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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Podcast credits

Executive Producer and Host: Danielle Rios, TelcoDR
Senior Producer: Lindsay Grubb, TillCo Media
Senior Editor/Brand Manager: Alisa Jenkins, Springboard Marketing
Audio Editor: Andrew Condell
Supervising Producer: Amanda Avery
Associate Producer: Kriselda Dionisio
Music: Dyami Wilson

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Ep 116 – You CAN run the network on AWS’ public cloud (Ishwar Parulkar)

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Ep 115 – Telstra is disrupting the status quo (Mark Sanders)

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Frequently Asked Questions

1. What makes Telefónica Germany’s cloud migration historically significant?

Telefónica Germany became the world’s first brownfield mobile operator to fully migrate its 5G core network to the public cloud using AWS infrastructure and Nokia’s cloud-native core. Unlike DISH’s greenfield deployment, this represents the first successful migration of an existing operational network to the public cloud, proving that legacy operators can modernize their infrastructure. The company has already moved more than 1.2 million 5G subscribers in six months and plans to migrate 30-40% of its customer base by 2026.

2. Why did Mallik Rao cancel his first cloud migration project?

After 18 months working with Ericsson and AWS, Mallik Rao killed the initial program because success wasn’t just about technology—it required all partners to truly collaborate with aligned interests. The key learning was that telecom workloads fundamentally behave differently than IT workloads. While IT applications must adapt to cloud infrastructure, telecom software dictates how the hardware should behave, requiring AWS to completely redesign its infrastructure specifically for network-intensive telecom applications. Learn more about how the operator shifted from Ericsson to AWS and Nokia.

3. What is AWS Outpost 2.0 and why was it necessary?

AWS Outpost 2.0 is a redesigned hardware infrastructure specifically engineered for telecom workloads. Unlike IT applications that need compute and storage intensity, telecom requires network-intensive capabilities with significantly higher transactions per second. AWS had to completely redesign the backplane architecture—focusing on layer 2 and layer 3 networking rather than just compute and storage—to handle the unique demands of telecom software and achieve the necessary performance for carrier-grade networks.

4. What business benefits does Telefónica Germany expect from public cloud migration?

The biggest advantage is time-to-market improvement—Telefónica Germany can deploy infrastructure and software twice as fast as on-premise solutions. Total cost of operation becomes equal or better than traditional infrastructure, but only when deployed at scale (at least 20-25% of workload). Previously, software upgrades took months; now they can be done in hours. However, achieving these benefits requires deploying at scale and fully embracing cloud-native practices like auto-scaling and elasticity.

5. How does Danielle Rios’s company Totogi support cloud-native telecom operations?

Totogi offers Charging-as-a-Service, which embodies true cloud-native design with multi-tenant architecture, automatic scaling, and usage-based pricing. The platform can handle one billion subscribers on a single charger with continent-level support and CI/CD-driven upgrades. This aligns with Rao’s emphasis that telecom software providers must implement auto-scaling capabilities to truly leverage public cloud advantages, rather than simply lifting-and-shifting traditional architectures to cloud infrastructure.

6. Why is Telefónica Germany pursuing Open RAN alongside cloud migration?

Telefónica’s primary goal with Open RAN is disaggregating hardware and software lifecycles in the radio access network. Software updates occur 30 times more frequently than hardware replacements, yet traditional vendors force hardware upgrades for software features. By separating these lifecycles, operators can innovate at software speed rather than hardware speed, potentially reducing total cost of ownership by up to 50% while maintaining flexibility to work with multiple vendors like Samsung, Ericsson, or Nokia.