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The Chairman of the NGMN Alliance Board and SVP Group Technology at Deutsche Telekom, Arash Ashouriha, alongside Anita Döhler, CEO of the NGMN Alliance, conducted a comprehensive review of last year’s accomplishments and provided an overview of the strategy and agenda for 2024, including NGMN’s global biennial Industry Conference & Exhibition which will take place in September 2024 in Munich. Firsthand perspectives and expert insights on the two recent NGMN Publications ‘Cloud Native Manifesto: An Operator View’ and ‘6G Position Statement: An Operator View’ were shared by Board Members of the NGMN Alliance, including Carlos Fernandes (DT), Jerome Birot (TELUS), Laurent Leboucher (Orange), Luke Ibbetson (Vodafone), Narothum Saxena (UScellular), Takki Yu (SK Telecom), and Yuhong Huang (China Mobile). Together, they delved deeper into key trends, innovations, challenges, and guidance, shaping the mobile industry. NGMN Board Members were available for a Q&A session afterward.

Arash Ashouriha, Chairman of the NGMN Alliance Board, underscored the Alliance’s remarkable achievements, noting, “Our Alliance has garnered international recognition for its contributions and the impact to the industry benefiting not only mobile network operators but also the entire ecosystem.” Additionally, he emphasized the significance of a collaborative approach within alliances like NGMN in today’s challenging landscape. Ashouriha highlighted that only by operators confronting industry challenges collectively, can the industry effectively overcome technical, economical and geopolitical obstacles.

Anita Döhler, CEO of the NGMN Alliance added: “We take pride in our diverse team of Board Members representing different geo-regions of the globe, a manifestation of our commitment to tackling the most pressing issues and opportunities and fostering genuine collaboration for the advancement of the global telecommunications industry. We extend an invitation to all stakeholders across the value chain to join our Alliance in our crucial endeavours.”

The briefing underscored the significance of two recent key publications by NGMN that are exerting a considerable influence on the industry landscape. The first, the Cloud Native Manifesto: An Operator View, delineates seven fundamental principles deemed essential for the realisation of open, interoperable, and highly scalable cloud-native networks. This manifesto steers the industry towards the effective adoption of cloud native technologies, emphasizing the transformative potential they hold.

Meanwhile, the 6G Position Statement: An Operator View represents a significant call to action within the mobile industry. It advocates for a paradigm shift in the approach to introducing new technology generations, particularly focusing on the impending transition to 6G. The statement offers comprehensive guidance encompassing various key requirements and principles vital for navigating this evolution. By providing a roadmap for future technological advancements and standards, the 6G Position Statement serves as a cornerstone in shaping the trajectory of the mobile industry’s development.

About NGMN Alliance

The NGMN Alliance (NGMN) is a forum founded by world-leading Mobile Network Operators and open to all Partners in the mobile industry. Its goal is to ensure that next generation network infrastructure, service platforms and devices will meet the requirements of operators and ultimately will satisfy end user demand and expectations. The vision of NGMN is to provide impactful industry guidance to achieve innovative, sustainable and affordable mobile telecommunication services for the end user with a particular focus on Mastering the Route to Disaggregation / Operating Disaggregated Networks, Green Future Networks and 6G, whilst continuing to support 5G’s full implementation.

NGMN seeks to incorporate the views of all interested stakeholders in the telecommunications industry and is open to three categories of participants/NGMN Partners: Mobile Network Operators (Members), vendors, software companies and other industry players (Contributors), as well as research institutes (Advisors). NGMN invites all parties across the entire value chain to join the Alliance in these important endeavours.

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Laurent Leboucher, Member of the NGMN Alliance Board (Orange), our CEO Anita Döhler and Programme Manager Chris Hogg joined other global leaders across Fixed Networks, Mobile Networks and Telco Software to share NGMN´s considerations and recommendations on 6G, ODiN and Green Future Networks.

Get NGMN´s Cloud Native Manifesto publication: https://lnkd.in/e8Yk96pU

We invite interested industry players to join our endeavor: ngmn.org

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Frankfurt, Germany, 13 September 2023. Today, the Next Generation Mobile Networks Alliance (NGMN) published the “Cloud Native Manifesto: An Operator View”. This important publication provides key principles and requirements for Cloud Native Telecom from an operator’s point of view, and a clear view on the focus required by the industry in order to accelerate the adoption of cloud native solutions in mobile networks. “Cloud Native” refers to a way of designing and operating applications, network functions and services in an open and flexible environment with the intention to enable greater efficiency in operations and faster time to market for new services, thereby enabling operators to meet their customers’ needs. 

“Given the strategic impact of the move towards cloud native, the already experienced and foreseen implications in its adoption for operators, and the multiple options and paths provided by industry players, it is the belief of the NGMN Board that a clear position on cloud native is required,” said Arash Ashouriha, Chairman of the NGMN Board and SVP Group Technology at Deutsche Telekom. “With this publication – written by the NGMN Board and invited operator experts – we provide that steering to the industry by outlining a clear set of prioritised calls to action, which, once addressed, will drive the migration at scale towards cloud native network workloads, for the benefit of the ecosystem and end-users”, he added. 

“Whilst the industry is embracing cloud native as a paradigm to boost efficiency and enhance flexibility for current and future networks, it is clear that several issues remain, which will hamper the objective to achieve scale deployment – unless these are urgently, consistently and cohesively addressed through an industry wide effort” said Mauro Costa, NGMN Board Member and Director of Network Cloud and Continuous Delivery at Telia Company. “In particular, together with the entire industry, we need to ensure that solutions can be truly cloud native and multi-vendor and that we have the tools and processes in place to enable these” he added. 

On the journey to highly flexible, sustainable, and resilient networks for the future, the NGMN Board believes in applying the following cloud native principles to all layers of network infrastructure, applications and services*: 

1. Decoupled infrastructure and application lifecycles over vertical monoliths  
2. ‘API first’ over manual provisioning of network resources  
3. Declarative and intent-based automation over imperative workflows  
4. GitOps** principles over traditional network operations practices 
5. Unified Kubernetes (or the like) resource consumption patterns over domain-specific resource controllers 
6. Unified Kubernetes (or the like) closed-loop reconciliation patterns over vendor-specific element management practices  
7. Interoperability by well-defined certification processes over vendor-specific optimisation. 
   

Through its Operating Disaggregated Networks (ODiN) project, NGMN continues to shape and develop processes to enable the industry – operators and vendors – to efficiently manage the full lifecycle of disaggregated networks. The Cloud Native Manifesto will play an important role in advancing this work of NGMN to deliver a set of operating model blueprints for disaggregated networks. The ODiN project, led by Deutsche Telekom and co-led by Bell Canada and Smart/PLDT, working with the entire value chain at NGMN, will publish its next recommendations at MWC2024.   

“As an industry alliance, we focus on collaboration, to unlock the smartest opportunities and to solve the biggest challenges the industry faces”, said Anita Doehler, CEO NGMN Alliance. “With this manifesto, coupled with the work of our ODiN project, we are providing a solid foundation for the industry to move forward at pace with adopting this key technology”, she added. 

Special acknowledgements go to the following Operator Members, who made significant contributions to the development of this publication: Bell Canada, BT, Chunghwa Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Smart/PLDT, Telia, TELUS, Turkcell, Vodafone. 

The full Cloud Native Manifesto can be downloaded here

* Does not imply order of priority
** Everything as code, single point of truth, immutable source of trust

About the NGMN Alliance

The NGMN Alliance (NGMN) is a forum founded by world-leading Mobile Network Operators and open to all Partners in the mobile industry. Its goal is to ensure that next generation network infrastructure, service platforms and devices will meet the requirements of operators and ultimately will satisfy end user demand and expectations. The vision of NGMN is to provide impactful industry guidance to achieve innovative, sustainable and affordable mobile telecommunication services for the end user with a particular focus on Mastering the Route to Disaggregation / Operating Disaggregated Networks, Green Future Networks and 6G, whilst continuing to support 5G’s full implementation.

NGMN seeks to incorporate the views of all interested stakeholders in the telecommunications industry and is open to three categories of participants/NGMN Partners: Mobile Network Operators (Members), vendors, software companies and other industry players (Contributors), as well as research institutes (Advisors). NGMN invites all parties across the entire value chain to join the Alliance in these important endeavours.

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On our journey to highly flexible, sustainable, and resilient networks for the future, we believe in applying the following cloud native principles to all layers of network infrastructure, applications, and services*:

1. Decoupled infrastructure and application lifecycles over vertical monoliths;

2. ‘API first’ over manual provisioning of network resources;

3. Declarative and intent-based automation over imperative workflows;

4. GitOps** principles over traditional network operations practices;

5. Unified Kubernetes (or the like) resource consumption patterns over domain-specific resource controllers;

6. Unified Kubernetes (or the like) closed-loop reconciliation patterns over vendorspecific element management practices; and

7. Interoperability by well-defined certification processes over vendor-specific optimisation.

We also believe that openness and compatibility principles need to be key drivers of future Telecom and network services implementations to ensure we leverage Cloud Native principles to encourage software – orchestration – and hardware disaggregation.

Building a cloud native architecture calls for a joint effort among telecom operators, suppliers, and partners. This is described in this document by stating a few principal requirements and by outlining the area of focus for this journey from an operator point of view.

* Does not imply order of priority

** Everything as code, single point of truth, immutable source of trust

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Disaggregation demands a new way of working, most likely significant additional integration efforts, changes to the operational model to embrace new processes as well as new skills and tools. All such efforts are required to eventually ensure the expected service levels, operational efficiency, performance, resilience and security, plus the opportunities to offer new and affordable services in order to meet an ever-increasing demand for high performing and cost-effective mobile networks. Whether the benefit of lowering the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) can be achieved for operators, is yet to be proven.

Carlos Fernandes, VP Group Technology, Deutsche Telekom and NGMN ODiN project lead says: “Disaggregation is the biggest challenge and opportunity mobile operators face today. Eventually, each individual operator will need to make its own choices, depending on its strategy, its starting point – greenfield or brownfield, its geolocation, local competition and many more. However, there are many topics which need to be analysed and solved, which are possible and worth being addressed jointly in the pre-competitive area, to support global standards, economies of scale and hence to enable competition for the benefit of the end-user.”

Arvin Siena, Vice President & Head – Technology Strategy and Transformation Office, Smart Communications, Philippines adds: ”We are very excited to work together with the operators and the entire value chain on industry solutions, paving the way for disaggregation’s success.”

The NGMN ODiN project invites the entire NGMN Partnership – vendors, system integrators and other interested parties – to jointly analyse potential gaps and work on industry solutions to meet the identified challenges. The project will also work with other relevant organisations and submit requirements to the industry.

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