AWS boosts telco cloud offerings with new Outposts

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has unveiled new Outposts racks and servers at the Mobile World Congress, targeting the telecommunications sector.

The new racks are designed for high-throughput, network-intensive workloads while the servers are optimised for cloud radio access network (RAN) applications. The hybrid cloud offerings will enable telcos to tap AWS infrastructure and services for on-premise network functions that require low latency, high throughput and real-time performance.

Jayanth Nagarajan, AWS head of telecommunications for Asia-Pacific and Japan, pointed out three trends that have shaped the development of the new offerings.

First, telcos are looking for business growth beyond connectivity via artificial intelligence (AI)-powered digital services and software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings to streamline device setup and management, for example.

Second, telcos are transforming themselves through the use of AI, thanks to the convergence of large volumes of data, new algorithms and processing power. This has been manifested through the creation of digital-native brands – such as Tune Talk, Malaysia’s first fully cloud-enabled operator – and app-first sub-brands designed to appeal to different market segments.

Others are using AI and predictive analytics to automate and optimise operations. Examples include the way Orange has reduced its time to diagnose problems from hours to seconds by creating a digital twin of its French network, a similar project by Japan’s NTT Docomo, and South Korean telco LG U+ using Amazon Bedrock to test a variety of large language models (LLMs).

Third, telcos are working on the “cloudification” of their core networks, enabling faster network builds, more efficient operations, quicker service launches and enhanced resilience and stability. Nagarajan said such resilience can be seen in the way Telstra’s hybrid Nokia and AWS architecture was able to maintain voice service continuity during an unplanned outage in Sydney.

“Telcos are moving beyond legacy constraints with automation, AI and edge computing,” Nagarajan said. “It’s an industry we are absolutely delighted to partner with.”

Dave Brown, AWS vice-president of compute and networking, said the new Outposts extend AWS cloud infrastructure to the 5G network edge, enabling telcos to run their entire 5G network, including core and RAN, on AWS.

“The AWS Outposts rack offering features a new architecture that allows cost efficient capacity scaling to meet the growing throughput demands on the most densely populated 5G networks globally,” Brown said. “The AWS Outposts server offering supports both open and virtual RAN architectures with complete feature and performance parity with device-based 5G RAN.”

Brown noted that these offerings will empower telcos to build future-proof cloud infrastructure for 5G and beyond, enhancing customer experiences, accelerating deployments and reducing costs.

The new Outposts racks offer fourth-generation Intel Xeon Scalable-based EC2 instances with a high-performance bare metal network fabric, leveraging AWS Nitro’s security and performance. They enable automated deployment and management of microservices-based 5G network functions via Amazon EKS add-ons.

Telcos can run AWS services locally while connecting to the broader AWS cloud region and monitor their 5G network with services like Amazon CloudWatch, Managed Service for Prometheus and Managed Grafana. 5G operations can be simplified by analysing network data with analytics and machine learning services such as Amazon Athena and Amazon SageMaker.

Designed for cloud RAN workloads at the edge, the new Outposts servers were developed with Nokia – though AWS is collaborating with other RAN vendors. Tommi Uitto, president of Nokia Mobile Networks, said this pre-integrated cloud RAN offering can help operators “enhance the efficiency and scalability of their 5G networks, as well as leverage the edge cloud for new monetisation opportunities”.

Benefits include reduced operational complexity due to pre-integration, faster innovation thanks to the availability of more than 200 AWS services in AWS cloud regions, simplified migration from legacy infrastructure to a software-centric and microservice-based RAN, as well as high performance AWS Graviton3-based EC2 instances.

Telefonica, Orange and Du Network will conduct field evaluations of the Outposts servers later this year. Both racks and servers will be generally available before the end of the year.