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Automated provisioning, activation, and orchestration will play crucial roles in unlocking 5G’s real value. Here are three 5G use cases powered by Intraway’s Symphonica that will help service providers meet emerging market demand for new applications, private networks and network slices, and even consumption models that look more like hyper-scale cloud than telecom.
Delivering Private 5G
It’s easy to dismiss private 5G as a tidy concept, but in reality, it’s extremely complex from delivery and throughout its life. A private 5G network can include installing antennas and edge equipment on a remote site, which in turn must become part of the greater physical network while being segregated from public network exposure.
Every step in the process needs provisioning and activation automation – network build, installation, activation, and infrastructure provisioning is just the first step. Layers are then added on – network slices, security, enterprise applications, cloud integrations, mobile and IoT devices, users – the list can go on. Each element needs to be provisioned, activated, and ready to be instantiated or used and managed.
From this perspective, the private network sounds more like a living tech zoo with thousands of disjointed parts. Automated orchestration is necessary to govern and align them so that coherent services can be delivered on-demand, at scale, and while meeting performance requirements.
In simpler terms, without automated orchestration, enterprise business processes that interact with multiple applications and the cloud will not meet zero-downtime requirements reliably.
Making Augmented and Virtual Reality work
Service providers and their suppliers are now partnering more often to bring additional market-specific innovation to relevant verticals and channels. For example, the day after Qualcomm announced its Snapdragon Spaces initiative in 2021, T-Mobile US announced the two would partner to encourage more AR/VR application development. This is an acknowledgment of the layers of engineering and integration necessary to turn high-value 5G capabilities into products.
Those products span industries ranging from construction and logistics to telemedicine and entertainment. As a result, though we may bucket these services as AR/VR, in reality, they will handle massive volumes of sensitive data and may pair with access to controls over physical infrastructure, including secure doors and vehicles.
The characteristics by which an enterprise or service provider must manage each aspect of a service, and the overall service set, will vary tremendously based on the applications in play. This makes automated provisioning, activation, and orchestration of these service components and their performance and functional variables necessary. Without automated provisioning, activation, and orchestration, enterprise AR/VR services cannot be delivered and managed continuously for customers.
Making Network Exposure Functions a Business
An exciting piece of the latest 3GPP 5G standards, releases 17 and 18, defines how network exposure functions (NEF) are delivered and made chargeable. Some consider this the next step for network-as-a-service (NaaS), but baked into the 5G standard and backed with real-time charging.
With this new NaaS capability in place, the 5G telecom network can act like a hyperscale platform, atomizing any function in the network, exposing it via API, and making its instantiation or use a chargeable event. This could be done on a simpler, granular basis, just as Amazon S3 is hugely successful as an API for a simple data storage service. Or it can happen at a higher level, combining multiple network functions to execute a service chain or a complete service.
To compose distinct network functions in this manner into coherent services that can perform as contracted requires automated orchestration, similar to what is used in automated NaaS solutions today, like Intraway’s Symphonica.
Symphonica Automates the Delivery of any Services to any Device over any Network
As service providers work to demonstrate the greater value of 5G to business users, their ability to make executing complex combinations of services look easy is crucial to the value they want to add. This means doing the hard work to embrace standards while also solving business problems with automation and future-facing technology.
Sorting out how to turn specs and functions into business value is a crucial ability for service providers. Intraway’s Symphonica is geared to do just that – to provision, activate, orchestrate and lifecycle manage the complex multi-technology services 5G has promised.
These services bring together devices, networks, clouds, enterprise applications, virtualized network functions, and mobile apps. For a close look at how Symphonica provisions, activates and orchestrates them all into end-to-end services that can be delivered via no-code automation, book your demo today.
Steve Marsh
General Manager - North America | Intraway