5G Successes Depend on Different Organisations’ Collaborative Efforts
With the agenda of delivering the technology-enabled solutions to its customers which needs to be thrived in today’s digital economy, Brillio helps its customers to accelerate what matters to their business by leveraging its expertise in agile engineering to bring human-centric products to market at warp speed. Born in the digital age, it embraces the four superpowers of technology, enabling customers to not only improve their current performance but to rethink their business in entirely new ways. While talking about 5G scope in Indian industries with Nitisha from BISinfotech; Sai Sandesh V, Senior Director, Product and Platform Engineering, Brillio says that the success of 5G is based on the collaborative efforts of different organizations.
Kindly talk about Brillio and its special offerings.
Brillio is a product engineering organization with roots in digital transformation that addresses multiple industry verticals. The company has significant stakes in telecom and network automation. We strategically engage with tier-1 operators and large network OEMs (original equipment manufacturer) on a complete product and business lifecycle that includes product architecture, design & development, tech consulting, business, and GTM strategy.
The company also has stellar credentials in building digital transformation software solutions to accelerate 5G network rollouts for tier-1 operators in North America. Since the inception of our company, we have provided comprehensive cell site management solutions covering aspects such as network planning, unified financial budgeting, cell tower construction, integrated operations, and customized IPs.
Brillio is invested in 5G technologies especially in the areas of Network Automation & Orchestration, Edge Computing, and Cell Sites rollout acceleration. Recently, Brillio along with its partner BluePlanet, co-developed and launched BluePlanet Network Automation Suite (BPE) that leverages AI/ML techniques to manage complex network operations focused on enterprises.
What are the potential and advantages of converging cloud and virtual networks? Kindly explain.
Organizations now have the freedom to deploy and run their software applications and services anywhere without being restricted to specific hardware or location. With the help of virtualization, workloads are run in form of virtual machines and containers on the cloud. Cloud has allowed seamless scaling and paved the way for pay-as-you-go and usage-based pricing.
While this brings in a lot of flexibility, organizations now need more agile ways to create and manage networks to enable applications and services to communicate over the networks. With the help of virtual networks, networks can be quickly spin up, updated, and deleted. All this can be achieved without making changes to the underlying physical network, thus making it a lot easier to operate. Virtual networks are managed with the help of a centralized controller that makes it easier to create networks, connect endpoints and define policies for security and access control. They become plug-n-play and adaptive. We can make the changes for bandwidth control and policies dynamically through centralized control.
Another dimension to virtual networks is that the services that earlier ran on specialized hardware are now being virtualized to run on COTS (Commercial off-the-shelf) hardware. vFirewall, vRouter, vLoadBalancer are some such examples of virtual network services. It allows an enterprise or a network operator to leverage the benefits of the cloud in terms of flexibility of infrastructure, scaling, and pricing.
Kindly explain the relevance of 3 computing models – cloud, edge, and hybrid in the telecom industry.
Edge has been envisioned to serve use cases that have stringent low data latency requirements while communicating with end-user or devices. Mini data centers located close to radio access networks will host hardware infrastructure (compute, storage & network) to run such use cases. Since these data centers are lean and can host limited hardware, only latency-sensitive or quick decision-making components of software applications will run on the edge. Compute intensive parts of applications or ones that are not associated with data latency will run on a centralized cloud. Thus, Telcos will be adopting a hybrid cloud model. Augmented Reality is a good example of how the graphical processing of an application can run on edge to give real-time experience based on user interaction. Other aspects of AR application such as deriving insights from user behavior using machine learning techniques can run on the cloud as it does not impact end-user experience.
How is the Convergence of 5G cellular and advanced Data Analytics for embracing open ecosystems?
We can address this question from two angles: data analytics in general and data analytics used in 5G cellular networks.
Data is considered as the new oil and generated data needs to be transported for processing purposes to the cloud or data centers. 5G access technologies will help in moving large datasets for analytics purposes for machine learning tasks or perform real-time decision making.
There is strong momentum in the industry towards the adoption of O-RAN, which is an open standard for the 5G Radio Access Network. Data analytics is considered as part of the O-RAN architecture and will play an important towards in the optimal use of radio resources in a 5G network. 5G networks are meant to be adaptive and respond to situations in real-time to keep the network, application performance and user experience optimal. For this, real-time data analytics capabilities are needed to address ground situation in the networks.
Integration of 5G with modern cloud-native architecture. Explain.
Telcos are moving towards the adoption of cloud-native architecture for running 5G network services to leverage various benefits of the cloud. O-RAN (CU [centralized unit], DU [distributed unit], RT-RIC [RealTime RAN Intelligent Controller], nonRT-RIC [Non-RealTime RAN Intelligent Controller]) and core network (SMF [Session Management Function], AMF [Access & Mobility Management Function], UPF [User Plane Function], PCF [Policy Control function], AUSF [Authentication Server Function]) services are envisioned to run on private or public cloud as cloud-native functions. Cloud-native services are run in form of microservices, a way to divide a monolithic software system into independently functioning modules that communicate with each other with the help of APIs. Each microservice has its independent lifecycle so any change or upgrade to a microservice can be done without bringing down the entire software solution. Unaffected services continue to run. DevOps teams are entrusted to manage the lifecycle of these microservices.
Operators have the flexibility to spin microservices on different clouds (private, AWS, GCP, Azure). It is also easy to scale a software system with the help of microservices architecture to balance extra workload. Additional instances of microservices can be easily deployed and incoming traffic can be load balanced to the additionally deployed instances. Once the traffic conditions return to normal, instances of the microservice can be scaled down without affecting the operations.
In this ever-converging space we are increasingly seeing Hyperscalers like AWS, Google, and Azure are providing solutions to host network services of 5G and Edge in cloud-native form.
What is the role of Data Analytics in 5G?
Automation is one of the key drivers of 5G that can be achieved with the help of data analytics. Automation will achieve the desired scale and speed of deployment of 5G networks. Data analytics is one of the key pillars of 5G and will be leveraged in end2end aspects of 5G services offered by Telcos. Operators will rely on data analytics to plan, build and manage their 5G networks. They will rely heavily on it to optimize their operations, solve customer problems and create business strategies. Listed below are the areas where data analytics will be leveraged for 5G:
- Plan to build and upgrade data centers; understand network utilization and recommend upgrades to the network to support user data traffic
- Use preventive and predictive techniques to manage and troubleshoot network infrastructure. Collect data from various network sources and find root cause analysis for network issues
- Diagnose customer connectivity issues by analyzing data from various network sources
- Configure network infrastructure optimally for best end-user experience
- For budgeting and financial spending – provide pointers for spending based on revenue forecast. Forecast estimated budget for any project based on historical data
- Optimize field workforce productivity by assigning them tasks based on efficiency, skill sets, and work location
- Select vendors based on their performance gauged on various parameters such as timeliness, the complexity of work, past performance, etc.
- Help find markets to launch new services based on customer demographics
- Auto-assign tickets to field engineers or customer support personnel based on the nature of the ticket
With plethora of data and insights available, it enables the opportunity to build a true Adaptive Network that can Scale, Predict and Prevent network issues eventually leading to Self-Healing Networks
What will be your future marketing strategy?
Brillio is strategically focusing on the areas of telecom digital transformation, network automation & orchestration, and mobile edge computing (MEC). Our marketing strategy hinges on:
- Being a strategic collaborative partner with CSPs (Communications Service Provider) and OEMs
- Becoming a center piece in forming an ecosystem composed of multiple players for 5G solutions
- Building open software systems and promoting open-source software
The success of 5G is based on the collaborative efforts of different organizations. Brillio has co-invented software products with its partners and has taken a step further to make them commercially viable and successful in the market.
The company envisions a marketplace-like ecosystem to offer solutions specific to edge for enterprises. Brillio strategy is to work with tier-1 operators to enable this marketplace through the following means:
- Bring in a variety of vendors and OEMs essential for edge services (4G, 5G, SD-WAN [software-defined networking in a wide area network], FW [Fixed Wireless], BNG [Broadband Network Gateaway])
- Onboard applications specific to edge use cases (autonomous cars, drones, IIoT, remote health, etc.)
- Digitize edge marketplace by developing relevant business support systems (vendor onboarding, contracts, workflows, transactions, service catalog, financial transaction systems, etc.)
- Design and build end2end edge solutions
- Leverage open-source software
