Managing Multi-Tenancy in the Edge Clouds: Cloud-Native Networking Unveiled at the Mobile World Congress

Thursday January 30, 2020

HELSINKI — January 30, 2020— FusionLayer announced today that it will unveil a patented concept for managing multi-tenant networks at the Mobile World Congress to be held in Barcelona between February 24th and 27th, 2020. The new design is targeted at service providers and carriers looking for cloud-native ways to manage multi-tenant networking at the edge cloud. The technology developed by FusionLayer is the only solution in the market that addresses multi-tenant network management at the edge clouds that leverage 5G mobility, Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI).

The telecommunications industry is forced to reinvent itself in the 2020s as the business model of functioning as the bit pipe for the popular over-the-top (OTT) media services such as Netflix, Google and Apple is broken. While the users of these streaming services are consuming an ever-increasing amount of data over telecom service providers’ networks, the monthly plans with practically an unlimited amount of data are making it impossible for the telecoms industry to invest in the next-generation capacity needed to ensure the Quality-of-Service (QoS) in the mobile Internet services offered to consumers around the world.

“The 2010s will be remembered as the decade during which public cloud services and over-the-top media services took over the Internet, “ said Juha Holkkola, the Co-Founder and Chief Executive of FusionLayer. “The business problem that telecom companies are now facing is that their role is largely restricted to transferring an increasing amount of data packets at a flat price. Like any commodity business, this is a race to the bottom that leaves very little financial leeway to invest in new telecom infrastructure required to keep up with the ever-increasing amount of data.”

To overcome this business challenge, network equipment vendors such as Nokia and Ericsson have developed the next generation of mobile technologies – known as the fifth generation or 5G in short – designed to provide low levels of latency and large amounts of bandwidth in densely populated metropolitan areas. To monetize these new technologies, the telecom industry is now moving its sights to a new technology called the edge cloud that allows telecom companies to host local cloud services in their data centers close to the users of connected devices.

The new 5G technology is especially suited for these rollouts because it allows telecom companies to provide blazingly fast network services and local computing capacity to enterprise customers that cannot afford the latency between the connected devices and centralized cloud services such as Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure. Typical use cases for this new breed of infrastructure involve various Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications.

“The operational challenge that most telecom companies will face in this area is networking” continued Holkkola. “The edge clouds are inherently multi-tenant because each one of them will be used to host the computing needs of hundreds or even thousands of enterprise customers. While this has been the norm in cloud computing for nearly a decade, the traditional telecom companies are not cloud-native and therefore have no operational processes or solutions in place to manage tens or even hundreds of thousands of private networks overlapping each other.”

The patented technology developed by FusionLayer allows telecom companies to manage multi-tenant network environments at the cloud edge. Through a unified management overlay that facilitates thousands of overlapping network spaces and more than a hundred thousand networks, FusionLayer is the only carrier-grade solution designed to manage networks at this scale. By adding an extremely high-performing virtualized DHCP (vDHCP) service to the mix, FusionLayer is also able to take care of the IP addressing for the individual mobile network devices that access the 5G network through the Points of Presence (POPs) that are the foundation of the edge cloud.

FusionLayer will launch its new solution for cloud-native network management and IP addressing at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) organized in Barcelona from February 24 – 27 2020. To schedule a demonstration or a briefing at MWC, please reserve a 15min timeslot here: https://mwc-2020-infinity-demo.appointlet.com/b/fusionlayer-demo. Alternatively, you can email us at mwc2020@fusionlayer.com.