Bell Canada is the latest service provider to announce a big partnership with a public cloud provider. Bell Canada has chosen to work with Google Cloud to power Bell’s company-wide digital transformation and enhance its network and IT infrastructure.
The new, multi-year partnership will combine Bell’s 5G network with Google Cloud’s Anthos multicloud solution, which extends Google Cloud services to its customers' environments.
Bell plans to begin the collaboration by shifting some of its critical workloads and applications from its on-premise IT infrastructure to Google Cloud. Bell Canada will also tap Google’s expertise in data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) to gain insights about real-time network performance, capacity planning and service assurance.
One of the reasons that Bell chose Google is because they “share a common goal to run more sustainable businesses,” according to Bell. “As the cleanest cloud in the industry, Google Cloud will contribute to Bell’s target of achieving carbon neutral operations by 2025, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 in line with the Paris Climate Agreement,” stated a Bell press release.
Bell and Google Cloud plan to collaborate throughout the next decade on new innovations, including cloud solutions for enterprise customers.
Cloud and service providers
2021 has proven to be the year where cloud and service providers go together like peanut butter and chocolate.
Dish kicked off the big announcements when it said in April that it would run its core and RAN network functions on AWS’s cloud.
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Then AT&T announced in June that it would run its core network on Microsoft Azure.
AT&T SVP of Engineering and Operations Igal Elbaz told Fierce that AT&T will hand over its network software development to Microsoft. But anything on top of it, like network functions and service creation, stays with AT&T.
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Elbaz said that from Day One, AT&T will be able to continue operating its network the same way it’s been doing. “We can continue to engineer and operate our network on the same cloud platform because we built it,” Elbaz said. Over time, Microsoft will continue to build additional capabilities on top of it.