DT, Ericsson, Google Cloud advance on cloud-native 5G core

Deutsche Telekom (DT) and Google Cloud flagged what they described as a “significant milestone” in their strategic partnership announced last year that included a standalone 5G pilot in Austria, among other projects.

DT said Ericsson 5G core cloud-native network functions (CNFs) had been successfully deployed on an on-premises implementation of Google Distributed Cloud Edge (GDC Edge), reducing the time taken to deploy such network functions from weeks to minutes.

In this setup, the partners completed a 5G core standalone data call, setting up the connection and application on the infrastructure to call completion “in a matter of minutes” on GDC Edge infrastructure hosted at the DT lab in Austria.

Gabriel Brown, senior principal analyst for mobile networks at Heavy Reading, remarked that the proof of concept “is representative of industry activity in cloud native 5G core”.

“The involvement of three major names adds some weight. GDC Edge is an example of a public cloud technology stack deployed as a private cloud in the operator data centre. This is a form of private telco cloud that is gaining credence as an option alongside other deployment models,” he said.

Brown added: “It’s worth a note that the DT press release references Ericsson tooling because this shows it is thinking about application portability across different cloud platforms.”

Armin Sumesgutner, SVP of technology delivery and CTO of Europe for DT, said the aim now is “to prove out the resilience and agility benefits required to more rapidly innovate and launch new services and customer experiences”.

Meanwhile, Brown pointed to another recent announcement relating to the cloud native 5G core, this time in Japan. Here, NTT DOCOMO and NEC announced a trial of a model where, as Brown described it, 5G core “can burst to the AWS public cloud” from DOCOMO’s private telco cloud.

“It uses the AWS in-house Graviton processor; this is important because 5G core is generally Intel based,” he added.

DOCOMO noted that the design will allow it to switch between its on-premises NFV and AWS infrastructure for 5G Core redundancy operations, “offering a more flexible and cost-effect means to manage network performance and capacity”.