Advancing Telco Innovation from Core to Edge: Watch the Video

Many communications service providers have reached a pivotal moment. Operating costs keep rising as traditional revenue streams flatten. For individual leaders, every architectural decision and technological investment can feel like a career bet. At the same time, you know that you need an AI- and data-ready network in order to stay competitive.

Across the industry, open source collaborations are mitigating some of these pressures. Proven blueprints, shared integration patterns and common platforms are making it possible for providers to innovate collectively and more rapidly. 

Key takeaways:

• Standardizing on a cloud native, open source stack across network and IT teams helps you harness innovation.
• SUSE Telco Cloud gives CSPs a secure foundation for modernization while supporting tighter OPEX control.
• In the video below, SUSE’s Tim Irnich and Timo Jokiaho discuss the highest-impact innovation paths for telco today.

Catch Tim Irnich and Timo Jokiaho discussing telco priorities for success and the role of AI in telco innovation in previous conversations.

Embrace innovation to strengthen business fundamentals

It is impractical to invest in unproven experiments, and modern telcos are advancing new initiatives in a measured and thoughtful way. They recognize the possibility of unlocking new revenue through modernization. At the same time, leaders are committed to protecting margins.

A major priority across the sector is artificial intelligence. AI-driven analytics can help you predict faults, plan capacity and improve quality of experience in real-time. In addition, AI can serve as a growth engine, but the potential of those workloads depends on the sophistication of your infrastructure.

Another key area of focus is automation, including the long-standing goal of autonomous, closed-loop networks. When policies, telemetry and actions link together, you can lower the risk of costly human error. It also allows you to redirect human expertise toward higher-value efforts. 

Increasingly, telcos are looking at cloud consolidation. By expanding cloud native platforms across network and IT workloads, you can further streamline data collection and enhance machine learning. 

Overcome complexity through strategic partnerships

Forward-facing ideas remain difficult to implement in a real-world setting, even for experienced operators. The open source stack has improved over time, but the overall maturity of industry technology remains a source of friction. 

An unexpected downside of accelerating technological improvements is that teams must also review, select and implement change at a faster pace. Today, real-time Linux kernels, modern data plane acceleration and precise timing support are landing in the main open source projects that you likely already use. These improvements are no longer relegated to niche forks or custom patches. With each new capability comes new design choices. You must weigh performance, hardware constraints and staffing when deciding what to adopt and when.  

Ecosystem complexity can further complicate those decisions. Disaggregated architectures promise freedom of choice, yet every new vendor relationship adds integration risk. The challenges of system integration across VNFs, CNFs, management planes and toolchains persist. 

Fortunately, industry collaborations are helping telcos address these obstacles. Projects such as Sylva and the Cloud Native Telecom Initiative now publish reference architectures and shared learnings, enabling operators to more seamlessly move from one-off integration efforts to reusable patterns. 

In addition, partners like SUSE can help you adopt the latest open source capabilities securely and at scale. We rigorously evaluate the open source combinations and architectures, reducing your team’s decision overload and keeping you focused on your unique network.

Deliver reliability with production-ready open source

Open source now underpins almost every strategic innovation in telecom. Linux, Kubernetes and a growing set of cloud native components provide the building blocks for 5G core, RAN, transport and edge computing. These technologies provide greater flexibility to place workloads where they fit best, and they support common tooling across network domains. 

A gap nonetheless exists between community artifacts and carrier-grade production. Business-critical networks need hardened distributions, reliable lifecycle management, tested upgrade paths and rapid security fixes. An open source leader for more than 30 years, SUSE can help you consume these technologies with confidence. With SUSE Telco Cloud, you can standardize on a secure, cloud native foundation across 5G core, RAN, fixed access, OSS/BSS and edge. This allows your teams to deploy faster and operate with carrier-grade confidence.

Advance your transformation with expert guidance

Open source makes it possible to bring the innovation velocity of global communities into your environment. But harnessing that potential requires a proven cloud native stack that, hopefully, lightens decision overload and reduces the burdens of stitching components together.

SUSE helps telcos evolve from vertically integrated stacks to open, disaggregated architectures that can better support new services and business models. Is SUSE Telco Cloud the right foundation for your next wave of telco cloud initiatives? Get in touch to find out.