TPG Telecom’s ground-breaking cloud transformation
In 2021 TPG Telecom launched its commercial 5G standalone network. This is the story about TPG Telecom’s cloud transformation, and how it has paved the way for a simplified and efficient network providing fast time to market for new offerings.
Highlights
Watch this video where Giovanni Chiarelli, Chief Technology Officer at TPG Telecom, shares insights and learnings from this cloud transformation journey.
TPG Telecom's drivers for change
- Vendor rationalization - high number of network functions that needed a common platform
- Simplify deployments and operations, and secure sustainability benefits of having a small physical footprint
- Reduced network complexity and TCO
- Embrace cloud native enabling new 5G SA services
- Strengthen challenger position
"From a technical perspective, it was a significant effort to rationalize the vendor footprint and the spectrum strategy. With an ambitious 5G rollout ahead of us, there were several requirements on the table that were conflicting with each other.
The implementation of a new, modern, fully virtualized core network, on a multi-vendor capable cloud infrastructure, was seen as a perfect solution to address."
"The first step was to consolidate several core networks into the new architecture with the virtualized network functions and to implement it through commercial hardware. And then build with Ericsson a roadmap for containerizing the network and launching the 5G standalone core network."
Giovanni Chiarelli
Chief Technology Officer, TPG Telecom
Overview of TPG Telecom’s solution
Ericsson played a key role in TPG Telecom’s transformation, leading the network evolution program end-to-end.
This encompassed design through to deployment, including all testing and acceptance within a testing environment in the pre-production stages, and pushing solutions out to production environments for delivery.
Ericsson solutions deployed in TPG Telecom’s 5G SA include:
Ericsson NFVI: The foundation of the cloud infrastructure, including the key components:
- Ericsson Cloud Container Distribution: Manages and orchestrates all containerized applications
- Ericsson Cloud Execution Environment: Telco-grade VIM, certified on OpenStack and OpenNFV
- Ericsson Software Defined Infrastructure: Manages all hardware, Ericsson and third party, in the NFVI solution
- Ericsson Software Defined Networking: Provides seamless intra-datacenter connectivity for virtual and physical workloads.
- Ericsson Software Defined Storage: Provides market-leading solutions suitable for Ericsson NFVI and Cloud Native Infrastructure solutions
Ericsson’s dual-mode 5G Core: Combining EPC and 5G Core network functions into a common cloud-native platform for efficient TCO and migration to 5G
Ericsson Expert Analytics with advanced troubleshooting and built-in software probes:
A cloud-native solution that performs customer-centric monitoring and identifies with advanced troubleshooting
Ericsson Cloud IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS):
Supporting voice services, initially with EPS fallback and later voice over NR (VoNR)
Ericsson Orchestrator:
Provides end-to-end cloud orchestration capabilities
The result: A successful transformation
Increased efficiency and evolved ways of working
TPG Telecom became Australia’s first service provider to have its entire 4G and 5G customer base migrated to a virtualized core platform, and then go on to successfully launch a commercial 5G SA network in 2021. Today, TPG Telecom has more than 60 different network functions implemented from 10 different vendors on the Ericsson NFVI.
TPG Telecom can now manage and expand its network capabilities on demand, using virtual applications in the network architecture. This, together with centralized orchestration, makes it easier to load-balance, and scale functions up and down. The transformation has allowed TPG Telecom to launch a “cloud brokerage” model internally. This has significantly reduced the time needed to add network capacity, offering the agility to move quickly and meet business demands. Additionally, the operational efficiency has been improved following the introduction of a service catalog, which standardizes TPG Telecom’s offerings to cloud consumers, reducing the time taken to validate, test and deploy new virtualized functions.
Automation is key
TPG Telecom addressed the challenge of handling the ever-growing data in 5G by taking full advantage of 5G Core’s built-in software-probing capabilities. Together with Ericsson Expert Analytics, it is introducing troubleshooting capabilities and end user-centric experience monitoring while at the same time reducing the total costs of implementing and maintaining the end-to-end analytics system. Experience degradations are detected and efficiently resolved.
Decoupling software from commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware has allowed TPG Telecom to experiment with a centralized, multi-vendor software CI/CD pipeline, and is striving for cloud-native quarterly software lifecycle events.
New market possibilities
The speed with which TPG Telecom can offer new services to customers has been significantly accelerated. The 5G SA network was commercially launched within months instead of years. The 5G Core also allowed for the aggregation of the low-band 700 MHz spectrum with the 3,600 MHz mid-band, enabling a significant coverage increase compared to the traditional deployment of 5G solely on the mid-band. This enabled TPG Telecom to quickly achieve 95 percent population coverage in the top 12 urban areas in Australia.
Looking ahead, growth is expected to continue thanks to high demand for 5G mobile broadband and other services from consumers and enterprises. The NFVI solution enabled 600 percent growth while only increasing the physical size of the core network by about 100 percent. This equates to significant power-efficiency benefits, supporting TPG Telecom’s environmental objectives and delivering tangible cost savings.
“The partnership with Ericsson really helped us immensely to become the first to launch 5G SA commercially in Australia. This is the result of a true spirit of partnership."
Giovanni Chiarelli
Chief Technology Officer, TPG Telecom
