Where is the software? And why do not we have more of it?

Continuing from last week, let us now examine why the software component is still small in telecom, apart from the mobile core, the network management systems and some SDN stuff.

I guess the main reason is that dis-aggregation has not yet hit the telecom with it’s full force. Let us look at some of the reasons for that:-

• Very few operators are working on the open interfaces and open projects
• The dis-aggregation needs a complete ecosystem to work effectively
• It needs a minimum level of adoption to start becoming main stream
• The operators are not organized to provide the integration and design support required to make the dis-aggregation work
• The big vendors continue to slow the adoption to retain the benefits of bundling the software and hardware
• Some of the projects I have seen, take the operator on the steps in the backward direction, where they believe that they must fall back to one vendor model to make their job easier as they transform to support 5G services.

I guess in summary, there is significant turmoil in the name of readiness for 5G that the operators are working to simplify the transformation. They want minimal amount of interfaces and want their vendors to take more responsibility. I do think that in such scenario the vendors who are leading the open approach are going to suffer and those that offer more integrated solutions are going to win. It takes more than just the right technology to win, we have seen some very good technologies fail, remember?

• CDMA vs GSM?
• PBB-TE

Stay tuned for more this week on how we can add software progressively and where should we start first!