Blockchain-based telecom infrastructure marketplace enables ‘pop-up’ networks and on-the-fly business models

A TM Forum Catalyst project called Blockchain-based Telecom Infrastructure Marketplace is using the distributed ledger technology to underpin a telecom infrastructure marketplace that will help to create more agile, flexible and on-demand business and procurement models. Blockchain is increasingly being used by a wide variety of industries – including telecoms – to enable organizations to directly transact with each other by eliminating intermediaries. It is also helping to build trust and transparency across value chains and ecosystems. Blockchain is considered one of the digital economy’s most disruptive technologies. According to the Deloitte 2018 Global Blockchain Survey, 69% of organizations are planning to replace traditional record systems with blockchain, while 59% believe it will disrupt their industry. A TM Forum proof-of-concept Catalyst project is exploring how blockchain can be used to help the telecoms industry procure infrastructure and assets quickly and cost-effectively to unleash new agile, on-demand business and procurement models. Blockchain Unleashed The platform project builds on the work done in the previous iteration of the Catalyst, Blockchain Unleashed, which looked at five use cases relating to roaming, identity management, service level agreement (SLA) monitoring, mobile number portability and stolen mobile devices. The award-winning demonstration showed how TM Forum assets could be used by communication service providers (CSPs) to implement blockchains. These assets included the Digital Services Reference Architecture (DSRA) and Open APIs as well as ecosystem modelling tool CurateFX. Tayeb Ben Meriem, OAM Senior Standards Specialist at Orange – which is a champion in the Catalyst alongside Vodafone – explains that the motivation for the second phase of the work was to find out how blockchain could help communications service providers (CSPs) move towards a new, more flexible and on-demand way of sourcing and procuring telecom infrastructure and assets that doesn’t involve capital expenditure (CapEx). Catalyst champions outline a business challenge and work with participants – in this case, Infosys, IOTA, Nokia and r3 -- to solve it. The Catalyst also has a collaboration with Stanford University in relation to smart contracts. Ben Meriem explains that the Catalyst is focusing on two use cases of “high interest” to CSPs: reinforcing existing infrastructure or acquiring it for a temporary event, such as in a stadium and opening up business opportunities in a country where it has no or incomplete infrastructure in place.

“And to do both of these, I don’t want to invest CapEx,” says Ben Meriem.

In blockchain we trust?

In both cases, CSPs need to procure or rent assets from various players in the market, such as tower or spectrum providers. This is a challenge – not least because there are typically no existing or long-term relationships or commitments between the companies.

“So there is no trust and confidence,” says Ben Meriem, adding that a blockchain-based marketplace for assets addresses this challenge. “Because blockchain is based on consensus, trust and confidence by design. And once the trust is built, the business can begin.”

Blockchain is a distributed, rather than centralized, ledger, and only those in the ecosystem or value chain can inspect, audit, add to or change the data and then only by consensus with the other stakeholders. Everything in the blockchain is immutable and traceable. Blockchain also enables an ‘auction-based’, on-demand approach to procurement that can be scaled up and down according to business needs. The marketplace approach being developed offers a number of facilities including renting rather than buying assets, hence reducing if not eliminating CapEx. Moreover, by using metadata, combined with an autonomic, artificial intelligence-based search engine, assets can be found, selected and onboarded in an automated and far more simplified way, removing many of the traditional pain points in the procurement process. Gnanapriya Chidambaranathan, AVP, Senior Principal Architect at Infosys, believes such a marketplace will be critical in the world of 5G and the Internet of Things (IoT), which will add even more complexity in terms of choice and options in the market.

“We are not really looking at complete and full-blown networks but at what is explicitly required, and being able to do so on the go. This is the requirement of new business models.” she said “It is about creating a marketplace that allows service providers to get what they want, when they need it and to do so in a seamless and integrated way.

The Catalyst’s own measure of success is to enable CSPs to find the required infrastructure and deploy it quickly with minimal outlay and “trust, transparency and traceability” throughout the lifecycle -- all the while delivering services that meet customers’ needs”.

Common to all markets

The templates and best practices generated through the Catalyst could form the basis of a standard that is effectively a generic blockchain-based marketplace which could be applied to any industry. At Digital Transformation World in Nice, the team will demonstrate three marketplaces based on three different blockchains: two for the telecoms market built on IOTA and r3 Corda and one for the energy sector built on Hyperledger.

“We will demonstrate how the different asset providers are onboarded and how service providers can find their requirements in a matchmaking scenario in the marketplace,” says Chidambaranathan.

As in the previous Catalyst, TM Forum assets have been central to developing the blockchain marketplace infrastructure including the TM Forum blockchain specification released last year and CurateFX. Many of the processes within the marketplace, such as ordering and bidding, are guided by APIs and Ben Meriem says the team will be using – and contributing back to – around five or six TM Forum Open APIs.