The back to the mothership moment in the networking business

The 2014-2019 Era and the drive towards open source

As detailed in the LF Networking Whitepaper, in the previous century, Communications Services Provider (CSP) would acquire the underlying proprietary technology from Network Equipment Providers (NEPs) and charge subscribers to use the network.

The various forms of networks we come across for our daily connectivity needs. At this level nothing seems to have changed over the last 30 years.

The resulting networks were largely homogenous with most of the equipment typically coming from a single vendor. In this traditional model, the technology and product roadmap of the CSP was the technology and product roadmap of their NEP which was driven by jointly developed standards. Standards-led product development led to decentralized yet globally compatible service offerings, enabling worldwide roaming and an unprecedented level of compatibility over defined reference points and across many vendors.

With consumers paying less to get more each year, the CSP must continuously create new services and provide more bandwidth at a lower cost each year just to remain viable as a business.

Its worthwhile tracing the evolution of the mobile CSP business that witnessed a “back to the mothership” moment over the last 3 years from R&D heavy CSPs such as at&t and others.

“Back to the Mothership” signifies the return to the operator-vendor commons business model (AT&T before 1996), driven by an open-source programmable infrastructure and very fast DevOps cycles.

The plethora of wireless technologies in the late 90s created the implosive landscape of the 00s largely due to complexity: both in the network as well as in operations. Too many wireless technologies that took too large investments to build and too many humans to operate and constantly retune the network, caused subpar ROIs relative to other industries until around 2007 where user interface innovations (iPhone) hit the market. The implosion lasted 10 years but addressed only the economies of scale in the business models of service providers. It did nothing to address the complexity of the networks themselves which have a life span of 20 years. Still today the industry has to cope and operate technologies standardized 30 years ago that simply can’t die fast enough . Complexity is slowly killing the industry.

The tipping point has already been reached in highly competitive markets such as India where CSPs are disappearing from the market or are merging but still losing customers to competition. From the once flourishing NEP ecosystem, less than a handful of vendors remain today. Despite the network itself becoming the foundation for the new global digital economy, the industry that provides the network is facing significant challenges.

The next phase of the business model evolution however has already started. The disruption in the IT space redrafted the mega-operators’ network architectures and kick-started Network Function Virtualization (NFV) deployments. But the Radio Access Network (RAN) remains the crown-jewel of esoteric thinking and many of the vendors are scrambling to respond to Cloud RAN architectural challenges for 5G.

5G must lead to dramatic operational simplification of the network, if not it can pose a serious threat to the operator and vendor yields by laying additional layers of complexity, with another 10-year standardization cycles, proprietary and broken management data formats and associated large investments into additional mobiles bands and modes (cm/mm wave, unlicensed multi-connectivity).

To achieve simplification while at the same time deliver on the performance premise, NEPs must rethink their business model where investments are concentrated in a bimodal fashion around (a) specialized components (e.g. SoCs) and (b) software services. The big missing piece of today’s NEP (vendor) business – that of systems integration will be largely taken over by the operator themselves. In fact, operators will largely compete with vendors for the same engineering talent pool that can program their open source programmable infrastructures, completing the circle.

In summary, the premise and the overarching theme of this course is in one word network simplification from the business, operation, technology perspective. But there is a twist - the mothership may not be in fact at&t or any other CSP for that matter !

Before we present how the story twisted, lets review what some CSPs were striving to do (until few months ago) and why this is still relevant today.

The 7 ways AT&T’s network is transformed

As outlined in the the AT&T’s Network Transformation white paper,

AT&T has led the industry as a disruptive innovator of Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software Defined Networking (SDN) by executing a network transformation initiative that’s spanned from the network edge to the core. In addition to virtualizing 75% of its network functions by the end of 2020,

• AT&T embarked on one of the largest OpenStack-based cloud infrastructure buildouts in the world, and disrupted the SDN industry by open sourcing its innovative platform – now called Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP). Read the rebuttal later in this lecture.

• 100% of the data traffic running through the multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) tunnels, which connect the core elements of our network together, is now under SDN control.

• It also activated the first 400-gigabit SDN-enabled optical connection carrying live internet traffic across its network for customers. The connection - between Dallas and Atlanta - is the first in the industry and is built on flexible, low-cost White Box hardware supporting OpenROADM standards.

Principle	Description
Network growth necessitates economies of scale that can only be achieved from interoperability and open disaggregation	There are three essential elements to AT&T’s network transformation ecosystem: (1) The open dNOS, like AT&T’s Vyatta NOS, that’s disaggregated from the underlying hardware (chassis, controller, line cards, etc.) (2) Well-defined standard interfaces and APIs enabling modularity with the ability to mix and match applications (3) Independent scaling of control and user/data plane functions to drive an open ecosystem. AT&T is leading efforts in industry bodies like the Open Compute Project (OCP), Open Networking Foundation (ONF), Open-RAN (O-RAN), OpenROADM, and the Linux Foundation to commoditize interoperable network functions and compute modularity without being cost prohibitive.
White Box hardware/software disaggregation using open dNOS, such as AT&T’s Vyatta NOS, is proliferating from the network edge to the core
Network edge densification is critical for low latency, near-real time connections, highspeed requirements for 5G and low latency enterprise applications
AT&T’s Mobility Core and IP Communication Core are pivoting to be cloud native	Our Mobility Core will begin to evolve to the Option 2 (5G stand-alone) Next Generation Multi-Access Core (NGxC),will be cloud native (containerized, require OVS-DPDK, necessitate High IOPS storage, etc.), will implement 3GPP Control Plane User Plane Separation (CUPS) on a large scale to support 5G latency performance requirements, and will ultimately converge discrete physical Mobility Core instances in a common core (FirstNet, Consumer, Enterprise, and 5G cores)
ONAP and AT&T’s ECOMP SDN platform are evolving for diverse NFV instantiation orchestration models - APIs not GUIs	Network functions and how they orchestrate are now diverse. ONAP and ECOMP are evolving to expose component functionality to provide flexible consumption of API-based service models, creation, instantiation, NFV control, inventory management, policy, control loop automation, and automation of operations.
Cloud-Based Data Warehouse, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and policydriven SDN-control are a powerful combination	AT&T is embedding intelligence at the edge using string analytics, algorithms, automated policy, and ‘if-then’ statements with SDN-based control loop automation for traffic flow and performance management. Its augmented with data streaming to cloud data warehouses
AT&T network security paradigm is rapidly changing from the customer premise, to the network edge, and at its core.	A distributed model with security localized and optimized to protect the resource helps in many aspects and represents a dramatic shift – one that SDN with its dynamic and intelligent capabilities can and will play a significant role.

The above transformation initiatives support the following strategic directions.

• An open network ecosystem is critical for scale out, interoperability, and performance – Insatiable customer video consumption, application “zero-tolerance” for 5G latency variance, dense penetration of cell sites/microcells, the speed of deployment is necessitating a shift in the network ecosystem. Interoperability and openness are critical to achieve not only a dense 5G edge but for economies of scale as well.

• Convergence and simplification of network function integration for improved network operability – Converging and aggregating best of breed components by working with ODMs obtaining better insight/input into merchant silicon roadmaps, and industry supported open interface specifications give AT&T the flexibility to produce a ubiquitous model for automation.

• Network disaggregation and open source is paramount to innovation – To ensure innovation can continue for the customer, the disaggregation of the software stack from hardware using standards-based APIs and broad adoption of open source must accelerate. There are two prominent areas of innovation: Edge-based services that can be “productized” and network data insights with Network AI that dramatically optimizes the customer experience and network performance.