Mavenir, the cloud-native network infrastructure provider, has signed a five-year Strategic Collaboration Agreement with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to jointly architect Mavenir’s technology, streamlining the development, testing, integration, and application of cloud-native solutions using AWS’ services. A telco-grade deployment model will be developed to aid operators in launching 5G, IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem), Radio Access Network (RAN) and future network technologies.
The RAN business has traditionally been run on dedicated compute platforms, which is a smaller market than the cloud computing business, so the computers are built in relatively low volumes. On the other hand, AWS uses a business model of building giant data centers and buying servers and other equipment in such high volume that it reaches a level of efficiency in running computing tasks that cannot be duplicated.
“Traditional RAN networks tend to be high performance but more expensive than the servers used by AWS,” said Joe Madden, Principal Analyst at Mobile Experts. Mobile Experts has performed detailed analysis of why using cloud RAN is more economical for the carriers than traditional 5G networks.
“Cloud RAN is more expensive on day one, but the savings comes over time as upgrades are made to the network,” Madden said. “The process of doing upgrades on the fly can be much more efficient and streamlined, because it has been very well developed in the cloud computing market.”
Mavenir and AWS will co-invest in developing functionalities, such as enhanced dynamic autoscaling, automation, and reliability enhancements, for carriers to enable migration to AWS. “The total cost of maintaining, upgrading, and operating a network is much lower, and the net total cost of ownership is lower at the end of the life cycle,” Madden noted.
Madden noted that the transition to using hyperscalers has been in the works for some time. Mavenir partnered with AWS on the DISH Wireless deployment in 2022 to build the world’s first cloud-native 5G SA network with Open vRAN on the AWS public cloud. More recently, Ericsson committed to making its equipment operable on cloud RAN. The deployment of wireless using hyperscalers, according to analysts, may mean some network upgrades in the future will not demand the involvement of tower services companies.
“Adding new features, such as 5.5G positioning features, URLCC support, multi user MIMO layers, millimeter wave and converting 5G to 6G — all of those upgrades would be much easier and would require a lot fewer technicians driving their trucks around the country,” Madden said.
By J. Sharpe Smith, Inside Towers Technology Editor
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