- Some telcos are looking to steal a page from the cloud compute playbook by making their networks more consumable on demand
- This is technically easier said than done, though, as telco networks have multiple technology silos
- Such a change also requires a shift in enterprise service procurement practices
Telcos are on the hunt for way to make their networks more profitable. And given the success cloud players have had over the past few years, it makes sense that they might try to steal a page from the hyperscaler playbook by making their networks more consumable. But what works for the goose isn’t necessarily easy for the gander, experts told us.
U.K.-based operator Colt Technology Services was pushing the “telcos as hyperscalers” idea at TM Forum’s DTW event in Copenhagen last week.
The argument from Colt’s Chief Digital and Information Officer Ashish Surti went something like this: No IT architect wants to design and run a network to handle peak load all the time when that demand only occurs a handful of times per year. Cloud hyperscalers have solved for this problem by offering elastic compute capabilities that can be scaled up and down as demand fluctuates. Telcos, though, are still wildly behind in this department and need to get on board.
“The biggest frustration many customers have with telcos is time it takes to provision services, so anything you can do to reduce the time between providing a quote and actually spinning services up is a benefit,” he said. “When I buy new software, I can spin up the infrastructure for that within seconds. The network doesn’t follow the same path. The slowest part of the cog is becoming the connectivity part.”
Surti told Fierce Colt is among those blazing a trail in this department with its On-Demand platform, which allows customers to automatically provision circuits and turn them up and down within minutes. Though early takeup of the service has been slow as customers get used to the new services procurement model, he said Colt is already seeing its platform be used for testing environments and network backups.
(For what it’s worth, Zayo in the U.S. has been moving to make connectivity available faster, debuting Waves on Demand last year. Fellow U.S. player Lumen – which sold its international assets to Colt – is also toying with a similar idea via its Internet on Demand offering.)
Easier said than done
But creating a consumable network is easier said than done and there’s a reason more telcos haven’t jumped on the bandwagon, Red Hat’s Telco CTO Ian Hood told us.
“It’s a fairly hard lift because it’s not just about compute, it’s about a bunch of different elements they’ve got to go do,” he explained.
In countries where the cloud giants don’t have a presence, some operators are emulating hyperscalers by offering compute and storage, Hood explained. Making the network itself consumable in the same way, though, well, that’s a harder task.
Why?
“The real basic challenge is the service that you’re actually trying to deliver is communications in itself, which has the complexity of where does it go, what is its latency, what is its speed and all the different elements I have to include in the conversation from where it comes into the network and everything from access, mobile, routers, optical, that whole collection,” Hood said.
“So, I’ve got all these different silos of technology to deliver these different pieces within the telco and they’re not all combined. And the way that we pass information back and forth is not standardized. So how do I carve out a chunk of service?”
To be clear, it technically can be done. But is it worth it? Well, Surti said Colt’s rollout has allowed it to utilize its networks in a more efficient way by reallocating idle bandwidth. But generally speaking, let’s just say it seems to be something shareholders are pushing for more than enterprise customers.
And the technical aspects are just one roadblock. Surti acknowledged another is overcoming the aforementioned entrenched procurement processes businesses have.
“It’s driving a change in the consumer behavior,” he concluded. “Many of our customers who are getting used to this capability, firstly they’ve got to get the right skills and knowledge to use the platform and second they’ve got to make sure that their procurement cycles are designed in such a way that the person provisioning services has authority to buy that service or turn it down. And I think that’s taking a little bit longer.”