Three 5G SA Killer Use Cases Ready to go Commercial from Telenor, NTT and Deutsche Telekom
by Sue Rudd June 30, 2020
With all the recent noise about partnerships with Cloud Hyperscalers some very important breakthroughs for 5G Standalone (SA) commercial solutions based on the ‘Telco Cloud’ got less than their fair share of attention in June 2021.
Demonstrated breakthroughs at Telenor, NTT and Deutsche Telekom are early proof that operators’ dreams of differentiated private and public services based on unique combinations of 5G SA Network Functions (NFs) with robust Service Management and Orchestration will soon be reality.
Below we describe three recent 5G SA ‘Killer Use Cases’:
Use Case 1. 5G SA Multi-Vendor Secure Services (Telenor)
Use Case 2. Private Campus Management from Telco Cloud Data Center (NTT DATA)
Use Case 3. Network Slicing finally Ready to go commercial (DT).
______________________________________________________________
Use Case 1: Telenor won GLOMO for Seamless Operation of Five Vendor Secure 5G SA Solution.
Telenor announced its Multi-Vendor 5G CORE Standalone (SA) Solution with Enea, Kaloom and others in April 2021 and it has now won the 2021 GLOMO award for ‘Best Network Software Breakthrough’. The solution is described in detail in an excellent Telenor YouTube Video. Telenor noted that “this deployment will likely become a template for other operators and was the reason the Glomo judges picked it as a winning entry”. This multi-vendor ‘composable core’ presages the advent of highly configurable differentiated 5G services based on 5G SA that will become commercial in the second half of 2021. And scale to high volume with 5G SA widespread deployment in 2022.
Five Vendors rapidly created seamless E2E Interoperable solution
Enea worked with Telenor to create a fully interoperable cloud-native 5G data management system that delivered automated End to End (E2E) encrypted communications from the core to the edge for the Norwegian Armed Forces. Kaloom provided its multi-tenant, multi-terabits per second, low latency vFabric that enables multiple isolated tenants to share a common distributed cloud environment. Casa Systems provided the 5G Session Management Function (SMF) and Access and Mobility Function (AMF) and Oracle delivered 5G Service Communications Proxy (SCP) to manage and route all the multi-vendor NF signaling and monitor all the SA cores running in Red Hat’s Openshift container environment with Ansible E2E automation.
Use case 2. NTT DATA will host SA Core and ‘hop over Ethernet’ to manage Private Campus Edge Clouds for industry
In late June, NTT, its subsidiary NTT DATA and leading Japan based global vendor NEC announced the creation of 'Enso - The Space for Creators' at NTT DATA Deutschland's Munich laboratories. Mavenir is also “a companion in the construction of the Enso campus network and provides the cloud-native software for its operation.”
What is special about the NTT solution?
The solution enables a Global vertical Industry cloud with SA Core functions hosted at a Carrier Data Center to manage Campus Networks anywhere.
In the proposed solution NTT DATA provides the Data Center (DC) hosting for relevant SA Core functions that links to any remote 5G Campus ‘Edge Cloud’ with O-RAN compliant vCUs and vDUs transparently over any Broadband Ethernet connection. This “End-to-end cloud-native 5G SA solution … can be integrated into the existing telecommunications and IT infrastructure….(and) seamlessly combined with …Wi-Fi 6 (all) centrally controlled via 5G..” Such a ‘Telco Cloud’ will be particularly useful where Campus LANs run on Private 5G Spectrum - as in Germany - and need to leverage hosted 5G SA services at a DC like that of NTT DATA, without involving any local Mobile Network Operator (MNO).
The “companies plan to create new solutions for other industries, such as…automotive and manufacturing for global markets, including the US by leveraging their private 5G expertise, knowledge and use cases cultivated in Japan.”
Use Case 3. Deutsche Telekom demonstrates E2E Network Slicing is finally ready for ‘Prime Time’ with RAN Slicing, SA Slice Management and Orchestration and UE Slice Selection
After years of piecemeal demos and ‘nailed up’ private solutions, Network Slicing may finally be ready for mass consumption. In June Deutsche Telekom, Ericsson and Samsung successfully completed pre-commercial 5G SA E2E network slicing at Deutsche Telekom’s Bonn lab. Ericsson provided commercial-grade 5G SA infrastructure for RAN, 5G Cloud Core, Slice Orchestration and Ordering Automation to deliver service to a Samsung S21 commercial device tethered to a Virtual Reality (VR) headset for Gaming Apps. The solution demonstrated the benefits of network slicing optimized for cloud VR game streaming with a device that can use UE route selection policy, or URSP to steer applications and services with specific requirements to a defined slice – selected from the multiple active slices offering different classes of service. UE selection means customers can match the desired service quality needed by their applications with the right network slice on demand.
Will Network Slicing scale commercially on an automated basis?
The partners also validated other critical commercial capabilities of 5G E2E Network Slicing including:
- Verification of stable latency and guaranteed throughput in a congested network
- Automated creation of different slices with infrastructure resource isolation as required
- Service differentiation using Ericsson 5G RAN slicing for near real time over the air allocation
- Automated slice and user profile provisioning through E2E Slice Orchestration
Dr. Won-Joon Choi, EVP & Head of Technology Strategy Team at Mobile Communications Business, Samsung Electronics commented “5G E2E Network Slicing will allow Samsung Galaxy users to experience gaming like never before.”
More important this demonstrates that the advent of the 5G SA Slice Management and Orchestration and UE functionality have finally made Network Slicing ready for full commercialization.