPP was defining the standard at that time, we thought that this was going to be a huge opportunity for a company like HPE. What the telcos are trying to adopt now is a transformation to cloud-native that enterprise IT started many years ago. We tried to take a position, as a company, first to provide the right infrastructure for 5G because 5G is coming with different performance and scalability requirements. The second thing is to look at the access network of the mobile operator of the future–more and more convergent with an edge cloud. And from a pure software point of view, the idea was to help telcos adopt all the best practices of IT and the simplification cloud brought to IT, all those best practices that, at the end of the day, can dramatically reduce the cost of ownership.”
This pretty well sums up the role companies more associated with enterprise IT have to play in 5G as proprietary, single-vendor technology stacks give way to the multi-vendor, open and interoperable configurations needed to create more favorable economics for telcos; the other argument for virtualization and distributed compute as it relates to 5G is the need for flexibility to address whole new types of use cases and applications. To facilitate this shift, HPE recently opened a 5G Lab in Colorado that’s focused on creating a space for telcos and vendors to work out interoperability issues.
Convertino agreed that the argument against open networking is that you’re trading capex for integration costs and said, “This is the spirit of the 5G Lab. We need places to experiment, test and have different companies working together creating new value.”
From a product side, HPE in March announced its Core Stack which the company describes as including “stateless containerized network functions…a shared data environment…a common platform as a service (PaaS) architecture, end-to-end management and orchestration (MANO), and automation framework, all pre-integrated on carrier-grade infrastructure as a service.”
In the move from non-standalone 5G, marked by new 5G carriers attached to an LTE core, to the full-on, cloud-native standalone 5G network, the big picture here is using network slices, spun-up automatically and with tailored quality of service parameters, to deliver high-value enterprise-facing services.
This was the focus of a recent demo HPE worked on with Casa Systems and Orange wherein the partners put a 5G radio on a robot, connected it to an open core, and used HPE’s orchestration software to automatically deliver the slice.
“Our robot demo underscores how a cloud-native, software-defined 5G network will support latency-sensitive business use cases with automatic detection and migration to a dedicated network slice to meet the strictest SLAs for mission-critical applications,” Orange’s Emmanuel Bidet, vice president of Convergent Networks Control, said in a statement. “This is a new step forward marking the emergence of the real-time enterprise as companies now expect to use data as soon as it is produced from sensors, cameras, robots and other devices and services to power digital transformation strategies.”
In this push to leverage 5G, edge compute and cloud to achieve the goals of Industry 4.0, “Everything is related to the 5G core,” Convertino said. While opening up and disaggregating the radio access network is certainly a trending topic in telecoms at the moment, “The access is a financial exercise. When it comes to the core, it’s different. 5G is going to change dramatically the landscape of the communication provider.”
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