5G、シスコ、ジュニパー、およびVMwareに大きな窓を開く

モバイルネットワークの変革の合流点は、シスコ、ジュニパー、およびVMwareにとってより好ましい環境を促進しています。Efforts to virtualize and introduce cloud-native technologies to mobile networks is opening new opportunities for vendors to emerge from the shadows and play a starring role in the 5G era. Cisco, Juniper, and VMware are stalwarts in the networking space and have deep interests in telecom, but 5G and a confluence of transformational shifts in mobile networks is fostering a more favorable environment for widespread use of their technologies. 5G is opening big windows for growth and influence from these companies and others. Prior to 5G, network operators primarily targeted consumers and were generally viewed as network and plumbing providers, explains Shekar Ayyar, executive vice president and general manager of telco and edge cloud at VMware. “They have historically missed the boat on being a cloud provider or having any benefits from the transformation of enterprises in consuming the cloud,” Ayyar said. “To us, 5G represents both a technical inflection point as well to some extent a fortuitous coming together of things that leads to a new opportunity landscape for telecom operators globally.” The benefits of connecting 5G networks to hyperscale public clouds and private clouds are just beginning to unfold. Coupling 5G network deployments with an underlying infrastructure transformation designed for cloud technologies will essentially move operators to a more agile, automated, and secure environment, according to Ayyar. “You now have the ability to connect the dots between private, public, telco, and edge,” he said. At the technology level, VMware is focusing on management, operations, automation, and security. “We’re now working with an increasing number of telecom carriers. Over 70 providers are using us on the network side for some form of NFV,” Ayyar said, adding that more than 90% of carriers are using VMware technology in their IT data centers. “The most exciting part of this in terms of 5G would be the companies that are using us for either the NFV architecture or SD-WAN deployments into the branch,” he said. “The extent of operationalization of the core network for carriers on NFV is expanding quite rapidly.” VMware also believes the next round of innovation riding the 5G wave will be defined by efforts to virtualize radio access networks (RAN). The untapped opportunity for mobile operators to serve more enterprises is also driving interest in more uniquely valuable network capabilities. “The expectations of the mobile network, particularly in the wireless environment, have gone through the roof,” Scott Harrell, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco’s enterprise networking business, told SDxCentral in June at its Cisco Live event. Uninterrupted, reliable, secure mobility is a “big paradigm shift in how you have to think about how you’re going to run your network and how you’re going to operationalize it,” he said. “These are expectations that used to be reserved more for the core, the aggregation layer at best, and now they’re being pushed out to not just the access layer from a switching point of view but all the way down to the individual access points. That’s incumbent on us in the vendor community to respond and provide those kind of outcomes for the customer,” Harrell said. Enterprises primarily use 4G LTE as a low-speed backup for activities like point-of-sale (PoS) traffic, but the latency and bandwidth characteristics of 5G means businesses can use it as a load-balanced primary data source for connectivity and more reliable backup, he explained. “5G from a branch router out will be the first place it will really impact the enterprise,” Harrell said. “We’re pretty excited about what it will do in that environment.” Integrating 5G and WiFi 6 will also help operators develop robust capabilities around network segmentation, he explained. “We’re still in the early days of actually building services that allow you to do that. The technology is there though,” Harrell said. Sally Bament, senior vice president of service provider marketing at Juniper, also sees 5G driving large architectural changes in mobile networks. “5G is about more than enabling super-fast mobile speeds – it’s also an enormous opportunity for service providers to increase revenues through new services that simply weren’t possible before,” she said. Low latency, high bandwidth use cases will also create exponential traffic demands on the network, pose new security threats, and introduce more operational complexities for operators, she explained. Mobile operators are under enormous pressure to deploy 5G networks but they also face an acute need to generate new revenue streams that can help offset escalating costs, Bament added. “We serve some of the largest global service providers on the planet today and are tightly aligned with them as they look to transform to support this oncoming 5G-led tsunami of bandwidth, devices, and services,” she said. Juniper has partnered with Ericsson to deliver a portfolio that integrates RAN with capabilities in edge computing and the network core functions. 5G is enabling Juniper to participate in network infrastructure transformation projects that deliver increased bandwidth and adhere to stricter security requirements in the RAN, edge, and core of those networks, Bament explained. Juniper is also helping operators “transform traditional services to new virtualized service delivery” through telco cloud, SDN, and the convergence of fixed and mobile networks, she added.