What do you think about the "cloudification" of mobile?

Tue Jan 25 14:11:55 UTC 2022

Mark,

Use the 12 foot ladder to get over the 10 foot paywall:

https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.economist.com%2Fbusiness%2Fwill-the-cloud-business-eat-the-5g-telecoms-industry%2F21806999

On Tue, Jan 25, 2022 at 4:12 AM Mark Tinka <mark at tinka.africa> wrote:

>
>
> On 1/19/22 21:52, Michael Thomas wrote:
>
> >
> > There was an article in the Economist (sorry if it's paywalled) about
> > Dish entering the mobile market using an AWS backend. I don't think
> > that AWS brings much more than compute for the most part so I don't
> > really get why this would be a huge win. A win maybe, but a huge win?
> > I can certainly see that not having tons of legacy and accreted
> > inertia is big win, but that's true of any disruptor. In the end they
> > still need base stations, spectrum, backhaul and all of that to run
> > their network, right?
> >
> > Am I missing something, or is this mainly hype?
> >
> > Mike
> >
> >
> https://www.economist.com/business/will-the-cloud-business-eat-the-5g-telecoms-industry/21806999
> >
>
> It's behind a pay wall, so can't read the entire article.
>
> But AFAICT, the way AWS's 5G service works is that they can provide an
> entire solution (towers, backhaul, back-end, even SIM cards), or just
> the back-end.
>
> I believe the latter is called Wavelength:
>
>      https://aws.amazon.com/wavelength/features/
>
> I'd say it is a legitimate threat to traditional MNO's. One does not
> require to build a national-scale mobile network from scratch... if you
> can service a small community of some 500 people in a manner that is
> affordable to them, and gives you a nice return so you can buy some food
> at the end of each month, no reason why that is not a successful and
> sustainable model.
>
> Heck, you probably don't even need to offer classic voice and SMS
> services. There are plenty of IP-based apps that will do this for you,
> and I know many people who have totally given up packages that include
> voice minutes and SMS messages, in favour of data-only services from
> their MNO. They are thriving.
>
> So if a small mobile operator using AWS 5G as a back-end does not need
> to negotiate massive interconnect contracts and deals with other telco's
> in the area, and their handful of customers are fine with just Internet
> access as the only service, makes a lot of sense to me.
>
> As I've been saying for a long time now, the telco model is a dying one.
> Customers only care about the problems we can help them solve, not
> whether we are a Tier-1, or how many TV shows were "Brought to you by..."
>
> Mark.
>
>
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