- Ericsson is taking its 5G Core stack to the cloud for its new Ericsson On-Demand service
- The service will let operators spin up 5G core capabilities for their customers in minutes rather than weeks
- The vendor is initially targeting private wireless and fixed wireless access applications
Ericsson is looking to shake the notion that telecom vendors aren’t cloud native enough. How? By putting its full 5G core stack in Google Cloud as part of its new Ericsson On-Demand offering.
“This has not been a lift and shift effort,” Eric Parsons, Ericsson’s VP for Core Network Emerging Segments, said during a media and analyst roundtable. He stressed that both Ericsson and Google Cloud pushed hard when designing Ericsson On-Demand to “really get to those native capabilities of the underlying platform.”
Unveiled Thursday during the company’s 5G Core Summit in Madrid, Ericsson On-Demand provides network core capabilities via a pay-as-you-grow software-as-a-service model. Though managed by Ericsson, the product is built with Google Kubernetes Engine, and both the control plane and the user plane run on Google Cloud infrastructure.
This cloud-centric approach means that 5G core network services can be spun up in minutes rather than weeks, and operators won’t have to pay for more capacity than they’re using. It also means that operators can deploy core network capabilities for their multinational customers across a global rather than regional footprint.
“It is changing the economics of how you deploy 5G services,” Google Cloud’s Head of Industry for Telecom Angelo Lubertucci told Fierce, adding the offering is the “first of its kind.”
Mununder Sambi, Google Cloud's VP and GM for Networking and Security, noted during the presentation that Ericsson's offering actually goes hand-in-hand with the Autonomous Network Operations framework the tech titan rolled out this week.
"Bringing data into the cloud is extremely hard and bringing the right amount of data is even harder. By having such a solution, it is almost like a plug and play," he explained. "You can now get data from this Ericsson On-Demand platform, feed it into our data warehousing or data platform like Big Query, be able to build a digital twin on top of it and then be able to leverage Vertex AI, Gemini models or the model of any choice that a customer has and build AI agents" to do root cause analysis, act as a RAN Guardian and optimize operations to lower costs.
Libertucci said the product will initially be aimed at private wireless deployments and fixed wireless applications. The Internet of Things, MVNOs, hybrid cloud capacity offload and hybrid disaster recovery were also listed as future use cases in an Ericsson presentation.
STL Partners recently tipped the private network market to grow from $1 billion in 2024 to $21 billion by 2030. Around 62% of the private networks will be based on 5G by the end of the forecast period, the firm predicted.
Ericsson is already one of the top vendors in the private networks space. But simplifying core network deployments could give it a leg up on the competition.
Dell’Oro Group Research Director Dave Bolan told Fierce Ericsson On-Demand “makes it hassle-free for an MNO to provision a 5G Core for an enterprise customer's private 5G Standalone network wherever Google Cloud is available.”
“Simplified solutions like this, hopefully will accelerate the uptake of 5G Standalone networks,” he concluded.