Consider what that means for the mobile operator and its relationship with its customers. Instead of selling a generic 5G pipe with a static SLA, a telco can now sell a dynamic, guaranteed slice for a specific use case—say, a remote robotic surgery setup or a high-density, low-latency industrial IoT factory floor. The network senses the congestion and automatically allocates resources without a human engineer needing to intervene in the middle of the night.
This is the revenue-generation part of the equation that the industry has been in search of for as long as I’ve been coming to MWC. Telcos that can add value on top of the high-performance, low-latency connectivity and shift it to a programmable service will stop being thought of as a utility and start being considered a value-added partner.
Addressing the GSI and talent gap
Of course, the technology is only half the battle. The barrier to entry for this autonomous network future isn’t just the code and the cloud, it’s the culture and the skills gap. The industry is currently struggling with a significant talent shortage when it comes to integrating cloud-native stacks with legacy infrastructure. AWS seems to recognize this, shifting its focus from selling raw Outpost racks to providing more of a stack that includes the orchestration and AI frameworks to make these systems usable.
By working with global systems integrators (GSI) and software partners like Amdocs, AWS is attempting to lower the barrier for telcos to get from ideation to production. The goal is to move from a three-year POC cycle to a six-month deployment cycle. For a telco executive, the ability to deploy a new service in months, rather than years, is the only way to justify the massive investment in network modernization.
Engineered systems have been widely adopted across various industries but have been slow to see uptake in telecom. A validated, turnkey system can greatly reduce time to production and enable service providers to get more value from their investments, faster.
The path forward
The narrative around AWS in telco is maturing. It’s no longer about whether a telco should use the cloud. The question has shifted to “How quickly can we make our network programmable?”
