Tag: 5G core

Telco Cloud Deployment Tracker : Is 5G SA getting real?

5G SA core: Will 2H23 finally see momentum?

At the end of 2021, we predicted that 5G SA core deployments would significantly accelerate in 2022, but they did not. There were 21 launches of converged 5G NSA/SA or pure 5G SA cores in 2022, against 18 in 2021. In the January 2023 update of our tracker, when we reviewed telco cloud activity for 2022, we shifted all the outstanding deployments once expected in 2022 to 2023. Some of these deployments had been announced for over two years and this made 2023 look as if it might become the year of 5G SA.

Now at the half-way point in 2023, there have been only seven 5G SA (including converged 5G NSA/SA) core deployments so far:

  • Although few in number, these deployments are significant either by their scale (Reliance Jio in India) or by virtue of the importance of the operators involved: E& (introduced in the UAE in March); and Vodafone (in the UK in June).
  • And for Orange, which is engaged in 5G SA deployments across its entire European footprint, the launch of a first country (Spain in February 2023) is encouraging progress.

But it is legitimate to ask whether the remaining 30 5G SA launches that we still have pending for 2023 are likely to take place in the remaining six months (as our Tracker currently reflects). Or will they in fact trickle in over the next few years or even not happen at all?

Global deployments of 5G core by type, 2018–2024

Source: STL Partners

 

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Why have SA 5GC deployments gone off track?

Our September 2022 report 5G standalone (SA) core: Why and how telcos should keep going provided some pointers as to why operators are slow in jumping to 5G SA. These remain valid today:

  1. 5G SA requires significant investment, for which (in some markets at least) there is no clear ROI because the use cases that would leverage 5G SA capabilities (in terms of latency, bandwidth or high volume of connections) are yet to emerge, both on the consumer and the enterprise fronts, as are the ways to monetise them.
  2. Many operators are still weighing up their strategy for partnering with the hyperscale cloud providers. In particular, this relates to the role of public cloud as an infrastructure platform for 5G SA deployments and the role hyperscaler infrastructure can play in accelerating SA network coverage.
  3. Some of the leading operators that are yet to launch SA are also among the main supporters of open RAN and/or are engaged in fibre rollout projects: those conflicting investment requirements may create delays and a need for phasing in some of the rollouts.

To fully exploit 5G SA requires an organisational evolution within telcos. To reap its benefits as both a pure connectivity enabler and as a platform for innovative services, telcos need to undergo an evolution in their processes and organisations to support cloud practices and operations. This doesn’t happen overnight.

In APAC where SA is steaming ahead, greater telco ambition and strong state support have spurred deployments

One way to address the question of stalled 5G SA deployments is to examine what has driven the deployments that have taken place. Will the use cases involved there drive a bigger wave of deployments globally?

While there have been 13 (converged 5G NSA/) SA core deployments in Europe, 31 have taken place in APAC. They involve the leading operators in China, Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan. The roll-outs support bandwidth-hungry consumer use cases such as gaming, AR/VR, HD/4K content streaming, VoNR, etc. Some operators, such as NTT Docomo, SK Telecom and the Chinese players, have made SA available to support a limited number of private networking and industrial IoT use cases. Factors driving these deployments include:

  • State support or mandates for 5G SA (China and South Korea)
  • Consumer enthusiasm for and early adoption of 5G, with the SA version offering tangible performance gains over 4G
  • Rich ecosystem of local device manufacturers and app developers, and a commitment by operators to invest in new use cases and services
  • Ability to offload ‘power users’ of bandwidth-hungry, latency-critical services off the 4G and 5G NSA network and willingness from those users to pay a premium for these benefits (the three Chinese operators have seen modest ARPU increases between 2020 and 2022 of between 2.5% and 5.2% per annum)
  • Pre-existing local and metro fibre, supporting 5G SA backhaul.

Effective deployments of 5G SA and converged 5G NSA/SA cores by region, 2019-23

Source: STL Partners

 

Table of Contents

  • Executive summary
  • Deep dive: Is 5G SA getting real?
  • Regional overview
  • Operator view
  • Vendor view

Related research

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Telco Cloud Deployment Tracker: 5G core deep dive

Deep dive: 5G core deployments 

In this July 2022 update to STL Partners’ Telco Cloud Deployment Tracker, we present granular information on 5G core launches. They fall into three categories:

  • 5G Non-standalone core (5G NSA core) deployments: The 5G NSA core (agreed as part of 3GPP Release in December 2017), involves using a virtualised and upgraded version of the existing 4G core (or EPC) to support 5G New Radio (NR) wireless transmission in tandem with existing LTE services. This was the first form of 5G to be launched and still accounts for 75% of all 5G core network deployments in our Tracker.
  • 5G Standalone core (5G SA core) deployments: The SA core is a completely new and 5G-only core. It has a simplified, cloud-native and distributed architecture, and is designed to support services and functions such as network slicing, Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communications (URLLC) and enhanced Machine-Type Communications (eMTC, i.e. massive IoT). Our Tracker indicates that the upcoming wave of 5G core deployments in 2022 and 2023 will be mostly 5G SA core.
  • Converged 5G NSA/SA core deployments: this is when a dual-mode NSA and SA platform is deployed; in most cases, the NSA core results from the upgrade of an existing LTE core (EPC) to support 5G signalling and radio. The principle behind a converged NSA/SA core is the ability to orchestrate different combinations of containerised network functions, and automatically and dynamically flip over from an NSA to an SA configuration, in tandem – for example – with other features and services such as Dynamic Spectrum Sharing and the needs of different network slices. For this reason, launching a converged NSA/SA platform is a marker of a more cloud-native approach in comparison with a simple 5G NSA launch. Ericsson is the most commonly found vendor for this type of platform with a handful coming from Huawei, Samsung and WorkingGroupTwo. Albeit interesting, converged 5G NSA/SA core deployments remain a minority (7% of all 5G core deployments over the 2018-2023 period) and most of our commentary will therefore focus on 5G NSA and 5G SA core launches.

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75% of 5G cores are still Non-standalone (NSA)

Global 5G core deployments by type, 2018–23

  • There is renewed activity this year in 5G core launches since the total number of 5G core deployments so far in 2022 (effective and in progress) stands at 49, above the 47 logged in the whole of 2021. At the very least, total 5G deployments in 2022 will settle between the level of 2021 and the peak of 2020 (97).
  • 5G in whichever form now exists in most places where it was both in demand and affordable; but there remain large economies where it is yet to be launched: Turkey, Russia and most notably India. It also remains to be launched in most of Africa.
  • In countries with 5G, the next phase of launches, which will see the migration of NSA to SA cores, has yet to take place on a significant scale.
  • To date, 75% of all 5G cores are NSA. However, 5G SA will outstrip NSA in terms of deployments in 2022 and represent 24 of the 49 launches this year, or 34 if one includes converged NSA/SA cores as part of the total.
  • All but one of the 5G launches announced for 2023 are standalone; they all involve Tier-1 MNOs including Orange (in its European footprint involving Ericsson and Nokia), NTT Docomo in Japan and Verizon in the US.

The upcoming wave of SA core (and open / vRAN) represents an evolution towards cloud-native

  • Cloud-native functions or CNFs are software designed from the ground up for deployment and operation in the cloud with:​
  • Portability across any hardware infrastructure or virtualisation platform​
  • Modularity and openness, with components from multiple vendors able to be flexibly swapped in and out based on a shared set of compute and OS resources, and open APIs (in particular, via software ‘containers’)​
  • Automated orchestration and lifecycle management, with individual micro-services (software sub-components) able to be independently modified / upgraded, and automatically re-orchestrated and service-chained based on a persistent, API-based, ‘declarative’ framework (one which states the desired outcome, with the service chain organising itself to deliver the outcome in the most efficient way)​
  • Compute, resource, and software efficiency: as a concomitant of the automated, lean and logically optimal characteristics described above, CNFs are more efficient (both functionally and in terms of operating costs) and consume fewer compute and energy resources.​
  • Scalability and flexibility, as individual functions (for example, distributed user plane functions in 5G networks) can be scaled up or down instantly and dynamically in response to overall traffic flows or the needs of individual services​
  • Programmability, as network functions are now entirely based on software components that can be programmed and combined in a highly flexible manner in accordance with the needs of individual services and use contexts, via open APIs.​

Previous telco cloud tracker releases and related research

Each new release of the tracker is global, but is accompanied by an analytical report which focusses on trends in given regions from time to time:

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Telco Cloud Europe update: Open RAN approaching tipping point

Telco Cloud deployments on track for growth again in 2020

Ninth update of the ‘Telco Cloud Tracker’: from ‘NFV’ to ‘telco cloud’

This report accompanies the ninth release of STL Partners’ ‘Telco Cloud Tracker’ database. This contains data on deployments of NFV (Network Functions Virtualisation), SDN (Software Defined Networking) and cloud-native network functions (CNFs) in the networks of the leading telcos worldwide. This analytical report focuses on trends in Europe, set in global context.

For this update and hereafter, we have changed the name of the database from ‘NFV Deployment Tracker’ to ‘Telco Cloud Tracker’. The name change reflects STL Partners’ new focus on ‘Telco Cloud’ as both a research stream and consultancy practice. But the change also corresponds to the fact that the telecoms industry has now embarked on the second phase of its journey towards more integrally software-based networks – the first phase of which went under the banner of ‘NFV’. This journey is not just about a migration towards ‘software in general’, but cloud-native software: based on design principles developed by the cloud industry, which have the potential to bring cloud-scale economics, programmability and automation to connectivity and connectivity-dependent services.

The Tracker database is provided as an interactive Excel tool containing line-by-line analysis of more than 760 individual deployments of NFV, SDN and CNFs, which can be used to drill down on trends by company and region.

We will produce further research and reports on different aspects of cloud-native software and its impact over the coming months.

Growth in 5G core offset by declines in other areas

Telco cloud deployments so far

After a slight drop in the overall number of deployments in 2019, 2020 is set to be a year of modest growth, as is illustrated by the figure below:

Total number of deployments worldwide, 2014 to July 2020

Source: STL Partners

The data for 2020 is split up into completed, ‘pending’ and estimated additional deployments. We have recorded 63 completed deployments between January and July 2020. Pending deployments (totalling 72) are those previously announced that we are expecting to be completed during 2020 but which – to our knowledge – had not yet gone live in the commercial network by the end of July. The estimated additional deployments are derived from extrapolating to the full year 2020 from the total of completed implementations in the first seven months. This results in around 45 further deployments. On this basis, the total for the year as a whole would reach around 180 deployments: just above the previous record year of 2018 (178).

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Table of Contents

  • Executive Summary
  • Introduction: Telco cloud deployments on track for growth again in 2020
    • Ninth update of the ‘Telco Cloud Tracker’: from ‘NFV’ to ‘telco cloud’
    • Scope and content of the Tracker
  • 5G core drives new growth in 2020
    • Deployments are on the rise again
    • Growth has been consistent across almost all regions
    • Europe also on track to maintain its record of year-on-year growth
    • Deployments in Europe are still dominated by the major players, but smaller telcos are catching up
    • Vendors: Ericsson in close second place behind Cisco owing to strong presence in mobile core
  • Open RAN at a TIPping point in Europe
    • European telcos are playing a leading role in open RAN
  • Conclusion: Growth being driven by 5G – with open RAN waiting in the wings
    • Worldwide surge in NSA 5G core deployments
    • NSA 5GC is now nearly the leading VNF overall in Europe
    • … with cloud-native, SA 5GC coming down the pipeline
    • … and waiting in the wings: open RAN
    • These overlapping waves of innovation will make telco cloud mainstream

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NFV goes mainstream: How cloud-native is contributing to growth

This report accompanies the latest update of the NFV Deployment Tracker (June 2020).  It provides an analysis of global tracker findings and covers deployments from 2011 until March 2020.

About the NFV Deployment Tracker

The NFV Deployment Tracker is a regularly-updated database of commercial deployments of Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV) and Software-Defined Networking (SDN) technologies by leading telcos worldwide. It builds on an extensive body of analysis by STL Partners over the past five years on NFV and SDN strategies, technology and market developments.

The Tracker is provided as an interactive Excel tool containing line-by-line analysis of nearly 700 individual deployments of NFV and SDN, which can be used to drill down on trends by company and region.

The NFV Deployment Tracker

Overview of STL Partners NFV Deployment Tracker

Source: STL Partners

Previous reports have focussed on trends in specific regions, in addition to global findings. These include:

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NFV/SDN continues to grow at different speeds in different regions

NFV deployments continue to grow…

In total, our database now contains information on 689 NFV and SDN deployments comprising 1,401 individual functional elements, i.e. an average of just over two components per deployment. As has been the case since we began collecting data, the number of deployments (as defined by STL Partners) continues to grow year on year; although the trend as illustrated below requires some explanation:

Deployment growth continues – despite an apparent slowdown

Source: STL Partners

Pending deployments are those regarding which there is uncertainty surrounding completion.  STL Partners expects some of these will be allocated to 2019 as it discovers that they were completed in that year. 2019 could yet emerge as a growth year, and if not, 2020 looks set to exceed the totals for 2018 and 2019.

…but the rate and drivers of growth vary by region

If we make a more meaningful comparison – between 2019 and the first three months of 2020 (including pending deployments), on the one hand, and 2018, on the other – we see that the number of deployments has continued to grow in each region, apart from North America, where the market is maturing and the pace of new deployment has subsided.

Regional deployment growth, with the exception of North America

Source: STL Partners

Overall, the Asia-Pacific region has accounted for the largest number of deployments across all years: 232 (33.7%) of the total – just ahead of Europe on 226 (32.8%). North America has generated 135 deployments (19.6%), followed by the Middle East with 57, Latin America on 30, and Africa with 15.

Table of contents

  • Executive Summary
  • About the NFV Deployment Tracker
    • Scope
    • Definitions
  • Introduction: NFV/SDN continues to grow – but at different speeds in different regions
    • NFV deployments continue to grow…
    • …but the rate and drivers of growth vary by region
  • In detail: understanding the growth
    • 5G ushers in Phase 2 NFV in developed markets…
    • …while Phase 1 core virtualisation spreads to other markets
    • SD-WAN also goes global
    • SDN was a critical component in longhaul network upgrades
    • vRAN and open RAN enter the stage
    • A second wave of telco cloud deployments is also underway
    • NFV MANO deployments were geared to supporting multi-vendor VNFs over telco clouds
  • In detail: deployments by operator
    • Vodafone, & Telefónica: telco cloud builders innovate at the core and edge
    • China, Japan (& Finland): leading cloud-native deployment
    • AT&T & Verizon: virtualisation programmes near completion
  • In detail: deployments by vendor
    • Cisco & Nokia: generalists leading overall and in 2019/20 respectively, boosted by 5G cores
    • VMware: thriving on telco cloud and SD-WAN
    • Ericsson: leading on 5G cores
    • Huawei: real position is unclear
  • Conclusion: NFV’s first phase has delivered, but tougher challenges lie ahead
    • NFV has become a more and more integral part of telcos’ service portfolios and infrastructure
    • NFV has proven its worth in addressing the challenges of today…
    • … while cloud-native NFV is also getting underway, and may help address the challenges of tomorrow
    • Phase 2 NFV: innovating our way out of the crisis
    • What next?
  • Appendix: Glossary of terms

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What will make or break 5G growth?

5G is a long way from delivering on the hype

This report is a crib sheet outlining the 18 factors that STL Partners believes will have a significant impact on the development of the 5G market. We put forward our core assumption on how we expect each factor to affect the 5G market, and highlight the upside and downside risks to our assumption.

The purpose of the report is to pull together knowledge from across different areas – networks, enterprise services, consumer services, regulatory and commercial environments – to give a holistic view of what we think will influence 5G development. Although everyone in the industry has an eye on how 5G is developing, often this is from a relatively narrow view of the market. But the reality is that over the long term, 5G will not be just another G, but an amalgamation of many emerging and maturing network technologies, increasingly bespoke and fragmented enterprise and consumer demands, with high government expectations for contributions to economic growth. So to understand how quickly or slowly 5G will deliver on these promises, operators, vendors, customers and governments need to consider how a wide range of factors are playing out in their countries. By benchmarking their progress against our core assumptions, upside risks and downside risks, industry players can make a well-rounded assessment of whether they are ahead or behind in 5G development and identify ways to drive the market forward.

This report builds on STL’s extensive coverage of 5G and other enabling technologies:

Key factors influencing 5G development

We have organised the factors affecting 5G development into three categories:

  1. Primary drivers: We believe these will have the greatest impact on 5G development, owing to their influence over the cost and ease of deploying network infrastructure and services, and accessibility and value of 5G connectivity to end-users.
  2. Secondary drivers: These factors have a less direct impact on the 5G market development, especially over the short term, or will only influence a specific part of the market, such as fixed wireless access. However, in some instances telcos have more control over secondary factors than the primary ones, so depending on their strategies, secondary factors could have a disproportionate impact on 5G market development.
  3. Wildcards: These are factors which are less likely or predictable, but that if they do occur would have a decisive impact on how the 5G market (and wider telecoms industry) evolves.

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The 5G-aliser

Over the coming quarters, we will use these 5G factors as a means of measuring progress. The diagram below shows the inaugural 5G-aliser. The top row shows the supply and demand levels for 5G, the middle row shows the absolute level impact of each driver on 5G development, i.e. how important each driver is to 5G growth right now , and the bottom row shows the relative position of each driver. While our intention was to start all drivers at the same relative level, reflecting our core assumption as of March 2020, given the rapid escalation of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have dropped this driver into the red already as we expect telcos’ first priority during the crisis to be on keeping their current operations running smoothly.

The 5G-aliser, March 2020

STL 5G-a-liser March 2020

Source: STL Partners

On a quarterly basis we will monitor the development of the 5G market and update the markers for each driver to reflect the emergence of upside or downside risks, and rising or falling importance of different growth drivers. Evidently, some factors are dependent on local market conditions, so we will also evaluate the drivers on a market by market basis, when important local developments occur.

Table of contents

  • Executive Summary
    • Key takeaways
    • The 5G-aliser
  • Introduction
  • Key factors influencing 5G development
    • Primary drivers
    • Secondary factors
    • Wildcards
  • Conclusions

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NFV Deployment Tracker: Asia-Pacific points to the future of NFV

About the NFV Deployment Tracker

The NFV Deployment Tracker is a quarterly-updated database of commercial deployments of Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV) and Software-Defined Networking (SDN) technologies by leading telcos worldwide. It builds on an extensive body of analysis by STL Partners over the past four years on NFV and SDN strategies, technology and market developments.

The Tracker is provided as an interactive Excel tool containing line-by-line analysis of nearly 600 individual deployments of NFV and SDN, which can be used to drill down on trends by company and region.

Figure 1: The NFV Deployment Tracker

Overview of STL Partners NFV Deployment Tracker

Source: STL Partners

Each new release of the Tracker is global, but is accompanied by an analytical report which focusses on trends in a given region. Previous analysis includes:

This report accompanies the seventh update of the NFV Deployment Tracker, providing an overview of global trends, and a deep-dive on what’s happening in the Asia-Pacific region.

Scope and definitions

The NFV Deployment Tracker covers verified, live deployments of NFV and SDN in commercial telco networks. We do not include proofs of concept, commercial trials or mere agreements to deploy, unless these eventually result in a full commercial deployment.

The data derives mainly from public-domain sources, such as press releases by operators and vendors, or reputable industry media. We also include undisclosed deployments that the operators concerned have informed us about on a confidential basis. These are subsumed within the aggregate data sets analysed in this report but are not itemised in the detailed information contained in the Excel spreadsheet.

We include only telecoms operators, and not other types of company that rely on communications infrastructure and services to deliver their own services (such as cloud providers, internet exchange and hub operators, vendors, systems integrators, etc.).

The telcos included are mainly Tier One providers: those that rely on their own national and international, end-to-end facilities to deliver B2C or B2B services. However, we also include information on incumbent or dominant operators for smaller countries – which are not big enough to be defined as Tier One – as well as particularly innovative deployments by smaller or start-up players in significant markets.

Data in this report covers deployments from 2011 until August 2019.

Global context: NFV is definitely not dead

Global NFV deployments still growing; Asia-Pacific in the lead

We have gathered data on 572 live, commercial deployments of NFV and SDN technology worldwide between January and August 2019. These deployments include 1,161 VNFs, software sub-components and infrastructure elements for which information is available. Overall, the volume of new deployments worldwide has increased every year since 2011.

Figure 2: NFV deployments are picking up speed

NFV deployments by region and year 2011-2019

Source: STL Partners NFV Deployment Tracker

The total of 132 deployments for 2019 in the above chart includes both completed and pending implementations (we define pending as ongoing deployments that have not yet been verified as completed, but which we expect to be concluded in 2019). In addition, the 2019 total shown here runs only up to the end of August 2019; so we are confident that the full-year total for 2019 will exceed the 147 deployments recorded in 2018.

In fact, the number of deployments in Europe and the Middle East in 2019 to date has already exceeded the total for each of these regions for 2018 as a whole. In Asia-Pacific, the volume for the first eight months of 2019 (38) is already around 80% of the 2018 total (49) – meaning that the region is likely to show growth overall by the end of 2019. It must be noted that, by contrast, deployments in North America have declined significantly.

When measured purely in terms of deployments, Europe led the world for the first time in the first eight months of this year. However, in the previous three years – and overall – the Asia-Pacific region has deployed more than any other. We have gathered data on 203 live, commercial deployments of NFV and SDN technology in the Asia-Pacific region between January 2012 and August 2019 – 35.5% of the global total. This means that Asia-Pacific is the largest market for NFV and SDN.

Figure 3: Asia-Pacific leads in total NFV deployments worldwide

Asia-Pacific leads in global NFV deploymentsSource: STL Partners

Table of contents

  • Executive summary
  • About the NFV Deployment Tracker
  • Scope and definitions
  • Global context
    • Global NFV deployments still growing; Asia-Pacific in the lead
    • Growth in 2019 driven by virtualised 5G mobile cores
    • Mobile core virtualisation is the dominant driver of NFV overall
    • SDN retains its dominant role in Asia-Pacific
    • Vendors of mobile network cores performing strongly
  • Asia-Pacific in focus: leading on innovatio
  • More Asia-Pacific operators are embracing NFV and SDN
  • Pushing the boundaries of mobile core architecture
  • Winning the race to operationalise the 5G standalone core
  • Innovating on SDN-based, on-demand networking services
  • Ambition to innovate for economic and social development
  • Conclusion: Asia-Pacific both leads on past deployments and points the way ahead
    • Asia-Pacific leads the NFV/SDN market in two main ways
    • The region also points the way ahead for the industry
  • Appendix: Glossary of terms