This is an excerpt from our new report Open source accelerates beyond experimentation.
Download the report now for the full insight.The relationship between communication service providers (CSPs) and vendors of network hardware and software has been a marriage of convenience and co-dependency for decades. Broadly speaking, vendors have set the timetables and roadmaps for innovation, and made themselves indispensable. In turn, this has made them highly profitable and secure in the knowledge that their R&D investment will generate a good return. CSPs also performed well financially until competition became fierce and markets were disrupted. IP-based competitors created the first wave, and cloud-based competitors are generating a more serious second one. This has pushed operators to find a better way, one that significantly reduces their cost of operation, frees them to become more agile and innovative, and lets them set their own direction.
CSPs have begun to view open source as the better way. They first saw it as leverage with vendors, to make them more pliant and responsive to their needs. Now, they see it as a foundation for operating their businesses and fostering innovation and open architectures.
What is open source?
The process of open source development is foreign and complex to anyone that came of age in the software world before open source, particularly those in telecoms. The concept is not so difficult. We’ll use the
Wired magazine definition because it is accurate, and ends with a simple claim that is paramount to this paper: Open source is a technology development and distribution methodology, where the codebase and all development – from setting a roadmap to building new features, fixing bugs, and writing documentation – is done in public. A governing body (a group of hobbyists, a company, or a foundation) publicly manages this work, which is most often done in a public repository on either GitHub or GitLab. Open source has two important, and somewhat counterintuitive, advantages: speed and security.
We all know about CSPs’ lack of speed at bringing technology and services to market. At best it is deliberate, and with good reasons including reliability and security. However, competitors that leverage cloud and open source technologies get to market much faster, hence operators are considering open source more seriously. The second advantage, security, has long been considered an argument against, not for, open source. For operators, security does not only mean cyber or physical security, but also resiliency, performance, quality, and control of all those aspects. In the past, these requirements caused operators to keep open source at arm’s length. Those arms are now reaching out to engage with open source software and practices, but until the open source community has fully convinced operators that their software, tools and platforms are worthy, the full embrace will be withheld.
The pulse of open source in telecoms
ABI Research said in a June 2020 study that telecoms’ adoption of open source software will become mainstream by 2025 and that many CSPs, such as Orange and Bell Canada, have created internal open source groups. Other companies, including AT&T, BT, China Mobile, Sprint, TIM, and Vodafone have created similar teams within their organizations. The research firm also said that open source could rival the proprietary telco solutions of today by 2025 as a key technology for the $29 billion telco cloud market. It is unlikely it will compete directly with software solutions such as operational and business support systems (OSS/BSS) for now, but open source could rival CSPs’ platforms and other tools.
In a panel on 5G and open source last year, Doug Eng, Distinguished Technical Architect at AT&T, said operators have reached the point were open source is a possibility for the network core. His sentiments were echoed by Lyle Bertz, Director of Technology Innovation & Architecture at Sprint, who talked of the field trials underway for the Open Mobile Evolved Core (OMEC) that Sprint launched with the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) in February 2019. OMEC is a scalable open source mobile core platform built with a network functions virtualization (NFV) architecture.
This year, T-Mobile Poland, became the
first to deploy the OMEC. The operator is using OMEC gateway control, user plane, and billing components to provide “fixed mobile substitution” services, a wireless broadband product. The OMEC components include 3GPP-compliant interfaces that support connections into T-Mobile Poland’s base stations, mobility management services, and lawful intercept platforms.
OMEC is a disaggregated, control-user plane separated (CUPS) mobile core that can run on containers, virtual machines (VMs), or bare metal – that is, a single-tenant, physical server. Sprint contributed its Clean CUPS Core for Packet Optimization (C3PO) open source platform, which it launched in 2017, as seed code to the project.
The project combined this seed code, and extensions, with Intel software code. The goal of the C3PO project is to create a virtual evolved packet core (EPC) that is based on software-defined networking (SDN) and can handle a bigger subscriber load without impacting speed. Michal Sewera, Head of EPC Shared Service Center at T-Mobile Poland, is a fan of the start small, learn fast and grow faster approach. Speaking on the same panel as AT&T's Eng, he said the fixed-mobile substitution enabled by OMEC is a perfect use case for this model because half of all traffic is consumed by 10% users. This means that operators can easily experiment with open source on the other 90%. Eng stated that open source is now a fundamental part of everything the company does going forward: “It is clear that the open source user plane function will be part of our long-term strategy. It is more a question about what will not be open source versus what will be?” In the same panel discussion, Pranav Mehta, Vice President & Director of Systems and Software Research at Intel Labs, added that this focus on platforms is good because open platforms allow the acceleration of innovation beyond oneself and beyond a group. “It enables everybody in the ecosystem to innovate on all those platforms,” he noted.
