Hello,
At my day job, we are considering going Full MVNO. Which means building a mobile core network.
I was wondering if some of you would have feedback or advices on the solutions currently available?
We would like to avoid the big providers (Ericsson & such).
Ideally, something opensource, or, if proprietary, a company maybe willing to license access to the code (one can dream).
There seems to be a lot of bits and pieces available out there, with a mix of full, fullish or partial solutions. This makes for quite the puzzle.
Among the ones I found most interesting:
nextEPC, covering, well, the EPC… (https://github.com/nextepc/nextepc). It looks like the more active open EPC implementation out there.
And it seems that Yate people have a commercial product covering basically everything needed (https://yatebts.com/solutions_and_technology/mobile_virtual_network_operator/).
What do you think?
Regards
Dario Renaud
This is interesting but so many variables to unpack to determin what the right solution is. What are the main goals of your org? What exact pain points are you trying to fix?
Hello Javier,
Well, if we take a step back to goals, I would like first to point that going Full MVNO might not be the best solution for us (roaming alone seems like quite a hassle, not to mention handsets management).
My focus here is narrower, as I am mostly trying here to assert what the possibilities for the core are, and if there are reasonable alternatives to the fully integrated solutions of the big providers.
That being said, I am not sure how our specific goals here would impact much the architecture: aren’t there a lot of constraints due to the 3GPP requirements? It seems to leave little room for creativity.
To provide a bit of context and answer you:
We are historically providing solutions on fixed networks, with a strong bend toward business end-users. We are also used to have a lot of control over our architecture, most of our services running over open-source and/or in-house solutions.
Being able to provide our services on mobile accesses is now a necessity. For this we already are light MVNO, using two different MNOs. Thanks to forced routing, it mostly does the job regarding voice. Data could be managed also. SMS is proving trickier.
But each MNO have their own products set: building offers that would work on both is tedious and necessitate compromises that tend to make our marketing people unhappy. Not to talk about supporting two provisioning chains, two SIMs supply chains, etc… These problems would only get worse if we add other MNOs to the mix.
We are also stuck with the roadmap of the MNOs (VoLTE and VoWifi are but distant “maybe later” possibilities).
So, in one word, this is about autonomy. And its cost.
Regards,
Dario Renaud
Thanks Dovid.
Sipgate needs seems very similar to our own and I’ve got quite a few good pointers from that talk.
By the way, a lot of these comcon sessions looks quite interesting, I think I will play a few others.
Thanks Andrew
Clearwater does some interesting things. Compared to other projects, they seem to have given a lot of thought to scalability.
But I am a bit surprised of their focus on I- S-CSCF & BGCF.
I guess they are assuming either MNO customers already equipped with SBC able to do the P-CSCF. Or MVNO build around a local breakout model.
Dario,
They were very helpful when I went over to them afterwards and asked questions. If you are interested in an intro let me know.
On a side note Commcon took a lot of effort and there wasn’t enough sponsorship so it may not happen in 2020. If anyone else glances over videos, finds them useful and would want to sponsor I can put them in touch with the shows host.