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Network Infrastructure Magazine | Saturday, January 29, 2022
Working with major communication services providers and network vendors to implement it, Google is helping them fulfill the potential of 5G to bring new revenues, decrease operating costs, and empower new customers.
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FREMONT, CA: Communication services providers (CSPs) are undergoing a period of interruption. Overall sales growth is slowing and is expected to remain below 1 percent per year for the foreseeable future, continuing a trend that began even before the pandemic. Simultaneously, due to the pandemic, data consumption jumped 30 percent in 2020 compared to 2019, with some operators reporting surges of up to 60 percent.
Operators are being forced to innovate in three essential areas due to revenue pressure and escalating data traffic expenses. To begin, operators are seeking new revenue streams. Second, higher network utilization must be accompanied by cost reductions. Thirdly, by improving the client experience, acquiring new customers is possible.
Fortunately, 5G provides a road ahead in all three areas. CSPs can distinguish their network services for public sector and enterprise customers using network slicing and private networks. The decoupling 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. Additionally, the ability to offload workloads to the edge enables CSPs to provide engaging experiences to consumers and businesses.
It's essential to explore how traditional telecommunications networks were constructed. Initially, networks were constructed using physical network functions (PNFs)—appliances that combined hardware and software to execute a single task. While PNFs benefited from being purpose-built for a specific application, they lacked flexibility and were difficult to upgrade. For example, to deploy new features, it is frequently necessary to replace the complete PNF, i.e., to deploy a new hardware appliance.
The concept 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. Rather than integrating hardware and software into a single device, VNFs decoupled the hardware from the software. As a result, hardware might be procured from one vendor and software from another. Additionally, hardware and software upgrade cycles could be separated.
While VNFs had some advantages over PNFs, they remained in an intermediate stage. To begin, they were often 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, resulting in inefficiency. Second, the VNF was frequently constructed as a single entity. While it was feasible to upgrade the VNF independently of the hardware, 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 increased risk, and operational complexity, which resulted in upgrade delays.
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