Live from MWC Las Vegas 2023: Verizon executive Joe Russo outlined the carrier’s multi-year network transformation, including a complete overhaul of its 5G core, on the sidelines of the conference.
Russo, the company’s president of global networks and technology, said the company’s transformation journey began by deploying more fiber, virtualization and the internally developed Verizon Cloud Platform. The latter is based on a web-scale software architecture and his IP-based technology designed for mobile operator workloads.
“All of our 5G core applications now run on our cloud-native platform,” Russo said. “We recently also moved to a containerized environment along with our 5G core.”
Benefits of Kubernetes-based cloud-native platforms include software and hardware separation within the core to support dynamic allocation of network resources.
“We are now really seeing the ability to automate resiliency at the core,” Russo explained. “That’s the first thing. We just make sure that if we find a failure in the platform, the application can self-heal and that the application can come up automatically.”
The 5G core upgrade will allow Verizon to perform faster software releases without impacting services used by consumers and businesses.
“A large amount of automation is being built into testing through platform deployment and optimization,” Russo said.
Verizon has also built in transport and application resiliency using its virtualization platform.
Because carriers have reduced infrastructure costs, they can now invest in other areas such as coverage and capacity, Russo said.
core competency
An additional benefit is the skills and capabilities Verizon has built through its 5G core rebuild that it can apply to enterprise customers.
“My team understands how to stand up virtualized cores all the way to virtualized RAN solutions, all of which are things we do in the private networking space,” Russo said. Masu.
Verizon is currently deploying vRAN primarily through Samsung to 15,000 cell sites, up from 8,000 in September 2022, but Russo noted that carriers are starting to deploy Ericsson’s vRAN. .
Russo said Verizon is working on deploying standalone (SA) 5G after conducting various trials, but the carrier’s open RAN efforts are “evolving, albeit slowly.” .
“I’ve been pushing teams to make sure that when they introduce standalone, it’s a step-function improvement for the customer,” he said. “What our testing has shown us is that there are several things we need to iron out to ensure that our customers get the reliability and accessibility they expect not only for data sessions, but also for voice sessions.”
