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Will telco move to the public cloud before Elon Musk gets to Mars?

October 8, 2024

Can you believe it? In two to six years we may be landing on Mars. When I heard Elon say that, it reminded me of my talk way back at MWC21 when I asked the audience, “Which one do you think will happen first? Will telco get to the public cloud or will Elon Musk put people on Mars?” It was my attempt to warm up the crowd and get them laughing, because at the time when I asked this question, most telco execs answered MARS

FACE PALM. 🤦🏻‍♀️

But just like Elon Musk, I am on a mission. I believe that over the next 20 years, the telco industry will radically change and all telco software will move to the public cloud. Back then, it was an idea that almost everyone dismissed, saying it would never work. But I knew the industry was about to undergo a huge transformation. It was INEVITABLE.

To support my vision, I’ve produced 100 Telco in 20 podcast episodes and written more than 100 newsletters and blogs. It truly has been a labor of love. To mark these milestones, I want to share the story of the journey, where we are today, and how this transformation is unfolding.

Becoming an evangelist

I didn’t wake up one morning thinking, “I want to be an evangelist! What can I evangelize about?” I started talking about the greatness of the public cloud for telco because no one else in our industry was. Back then, if someone mentioned the public cloud, it was only to say that the hyperscalers offered infrastructure management. Or that the public cloud wasn’t carrier grade and they could manage a data center better themselves. Or that they could compete with the hyperscalers and sell it to customers, too. Or that the hyperscalers would steal and use their data.

I sat in meeting after meeting feeling so sorry for how WRONG they all were.

I knew back then that the public cloud was coming to telco like it had to so many other industries—including highly regulated ones like financial services and government. I knew it offered huge opportunities—for much needed cost reduction, operational simplification, and access to amazing software.

People needed to know. Someone needed to tell them, and I decided that someone would be ME.

Launching CLOUD CITY at MWC21

But I needed a big stage. My podcast and blog weren’t enough. And lo, a gift came down from heaven. It was early in 2021, and we were still in the thick of the pandemic. The GSMA moved MWC21 from February to June,^[1] trying to make the show happen—and desperate for exhibitors and people to attend. Ericsson, a major event sponsor, bailed, leaving the GSMA high and dry. It probably saved a bunch of money by not attending, but the move left open a key vulnerability: its iconic exhibit space was up on the block, open for anyone to grab.

So I took it over and called it CLOUD CITY.^[2]

Our mission: educate the telco industry about the public cloud. We wanted to pull together all the players that believed in the mission—hyperscalers, startups, thought leaders—to create a community around this way of thinking. We covered how to start, how to migrate, and what the pitfalls were. We offered tips for convincing your team that the public cloud was the future and how to control cloud spend. I gave an MWC keynote^[3] on the big stage called The Paradox of the Public Cloud. I talked about how there are two sides to the public cloud: how it was both a massive threat and a massive opportunity for telco. And we invited Jon Bon Jovi to give a private concert—for real.

The flywheel starts turning

Leaders in the industry started to understand the benefits of the public cloud. In April 2021, DISH Wireless announced that it would deploy a US greenfield 5G network on Amazon Web Services (AWS). In June 2021, Microsoft Azure acquired AT&T’s network cloud technology.

We were on to something. Still, there’s always going to be some who don’t get it. Case in point: In 2022, Sampath Sowmyanarayan, the CEO of Verizon Business, said, “I will never be putting our core network on a hyperscaler … We need to control it, we need to own the stack, we need to manage through it.”

I guess I haven’t convinced everybody—yet.

All the same, the future is clear enough. Several operators have made big moves this year. In February, NTT DOCOMO selected AWS to deploy a nationwide 5G open radio access network in Japan while Etisalat announced a deal to use Microsoft Azure’s Nexus platform to host 5G network apps. In March, Zain Sudan, a Tier-1 mobile network operator with 23 million subscribers, replaced its Ericsson charging with cloud-native Charging-as-a-Service from Totogi (where I’m acting CEO). A few months ago, O₂ Telefónica Germany announced a new 5G core network built entirely in the cloud.

The flywheel is spinning.

Good thing, too, because we have the next mega trend on our doorstep: generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). I’m already hearing how people think they can do this on their own in their own data centers. But once again, they will be wrong. For AI, you need the public cloud because of the compute and scale required, access to the chips^[4] that you can pay for by the use, and the software you need to build your AI-powered apps. The name of the game in AI is speed, and the public cloud is the shortcut you can use to get ahead.

Beating Elon to Mars

Elon may get to Mars before our industry fully embraces the public cloud, but telcos are putting up a good fight. So much has happened in the four years since I started this journey. If you ask me now, “Which one do you think will happen first? Will telco get to the public cloud before Elon Musk puts people on Mars?,” I can give you one guess as to what I think:

I’m betting on telco.

Notes:

^[1] I still think the GSMA should hold MWC in June—it was awesome.

^[2]Rumors were that Ericsson was very, very, very unhappy with the GSMA, but the GSMA was in a fight for its own survival. I’m still very thankful to the GSMA for the partnership.

^[3]This was my first keynote ever. I was so nervous, but I rocked it, right?

^[4]How are you going to get access to all the H100 chips you need for this? Get in line behind Elon, because it’s long and expensive.

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