Telecommunications companies (telcos) are well on their way to transforming their infrastructure from the legacy, unadaptable, complex network of dedicated hardware from yesteryears to agile, modular and scalable software-defined systems running on common off-the-shelf (COTS) servers.

Within this space, the current trend, driven by 5G deployments, is to complement tried and tested network function virtualisation (NFV) infrastructure with cloud-native network functions (CNFs). This refers to the cloud-native approach of building, deploying and managing telco functions and applications as a mesh of micro services packaged as containers.

A telco cloud is a highly robust and dynamic infrastructure built using cloud-native technologies designed specifically for communication services providers (CSPs) to deliver agile, flexible and efficient telecom services. It combines various components like software-defined networking (SDN), orchestration tools and other cloud computing technologies to enable the creation, customisation, and management of network services in a more cost-effective, scalable, and automated manner compared to traditional telecom architectures. It empowers telcos to reduce their innovations’ time to market, to react more quickly to shifts in network requirements and to improve their operational efficiency. A telco cloud provides the foundation for next-generation communication services, including 5G stand-alone (5G SA) networks and various Internet of Things (IoT) applications.

How does a telco cloud address telco challenges?

In order to stay innovative and competitive, telcos need ever more agility. They need to respond quickly to shifting market dynamics, evolving customer demands and emerging technologies. They require flexibility, modularity and freedom to customise solutions to keep up with the evolution of the industry. These are all areas in which a telco cloud can help.

Innovate and customise

With cloud-native application development techniques, telcos can leverage a telco cloud to bring new 5G revenue streams, internally developed or externally acquired from new tech and start-ups with a higher risk appetite than service providers.

They can reduce the time to develop, build and deploy new services and features to specific customer segments. This enables bringing solutions targeting new markets, such as industry monitoring, smart cities, smart homes, connected cars and fleet management.

These solutions can be tailored to specific customers quickly and economically thanks to the agility, modularity and flexibility of cloud-native software development.

Similarly, these technologies allow telcos to build platforms which can ignite collaboration and provide support to innovative third party developers. This can enable the creation of value in the telco’s core competencies, including connectivity and operational excellence, while reducing risks associated with the process of experimentation.

Increase power efficiency

Energy expenses currently comprise between 15% and 40% of telcos’ operating costs. They are all actively looking for ways to reduce their energy consumption through energy-efficient technology, renewable energy sources, and improved operational efficiency.

By virtualizing network functions and consolidating multiple workloads on a shared infrastructure, a telco cloud reduces the overall number of physical servers and corresponding power requirements. With intelligent load-balancing techniques, a telco cloud ensures optimal resource utilisation across the network, minimising idle resources and reducing the need for excess capacity, which in turn decreases power consumption. 

The use of specific analytics coupled with automation can be beneficial to optimise the power consumption of telco workloads. Underutilised wasteful infrastructure can be identified and massive power savings can be achieved with the right optimisation approach while maintaining network performance and service levels. A telco cloud offers the flexibility to scale resources up or down according to demand, ensuring that only the necessary compute, storage and network capacity is being used. The high availability and fault tolerance features of a telco cloud ensure minimal downtime and prevent overloading of resources, thereby optimising energy consumption by reducing the need for redundant equipment or backup systems.

Improve customer loyalty

Telcos are facing heightened competition and shifting consumer behaviours, necessitating creative approaches to increase revenue and maintain customer expansion. One way is to bundle and aggregate popular streaming services by partnering with content platforms.

A telco cloud enables the integration – from delivery to billing – of various digital services, such as over-the-top (OTT) media content distribution, to significantly enhance the telco customer experience. 

Using AI-powered tools, telcos are also able to grow their revenues by predicting and preventing subscriber churn. A telco cloud delivers more agile cloud-centric monetisation platforms providing more insights to power the new generation of services.

Reduce costs

A telco cloud, when run at scale, reduces the capital expenditure required to support network infrastructure by enabling companies to utilise COTS hardware and pay only for the capacity they need, adjusting with usage changes, while leveraging the hybrid cloud.

This shift to operational expenditure is covered by the accompanying process automation enabled by Telco Cloud best practices and cloud-native application development methodologies, such as DevSecOps and CI/CD.

The highly resilient and automated architecture of the Telco Cloud also improves service availability and reduces the time to respond to faults and demand fluctuations.

What are the technical requirements for a telco cloud?

There are significant differences between your general purpose cloud environment and that of a telco cloud. With the exception of mission-critical applications, enterprise cloud deployments can tolerate less tight availability and performance requirements than those of telco network functions.

Some functions, such as the 5G Radio Access Network (RAN), need to perform in real-time at the edge of the network, as close to the user equipment as possible, with the best throughput and latency. The five nines availability goal, a downtime of no more than 5.26 minutes per year, is also a given.

A telco cloud encompasses not only the telco central offices and edge locations, but also data centres spread across the network reach. It delivers its network functions and other workloads wherever they can be run in order to optimise efficiency and quality of experience.

Carrier-grade network requirements initially prevented moving network functions to the public cloud. With the improvement of multi cloud and hybrid cloud connectivity, more and more telcos are leveraging public cloud infrastructure for some of their telco cloud network functions. One significant advantage of the container technology used in cloud-native architecture is its portability. The microservices realising a network function and its dependencies are encapsulated in a single, self-contained unit that can run on any system that supports the container format.

One of the key conditions in achieving a successful implementation of a telco cloud is the need for business continuity and coexistence of cloud-native with existing legacy infrastructure. During a telco cloud deployment, companies need to be able to seamlessly migrate existing network services and applications in a coordinated manner. A good way to approach this challenge is to consider not only the infrastructure and product portfolio but also the organisation and its processes.

As with any project, there are several factors to evaluate when deploying a telco cloud:

• Whether to buy a complete solution or to do everything or part of it internally, with or without external support from a systems integrator.
• What amount should be invested upfront?
• How much risk is acceptable?
• What is the target time-to-market?
• How will success be defined and measured?

Some of the key decisions that telcos need to make include:

• Identifying the telco cloud services that need to redeveloped as microservices instead of migrated virtual machines (VMs).
• Selecting the right management and orchestration tools to support the efficient and effective automation of a telco cloud.
• Defining the rules that drive the hybrid cloud approach, depending on the economics, operational expertise and time-to-market requirements.
• Partnering and collaborating with technology companies, startups, and other organisations. This can help to access new technologies, markets, and expertise, and accelerate time-to-market

The path to a successful telco cloud deployment can be long and difficult but it is one of the key milestones for a telco to achieve its transition into a “techco” (technology-driven company) equipped to face competition from tech giants, media conglomerates and startups.

How can Canonical help you deploy a telco cloud?

In order to deploy a telco cloud effectively, companies need the tools that can support all their critical workloads wherever they run them, and enable them to incorporate innovators into the CSP network.

Canonical brings the power of open source cloud-native technologies to  the telco industry. A member of key telecommunications initiatives (such as the Open Networking Foundation, where we contribute to the Aether project, the OpenAirInterface Software Alliance, the Sylva project, and ETSI), Canonical provides cloud platforms that support the deployment and operation of certified virtual and container network functions both for the 5G Core and RAN. We are a proven, trusted technology partner in the ecosystem, with years of experience in telco operations across the globe.

Canonical maintains a strong security posture by ensuring all published open source software is hardened, audited and certified to adhere to industry standards. This commitment extends to reducing the footprint of the OS and containers to minimise the attack surface.

This specific innovation also translates into efficiency gains that are significant in large-scale RAN deployments involving tens or even hundreds of thousands of nodes.

Furthermore, Canonical’s robust automation tooling and 12 years long term support (LTS) not only streamline day 2 operations but also contribute to a competitive TCO making canonical the most economical vendor in the market.

Global top-tier operators endorse Canonical solutions for telcos. Our solutions encompass core, RAN and edge use cases and provide essential Enhanced Platform Awareness capabilities such as affinity and anti-affinity rules, CPU pinning, DPDK, Huge Pages, SR-IOV and secondary vNIC access, among others.

Groundwork starts with our tight partnerships with silicon vendors and independent hardware vendors that ensure Canonical provides the best silicon enablement and support for innovative technologies and acceleration capabilities.

Lastly, Canonical’s simple and unique Ubuntu Pro subscription offers the most comprehensive long term support, security and compliance for all your open source software. Using Canonical solutions, companies can operate carrier-grade cloud-native Telco Clouds at scale.

Learn more about Canonical solutions for telcos

Carrier-grade open source for telecommunications

Transform your infrastructure with secure and cloud-native telecom solutions

Further reading

Reduce 5G infrastructure costs with open source

How telcos are building carrier-grade infrastructure using open source

How a real-time kernel reduces latency in telco edge clouds

Paris, France. 14 February 2024. United by a common goal to advance open source software in telecommunications, Firecell and Canonical will demonstrate at this year’s Mobile Wireless Congress (MWC) event in Barcelona, 5G private mobile network (PMN) solutions running on Canonical’s Ubuntu operating system.

Recognising the future of Open RAN in telecommunications, particularly in 5G private mobile networks, Canonical joined the OpenAirInterface (OAI) Community in December 2023. As a member of OAI, Canonical is expanding its telecommunication software portfolio, adding mobile networking software to the set of open source tools and solutions that the company offers to the industry. Canonical also now collaborates with companies such as Firecell to bring secure, trusted and production-grade open source to the Open RAN ecosystem. Firecell offers PMN solutions based on the open source software distributed by OAI for both indoor and outdoor connectivity.

Ubuntu is the de facto industry standard worldwide when running telecom networking software and business application workloads. It provides exactly what the telecom industry needs: production-grade performance and security for telecom software and infrastructure. 

“Canonical’s integration with the OpenAirInterface Community and collaboration with Firecell are set to transform the telecommunications landscape”, said Cédric Gégout, VP of Product Management at Canonical. “Our commitment to deliver robust, secure open source solutions with more than 10-years of support with Ubuntu Pro guarantees production-grade performance and security to all the 5G industries.”

These 10 years of support are available through Ubuntu Pro, the most comprehensive subscription service for software security and compliance in the industry. The Ubuntu Pro subscription also brings real-time processing capabilities to telecom networking software and business applications. With its support for a wide range of enhanced platform awareness (EPA) features, operators can get the performance they need when delivering their services with Ubuntu running across their entire telecom infrastructure, covering devices and radio access networks (RAN) as well as edge and core clouds.

“As the leading provider of integrated and affordable private 5G solutions, Firecell is excited to announce our partnership with Canonical”, declared Claude Seyrat, CEO of Firecell. “This collaboration underscores our dedication to open-source innovation and our belief in its critical role in shaping the future of telecommunications. By pooling our resources together and supporting the OpenAirInterface initiative, we are setting a new standard in the industry. We are not just advocating for change on how telecommunication software must be developed; we are actively driving it, ensuring that open-source becomes the cornerstone of 5G development”.

The OpenAirInterface (OAI) Community is dedicated to developing and distributing software for open radio access networks (Open RAN) and core networks. Their work adheres to the mobile telecommunications networking specifications set by 3GPP, as well as the software interfaces defined by the O-RAN Alliance for Open RAN. The production-grade PMN solutions offered by Firecell and empowered by Ubuntu are another example of the capabilities of open source software on Ubuntu within the telecommunications sector.

Contact us for your telco deployment needs and your transition to open source.

About Canonical

Canonical, the publisher of Ubuntu, provides open source security, support and services. Our portfolio covers critical systems, from the smallest devices to the largest clouds, from the kernel to containers, from databases to AI. With customers that include top tech brands, emerging startups, governments and home users, Canonical delivers trusted open source for everyone. Learn more at https://canonical.com/

About Firecell

Firecell accelerates companies’ digital transformation by providing seamless and robust connectivity both indoors and outdoors, with a turn-key private 5G network solution. Firecell eliminates the complexity of deploying private 5G networks and reduces the overall network cost to achieve faster ROI for enterprises. Firecell has customers in Europe, the US and Asia. Learn more at https://firecell.io/

Press Contacts

Canonical

Lelanie de Roubaix, Communications Manager
pr@canonical.com

Firecell

Olivier Dhotel, Co-founder
olivier.dhotel@firecell.io

The world’s largest and most influential telecommunications exhibition event, Mobile World Congress (MWC), is taking place in Barcelona on 26-29 February 2024. Canonical is excited to join this important annual event once again and meet the telecom industry. 

Telecommunications is a key sector for Canonical. We offer solutions for private, public and hybrid/multi cloud environments, with a consistent experience across the entire telecom spectrum, from core clouds to the edge, with a single set of tooling. Built with the same philosophy as Ubuntu – secure, trusted and production-grade open source backed by full operations support – our solutions are fully upstream and integrate the latest technology advancements that telco leaders require to deliver best-in-class services to their customers. 

We are looking forward to meeting you at MWC 2024. Come and speak with our experts to learn how we can help you in your journey to cost-effective, secure and trusted open source telecom solutions for your infrastructure.

Hot topics in telco

To meet today’s customer expectations, telecom operators require flexible, scalable and agile operations across the many service types that make up a modern mobile network.

At this year’s MWC event in Barcelona, Canonical’s team will explain how you can elevate your telecom infrastructure with the latest innovations in cloud-native technologies and modernise your telco clouds with open source. These strategies will empower you to meet and exceed customer expectations with repeatable and reliable deployments.

Automation at scale for telco edge clouds with CNEP

We have been listening to our telco customers to understand their needs in delivering cost-effective modern edge clouds for their infrastructure that they can rely on. Canonical is proud to offer a new holistic solution, Cloud Native Execution Platform (CNEP) to meet these needs precisely at telco edge clouds.

With CNEP, we deliver the ideal software stack for telco edge clouds with automation in place, based on fully upstream and CNCF certified Kubernetes running on bare metal hardware for best performance. It brings all essential open source components together, with the aim of achieving high performance in data processing and delivery, whilst ensuring platform security and efficiency with Ubuntu Pro.

At MWC, our team will explain how operators can achieve scalable and repeatable deployment of edge clouds with CNEP. For Open Radio Access Network (RAN) readiness, CNEP is the ideal RAN platform, bringing all the technology features that cloud-native Open RAN components require. CNEP is also tailored for best performance and security assurance for distributed compute and multi-access edge computing (MEC) applications, enabling businesses to run their telco workloads on 5G edge networks.

Real-time Ubuntu for ultra-reliable and low-latency communications

Canonical has been working with all major silicon hardware vendors, such as Intel, to deliver the highest levels of performance and security to telco networks and applications. 

We have been running advanced engineering programs with the aim of enabling the latest innovations in silicon hardware in telco software infrastructure at a rapid pace, with quick software release cycles. As part of our collaboration with Intel, we have integrated Intel FlexRAN in Ubuntu real-time kernel for telco applications and networking software, which has enabled real-time processing at both operating system and silicon levels.

At this year’s MWC, we will explain how Ubuntu Pro brings real-time data processing capabilities to the telco edge for mission-critical operations and also ensures confidential computing for the most-sensitive telco workloads.

Sustainable telco edge infrastructure with an energy-efficient system stack

Telecom networks will increasingly deploy edge cloud sites in the journey to distributed and flexible cloud-native operations. This requires support for several features across the hardware and software stack to make sure that platforms are energy and cost efficient. From container images to bare metal hardware automation, Canonical’s edge cloud stack is equipped with features that ensure sustainable operations.

In Barcelona, we will explain how our open source software stack can deliver optimal deployments on telco edge clouds and help operators meet their sustainability goals.

Demos

At MWC 2024, you will get the chance to see our technical team demonstrate Canonical’s CNEP solution. This is a great opportunity for all players in the telco ecosystem to see how we meet sector requirements on cloud-native operations at the telco edge with automation. In our demo, the Canonical team will run CNEP on Intel’s 4^th Generation Xeon Scalable Processor, bringing the acceleration capabilities provided by Xeon to large-scale edge network rollout for cost-efficient Open RAN deployments.

CNEP’s open and upstream APIs along with Canonical’s observability stack and telemetry solutions enable machine learning algorithms to assist edge cloud operations. The Canonical team will demonstrate how our AI/ML platform solutions can be used to boost the effectiveness of distributed computing applications running on telco edge clouds. We will show how a multi-cloud data platform can be formed for various data types collected from a telecom network. We will also show ML-based anomaly detection and LLM to summarise and explain collected data from the network. 

Come and meet us at MWC 2024

If you are interested in building your own modern telecom infrastructure and migrating to open source with cost-effective, secure and trusted solutions, Canonical can help you. We provide a full stack for your telecom infrastructure, enabling secure, trusted, flexible, optimised, automated and low-touch operations.

To learn more about our telco solutions, meet us to discuss your telecom needs at MWC Barcelona 2024, and visit our webpage at ubuntu.com/telco.

If you’re unable to find a suitable time, please reach out to Mariam Tawakol <mariam.tawakol@canonical.com> or Jacob Boe <jacob.boe@canonical.com>. Let them know your availability and what you’re interested in, and they will set up a meeting for you.

Further reading

Canonical joins Open Networking Foundation

Fast and reliable telco edge clouds with Intel FlexRAN and Real-time Ubuntu

Bringing automation to telco edge clouds at scale

How telcos are building carrier-grade infrastructure using open source