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DTW (Digital Transformation World)

CSPs and suppliers seek consensus on autonomous networks

At Digital Transformation World, a global group of communications service providers and their suppliers launched a new industry initiative aimed at developing a common understanding of and consensus around the concept of autonomous networks.

Dawn BushausDawn Bushaus
16 May 2019
CSPs and suppliers seek consensus on autonomous networks

CSPs and suppliers seek consensus on autonomous networks

Sponsored by: Huawei
By 2025 there will be a total of 100 billion connections around the world, according to Huawei’s Global Industry Vision. While this represents a great opportunity for communications service providers (CSPs), they may it difficult to meet the demand for hyper-connectivity because of the complexity and fragmentation of their network architecture, inefficiency in their operations, and a lack of knowledge and skills. 5G will only add to the challenges and complexity.

Automation can help CSPs address these issues and meet the fast-growing demand for connectivity. According to a 2018 report by Analysys Mason, 56% of CSPs globally have little or no automation in their networks. Yet by 2022, the research firm expects 80% of them to have automated 40% or more of their network operations.

To accomplish this and move toward full network automation, collaboration is mandatory.

That’s the message from a group of TM Forum members who have started a new automation initiative in the telecoms industry. They presented a white paper called Autonomous Networks: Empowering Digital Transformation for the Telecoms Industry during a spotlight workshop sponsored by Huawei at Digital Transformation World on May 15, 2019.

Members from BT, China Mobile, Ericsson, Huawei, Orange and Telstra collaborated on the white paper to develop a common understanding of and consensus around the concept of autonomous networks, and to explore how to simplify network infrastructure, make operations automation and develop innovative services. The group has initiated a new TM Forum collaboration project to work on their goals.
“Autonomous networks are not only an automation and efficiency of network operations, they’re a global vision of value creation,” says Christian Maitre, Director of Global Operations Transformation, Orange.

What’s driving automation?


One of the primary drivers for automating telco networks is the urgent need to reduce complexity so that they can lower operating costs, and more importantly create the new business growth opportunities. The graphic below from the white paper illustrates the dilemma.
China Mobile, for example, which is providing 100 million connections in China, is at a disadvantage when it comes to competing with over-the-top (OTT) providers because the OTT companies are much leaner.
“We have about 10 times the number of employees as the OTT players,” says Ye Wang, China Mobile’s Director of OSS. “We are very heavy, so we want to be more efficient. The selection of use cases should be business driven and customer centric.”

Inspired by autonomous cars


Autonomous networks will help CSPs develop innovative new services and respond to customers’ changing needs much more quickly. “CSPs can no longer wait 18 months to deliver a new service,” says Aaron Boasman-Patel, VP, AI & Customer Experience at TM Forum, and editor of the white paper. “We need to get it down to 18 days.”

An inspiration for CSPs and suppliers is the automotive industry, says Dr. Dong Sun, Chief Architect of Digital Transformation, Huawei.
“Their business model is changing,” he explains. “They are selling the car based on the automation level, not just on the basic car functions. We also have this opportunity [in telecoms]. The ultimate goal is to bring simplicity of ICT services to the users (enterprises and consumers) through the collaboration of autonomous domains.”

Dr. Dong Sun notes that the aim of autonomous networks is to build a more valuable telecoms industry and to take advantage of automation and AI. “A simplified network architecture and automation of operations are needed for self-configuration, self-healing, self-optimizing and self-evolving telecom network infrastructures. The telecom industry needs to offer zero wait, zero touch and zero trouble services, which can provide the best possible user experience, full lifecycle automation and maximum utilization.”

Similar to the classification of autonomous cars, autonomous networks are grouped into five levels of management:

  • Level 0 – manual management

  • Level 1 – assisted management

  • Level 2 – partial autonomous network

  • Level 3 – conditional autonomous network

  • Level 4 – high autonomous network

  • Level 5 – full autonomous network


Reducing complexity is key


Guy Lupo, General Manager, Head of NaaS 2020, Telstra, says automation is “hugely important” to the company’s massive network transformation to embrace network as a service (NaaS). To illustrate why, he pointed to one of the first automated service chains the company created years ago to support a simple virtual private network connection which involved several network components.

“The concept of automation was demonstrated, but we didn’t solve the problem that each and every silo [of the orchestrated components] allocated their own operating people. We ended up with 20 people for a service that’s supposed to be cheap.
“It doesn’t scale,” he says. “If you don’t start investing in automating the operations functions around those domains and expose services to create some economy, you will have a non-scalable business.”

José Domingos, OSS Chief Assurance Systems Architect at BT, notes that automation isn’t just a future consideration for CSPs – it is important now because networks already are too big and too complex to be orchestrated and managed manually.
“As we move into SDN and NFV and into 5G deployment, we won’t be able to deal with the complexity,” he says.

Ignacio Más, Senior Expert and Head of Technology Innovation in OSS at Ericsson agrees.
“There’s going to be an explosion of the complexity as things start to work with each other the way we need them to,” he says. “Automation is the only way forward, but we need to have a little patience.”

Working together is the only way


The group stressed that CSPs and suppliers must work together to establish a common language and standards for autonomous networks.
“The true autonomous enabler is working on standardizing common repeatable aspects of the service with the industry,” Lupo says.

This collaboration will happen within TM Forum as part of a new collaboration project which will have its first workshop in June. But it will also happen within other standards-development organizations and open source communities. The panel also emphasized that it is equally important for these groups to collaborate.
“This is the right time,” Dr. Dong Sun says. “We have the enabling technologies and we also have the change of mindset to understand what the business really needs and what the business collaboration mode should be. Then we can look at how to apply cutting-edge technologies such as AI, big data, cloud computing and virtualization. The answer is from automation to autonomy for the transformation of the telecom industry.”

Watch Huawei’s Dr. Haiping Che, Senior VP and Chief Digital Transformation Officer, discuss the autonomous network project. To learn more and to find out how to join the project, please contact Aaron Boasman-Patel.