There was an article in the Economist (sorry if it's paywalled) about Dish entering the mobile market using an AWS backend. I don't think that AWS brings much more than compute for the most part so I don't really get why this would be a huge win. A win maybe, but a huge win? I can certainly see that not having tons of legacy and accreted inertia is big win, but that's true of any disruptor. In the end they still need base stations, spectrum, backhaul and all of that to run their network, right?
It's behind a pay wall, so can't read the entire article.
But AFAICT, the way AWS's 5G service works is that they can provide an entire solution (towers, backhaul, back-end, even SIM cards), or just the back-end.
I believe the latter is called Wavelength:
https://aws.amazon.com/wavelength/features/
I'd say it is a legitimate threat to traditional MNO's. One does not require to build a national-scale mobile network from scratch... if you can service a small community of some 500 people in a manner that is affordable to them, and gives you a nice return so you can buy some food at the end of each month, no reason why that is not a successful and sustainable model.
Heck, you probably don't even need to offer classic voice and SMS services. There are plenty of IP-based apps that will do this for you, and I know many people who have totally given up packages that include voice minutes and SMS messages, in favour of data-only services from their MNO. They are thriving.
So if a small mobile operator using AWS 5G as a back-end does not need to negotiate massive interconnect contracts and deals with other telco's in the area, and their handful of customers are fine with just Internet access as the only service, makes a lot of sense to me.
As I've been saying for a long time now, the telco model is a dying one. Customers only care about the problems we can help them solve, not whether we are a Tier-1, or how many TV shows were "Brought to you by..."
I don't think the model is, in and of itself, new.
What's new is that it is available from an "everyday", mainstream cloud provider. In essence, democratizing it and making it more accessible to a variety of markets and scales of operation.
The country’s three biggest carriers, AT&T, Verizon and
T-Mobile, have offered 5G connectivity but in practice
this differed little from the earlier 4G.
Considering the relatively decent performance of 4G/LTE, especially as fibre + wi-fi is more rife, particularly in the dense metropolitan areas that would be fibre-rich, with folk offloading a lot more of their traffic to wi-fi in lieu of GSM, I am still struggling to see the 5G use-case, outside of implementing 3GPP specs. for their own sake.
By one operator offering 5G, all other operators are forced to offer 5G. So they all end up spending billions to remain in the same place.
Ah well...
As far as AWS 5G goes, they don't have to be locked into just 5G. De-risking the back-end for non-traditional greenfields would allow them to even support GPRS if it made sense. It's all software and CPU.
The country’s three biggest carriers, AT&T, Verizon and
T-Mobile, have offered 5G connectivity but in practice
this differed little from the earlier 4G.
5G is nothing. That’s all.
Considering the relatively decent performance of 4G/LTE, especially as
fibre + wi-fi is more rife, particularly in the dense metropolitan areas
that would be fibre-rich, with folk offloading a lot more of their
traffic to wi-fi in lieu of GSM, I am still struggling to see the 5G
use-case, outside of implementing 3GPP specs. for their own sake.
By one operator offering 5G, all other operators are forced to offer 5G.
So they all end up spending billions to remain in the same place.
Ah well…
As far as AWS 5G goes, they don’t have to be locked into just 5G.
De-risking the back-end for non-traditional greenfields would allow them
to even support GPRS if it made sense. It’s all software and CPU.
I would say its all actually billions of $$ in spectrum and patent fees… hardware parts are a rounding error.
The more interesting story is at&t
Tell everyone you are build an open source core network on openstack (lol)
Build it, put it into prod, then disown it into the linux foundation
Admit you built an albatross , then pay Azure to take it off your hands, and thus losing any control of your network.
That's what I've been trying to figure out as well. The use case of seamless handoff across large regions is fairly niche imo. Sure that was the original motivation for cell phones, but smartphones are about as statically located as laptops and nobody is rushing to get their laptops seamless handoff capabilites. That handoff capability comes at a tremendous cost in both spectrum and coverage.
Since everybody has their own wifi it seems that federating all of them for pretty good coverage by a provider and charging a nominal fee to manage it would suit a lot of people needs. It doesn't need expensive spectrum and the real estate is "free". Basically a federation of "guestnets".
Which is pretty much what Xfinity is already offering
to their subscribers; use your xfinity login to get onto
the wifi access points of other xfinity users all around
the country, relatively seamlessly.
I’m sure other networks that provide their own CPE are
likely to follow suit as well.
Which is a major hassle if you have your own APs and just want^H^H^H^H have no practical choice other than to use their Internet, as their CPE includes a radio that does nothing for you and that you can't turn off.
I had to escalate through many layers of "support" to get to someone who could disable their enabled-by-default interference and noise generator after threatening to open up the box and cut the appropriate trace.
Yes - WiFi Offload is more attractive to MNO's than building out more base stations, I believe. The problem is that it's easier if they could do this without also having to roll out a large scale wi-fi network, themselves.
So they have to focus on one, and I've tended to find wi-fi deployments by MNO's take more of a back seat, as it's about reaching as many customers as possible, even at the lowest common denominator of performance.
I've seen MNO's partner with other providers to run a VLAN for their service on their wi-fi network. For various reasons, one of which involves ease of use by an MNO customer, it hasn't really taken off.
Reminds me of the days when you needed to insert a login and APN to access the GPRS network between 2007 - 2009. Adoption of mobile data became so much simpler when the phones and SIM cards came pre-configured to "just connect" to the data network.
It's nice to see your mobile provider's SSID on some random wi-fi hotspot. But if using it is such a drama, folk will be happy to struggle with 3G or even EDGE.
So yeah, it sort of mirrors my thinking... there is certainly some ways to go for AWS (and Google, and Microsoft) to catch up with the establishment. However, as we've seen in the past, these things happen quickly, and legacy always seems to get taken by surprise.
The question is whether telco has learned from its past mistakes, of doing whatever it can to keep content out by either delivering its own "inferior" app alternatives, or attempting to block content from riding the network.
Things could have been different for telco if we didn't try to rent-seek from content 20+ years ago, which forced them to build out on their own and run networks even larger than telco could ever dream of.
Will telco hold on tightly to their edge gear and spectrum, while content tries to take the EPC core, or will they, for once, have a meeting of the minds?