Podcast

Ep 118 – Telefónica Germany moves the network to the public cloud (Mallik Rao)

June 23, 2025

This week’s guest

Mallik Rao

Chief Technology & Enterprise Business Officer Telefónica Germany

Telecom operators worldwide need to modernize their infrastructure and reduce costs. While many have been hesitant to move critical network functions to the public cloud, a growing number of visionary operators are proving that cloud-native networks aren’t just possible—they’re the future.

Today, I’m speaking with Mallik Rao, chief technology and enterprise business officer at Telefónica Germany, who is leading the world’s first brownfield migration of a 5G core network to AWS. We dive into the technical challenges his team faced, the organizational transformation required, and why combining cloud-native architecture with Open RAN is poised to revolutionize how telcos operate.

Listen now to hear:

Why Mallik Rao killed his first cloud migration project after 18 months; [05:08]
How AWS redesigned its hardware infrastructure for telco workloads, creating Outpost 2.0; [06:36]
The strategy behind disaggregating hardware and software lifecycles in RAN for maximum flexibility; and [11:19]
Why time-to-market improvements matter more than cost savings [13:37].

Links and resources

Read Telefónica Germany’s project announcement, 5G Cloud Core milestone with over one million users on the O2 Telefónica network.
Take a look at this article on how the operator shifted customers from an Ericsson 5G cloud core to one provided by AWS and Nokia.
Learn more about AWS’s second-generation Outposts racks.
Check out Telefónica Germany’s Open RAN strategy and collaboration with Samsung to modernize RAN.
Learn more about Totogi’s Charging-as-a-Service, a multi-tenant SaaS solution that delivers automatic scaling, usage-based pricing, CI/CD-driven upgrades, open APIs, and real-time event-based charging on the public cloud.
Can your charger scale to the equivalent of 1 billion subscribers? Totogi’s Charging-as-a-Service can, and we’ve got the proof. Check out this performance benchmark whitepaper.
Relocating for a new job can be hard! In the 1988 comedy Moving, Richard Pryor plays Arlo Pear, a man uprooting his life and family for his dream job. But when they reach their new home, they find the previous owners weren’t joking about ‘taking everything.’
Check out this episode on our YouTube channel.
You can find the episode transcript here.

Wanna talk AI and public cloud? Telco execs, set up a meeting with our team to learn how to tap the immense business value it can bring.

Guest bio

Mallik Rao has been a member of the Management Board of Telefónica Deutschland Holding AG since the end of October 2019. He was initially responsible for the mobile and fixed network as well as the IT of Telefónica Deutschland in his role as chief technology & information officer. Mallik Rao has also been assigned responsibility for the business customer division and the company’s data platforms and artificial intelligence activities in his role as chief technology & enterprise officer. Mallik has more than 25 years of experience in the international telecommunications industry. He lived and worked in seven countries, bringing experience from technology providers like Ericsson and Nortel, and service providers like Vodafone and Aircel. He is passionate about working with various cultures and building technology solutions for customers.

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