INTERVIEW Vodafone
“The core network hasn’t really changed much for 10/15 years but the move to 5G has challenged the way we
design a network in a number of ways” Scott Petty, CTO, Vodafone UK
Vodafone sets out 5G plans
Chief Technology Officer Scott Petty and Head of Networks Andrea Dona talked through 5G investment and a
new SDN service for enterprise
Following the launch of the
rst 5G network last week,
it’s fair to say that a gauntlet
has been thrown down to
other networks by BT/EE.
e operator kicked o the
5G era with a boat party and gig
on the river ames to maintain
its 100% record to be the rst
to launch the latest and fastest
generation of mobile connectivity.
Since then, ree has also
announced it will launch 5G in
August but it was Vodafone who
announced a hard date for 5G
rst; come July 3rd, there will be
two 5G operators on the market.
Giving an update to the press,
Vodafone UK head of networks
Andrea Dona said that the
decision not to ght to be the
rst to launch was taken after
watching mistakes made by other
European operators, adding that
testing the operator has done is
on par with that of its competitor.
“We’ve decided to launch
when it is right for our customers
to have the best service, best
functionality and best mobility.
Contrary with what happened
with 4G where the competition
launched a year before, that will
not happen this time.”
During the tour of the facility
and 5G masts, speeds of over
900Mbps were clocked by tests,
before dropping to around 300
to 350Mbps backing up Dona’s
claim.
Virtualisation Reality
Dona echoed the announcement
from CEO Nick Jeery nine
months ago that Vodafone has
spent over £2Bn on network
improvements since 2014.
In preparation for launch in
seven cities early next month,
growing to 19 before the end of
the year, 16,000 cites have been
modernised and, to t in with
Andrea Dona Head of Networks (Left) and Scott Petty, CTO Vodafone UK (Centre)
from a combination of the radio
but also the ability to distribute
network nodes further in the
network.”
SDN for Enterprise
Petty went on to say that
Vodafone UK is also setting up a
new consultancy that will allow
enterprises to manage their own
network much like the operator
itself does.
“We are seeing our big
appetite for people to move away
from MPLS (Multiprotocol
Label Switching) to SD WAN
where everything is controlled by
software.
“erefore, we are announcing
a new, free consulting service to
help our enterprise customers
take all the knowledge that
we have developed on SDN
internally across our network.
“We think that this will
fundamentally change the
enterprise networking space,
it will change the way that
enterprises can accelerate their
move to cloud and the types of
applications they are building
from a digital point of view.”
an overall strategy to continue to
invest in the network, Vodafone
will aggregate 3G signals into 5G
and end it’s 3G service in the next
two years.
Chief technology ocer, Scott
Petty said that these updates
were necessary, arguing that the
narrative around 5G so far has
not taken into consideration
changes to the core network.
“e core network hasn’t
really changed much for 10/15
years but the move to 5G has
challenged the way we design
a network in a number of ways
such as the virtualisation of the
core nodes.
“With virtualisation we are
moving to a much more software
orientated way of running our
infrastructure, using cloud-native
technologies and virtualised
software nodes that sit on top of
that infrastructure.”
According to Petty, as a result
of adopting an SDN approach
to managing the network the
operator can control nodes
quicker rather than relying on
hardware and customers can
benet from a reduction in
latency.
“e Software Dened
Networking approach allows
us to have intelligence built
into the core of the network
that make adjustments based
on what we see. If trac load
increases in one area, such as
increase bandwidth, it will route
trac to that location. If we
see a security, denial of service
attack on a particular node,
we can shut that node down,
route the trac around it and
instantiate a new rewall.
“We can then benet
from cloud scale and get to
horizontally scale our network.
In the past, the core of the
network sat in one or two
central locations in the network
and we had to bring all trac
back to make decisions around
what we would do.
“In a virtualised world
we can distribute that much
more broadly throughout the
network and the impact for
users would be, for one, the
speed increase as the latency
decreases signicantly. Most of
the latency benets for 5G come
30 | Comms Business Magazine | July 2019 www.commsbusiness.co.uk
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