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Road to Network Cloudification: USA & Canada

Road to Network Cloudification: USA & CANADA

"Road to Network Cloudification" : Series focusing on summarizing the virtualization journey so far, current status & 5G related news of some of the major Operators in a region/country. 

Will be starting the series with focus on USA & Canada.
 
Note: As of 21st August, 2020 have started a new post with summary table capturing all regions, the operators from these post and their NFV ecosystem and 5G status. 

Last Updated: 4th Jan 2022

USA:

    1. AT&T :
  • Virtualization Journey:
    • AT&T has been one of the global leaders who has invested heavily towards virtualizing their infrastructure. Their journey towards network virtualization essentially started in 2013 when it laid out plans of its "Domain 2.0" initiative.
    • As part of Domain 2.0 AT&T also announced plans of "User Defined Network Cloud" in 2014 which was their network of the future for which it selected Ericsson, Tail-F Systems AB, Metaswitch Networks ltd & Affirmed Networks as the vendors.
    • Developed in house MANO(Management and Network Orchestration) platform (ECOMP) which was made open source later on and collaborated with many other global operators to cofound "ONAP(Open Network Automation Platform)" 
  • Virtualization Status:
    • By 2019, around 71% of their core network functions has been virtualized and AT&T Targets to reach 75% by end of 2020.This target was reached in September 2020.
    • Also currently SDN controls 100% of the data traffic that runs through the infrastructure connecting the elements of the core network together.
  • 5G News:
    • AT&T revealed in 2018 that Ericsson, Samsung & Nokia are the 5G vendors it will be using.
    • In 2019, AT&T started deploying 5G using Kubernetes on Openstack's Airship project which is being provided by Mirantis.
    • AT&T is deploying its Kubernetes and OpenStack cloud on-premises rather than in a public cloud
    • AT&T also teamed up with Microsoft in 2019 to innovate around 5G, AI, cloud, and edge computing and moving non network worloads to Azure Cloud by 2024.
    • One of the biggest move made by AT&T was in June 2021 when they decided to move 5G core to Microsoft Azure's hybrid cloud with Microsoft acquiring AT&Ts Network cloud platform running 5G already and integrating azure services to the platform .
    • AT&T has also partnered with Google cloud in July 2021 for enterprise services 
    2. Verizon Wireless:
 3. T-Mobile:
  • Virtualization Journey & Status:
    • T-Mobile has not been public about its NFV efforts.
    • However Sprint which has been acquired by T-Mobile has invested heavily towards virtualization and has been working on OpenStack Cloud since 2017.
    • Sprint had fully virtualized its Packet core and IMS core as part of its virtualization efforts.
    • In 2018, T-Mobile announced launch of World's largest virtual Packet Core with Cisco which will help it prepare towards supporting 5G.
    • In addition for 5G in 2018, T-Mobile signed a deal with Ericsson & Nokia as well for 5G. T-Mobile had selected Ericsson to deploy Ericsson's Radio System portfolio, including 5G New Radio and NR hardware and software compliant with 3GPP standards.
    • Also, they informed that in standalone 5G trial they have used packet core from Nokia & Cisco.
 4. Dish Network:

CANADA:

1. Bell Canada:
  • Virtualization Journey/Status:
    • Bell Canada kicked off its NFV strategy in 2015 by launching its Network 3.0 Strategy which involved transformation of its network from core to edge.
    • In 2018, Bell Canada launched Bell Virtual Network Services- a catalogue of cloud-based, on-demand network functions for enterprise business customers under the Network 3.0 umbrella. Cisco Viptela SDWAN is one of the use cases which is being provided as part of this offering
    • Also in 2018, Bell deployed containerized version of ONAP solution in production along with Amdocs to automate life cycle management of both physical and virtual network functions, incident management and service assurance.
    • In 2019, Bell Canada informed that they are running Virtual Machines on Kubernetes platform without any openstack platform.
2. Telus:
  • Virtualization Journey/Status:
    • Telus has being deploying NFV from at least 2016 deploying 10 NFV pods on Openstack till 2018.
    • Telus has also worked with Affirmed Networks (Now Microsoft) to implement NFV for IOT services. They deployed virtualized EPC, IMS and vCPE to realize the same.
    • Telus has also leveraged Netcracker's Network As a Service offering to deliver SD-WAN and other next-generation services to their customers.
3. Rogers Canada: Even Rogers Canada has started deploying 5G in canada in Jan 2020. Rogers is deploying 5G in Canada using Ericsson's 5G RAN & Core.




Disclaimer:
The details presented above is based on data available online.The references used are available on: https://matelecom.blogspot.com/p/references-road-to-network.html .


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