White Paper Excerpt – Hyperscale Innovation
Operators have to re-think IoT
The focus in our industry is always whether the network equipment has the features to perform a certain task and allow the network to scale with millions of subscribers. But is this the right discussion to have for complex IoT services?
Maybe the question below is a better question to ask yourself as a mobile operator.
“Will my organization be able to deliver on the agility, speed and cost-efficiency needed in the IoT era?”
Hyperscale Cellular IoT – White Paper
This is an excerpt from our white paper Hyperscale Cellular IoT. The full white paper is available here if you like what you read. Don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions.
What Mobile Operators Have versus What They Need
What Mobile Operators Have
Mobile operators have a mobile core that, for good reasons, has been built for stability, not agility. They have IoT connectivity platforms capable of handling SIM management and producing billing data. They can provide global connectivity through roaming partners. Some may also use eSIMs to localize the connectivity to partner MNOs networks and provide a service that is compliant with regulations.
What Mobile Operators Need
But we believe there is a missing layer. A layer that provides the flexibility and security that IoT connectivity services crave. This layer offers adaptive agility by making it as much as possible into a self-playing piano with automation and customer self-management. The connectivity must also be secured by VPNs and next-generation Firewalls that each customer can configure according to their needs.
Hyperscale Innovation
We must all respect that the mobile core and OSS/BSS teams always will prioritize stability before being fast on their feet, implementing every change requested by demanding customers. Wouldn’t it be great if mobile operators could ‘have their cake and eat it too’?
We think they can!
Mobile operators must unchain themselves from the strict consideration of 3GPP and the implementation and upgrade cycles of their mobile core nodes.
“What Enea suggest is that mobile operators leave their core networks untouched and then use hyperscalers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) to add the necessary IoT functionality “
There are three cornerstones in such a cloud-native hyperscale IoT connectivity solution:
1. Adaptive agility
- Automate common customization tasks, such as VPNs and customer-specific policies.
- A high degree of customer self-management.
- Extensive APIs for smooth cloud and edge integration.
- Control of all important settings such as IP-assignment.
- Ability to keep these settings over partner networks to provide a unified IoT service.
2. Security
- End-to-end IoT security.
- Secure software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) customer experience through next-gen firewalls.
- Automatic setup of customer VPNs.
- Advanced routing of the traffic, some through VPNs and all other directly to the Internet.
3. Global Access
- Roaming and in some countries use eSIM/eUICC technology to localize the connectivity to comply with local regulations.
- Important to still provide a unified service experience across partner networks (keep IP address etc.)
Don’t miss our blog post in two weeks, where we will talk about the different layers of functions needed in a Hyperscale IoT Connectivity solution and the role of Enea Aptilo IoT Connectivity Control Service (IoT CCS) in such a solution.
