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Network Infrastructure Magazine | Wednesday, June 29, 2022
Working with leading communication services providers and network vendors to implement it, Google is assisting them in fulfilling the potential of 5G to bring new revenues, decrease operating costs, and empower new customers.
FREMONT, CA: Communication services providers (CSPs) are experiencing a period of interruption. As a result, overall sales growth is slowing and is expected to remain below 1% per year for the foreseeable future, continuing a trend that began before the pandemic. Meanwhile, due to the pandemic, data consumption jumped 30% in 2020 compared to 2019, with some operators reporting surges of up to 60%.
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Because of revenue pressure and escalating data traffic expenses, operators are forced to innovate in three essential areas:
1. To Commence, operators are searching for new revenue streams.
2. Cost reductions must accompany higher network applications.
3. By enhancing the client experience, acquiring new customers is possible.
Luckily, 5G provides a road ahead in all three areas. Through network slicing and private networks, CSPs can differentiate their network services for the public sector and enterprise customers.
The dissociation of hardware and software enables the entry of new vendors with differentiated capabilities and allows CSPs to develop, deploy, and operate networks in fundamentally new ways. Moreover, offloading workloads to the edge enables CSPs to give engaging experiences to consumers and businesses.
It's important to explore how conventional telecommunications networks were constructed. Initially, networks were built using physical network functions (PNFs)—appliances that composite hardware and software to execute a single task.
While PNFs aided from being purpose-built for a specific application, they lacked flexibility and were difficult to upgrade. For instance, deploying new features is frequently necessary to replace the complete PNF, i.e., deploy a new hardware appliance.
The idea of virtualized network functions (VNFs), software workloads designed to run on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware, was the first step toward increasing deployment agility. Instead of integrating hardware and software into a single device, VNFs decoupled the hardware from the software. Hence, hardware might be procured from one vendor and software from another. Also, hardware and software upgrade cycles could be separated.
While VNFs had some benefits over PNFs, they remained in an intermediate stage. To begin, they were much required to run within a virtual machine (VM), which necessitated the use of a hypervisor to interface between the host operating system (OS) and the guest operating system (OS) contained within the VM.
The hypervisor ate up CPU cycles, causing inefficiency. Second, the VNF was often constructed as a single entity. While updating the VNF independently of the hardware was feasible, doing so required the deployment of the entire huge VNF, even if the upgrade affected just a fraction of the VNF. As with PNFs, this greater risk and operational complexity resulted in upgrade delays.
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