Telstra: 5G network slicing to deliver superior service experiences to Australian enterprises
Telstra has built the largest 5G network in Australia covering 90% of the Australian population today. It is driving service orchestration and assurance evolution for wireless services, has a long history of leadership and continues to push the boundaries on the next evolution of connectivity.
Telstra and Ericsson win Glotel award for 5G Innovation of the Year - 2024 (Image courtesy of Glotel Awards, sponsored by telecoms.com)
What
Setting out to evolve service orchestration and assurance capabilities with clear goals, Telstra is planning to:
- Offer network slicing enabled services by deploying network configuration on-demand using a fully automated process
- Implement a service orchestration and assurance framework for dynamic end-to-end network slicing
- Provide enterprise customers guaranteed service level agreements (SLAs) to increase 5G monetization from the network
Why
Telstra’s ambition is to deliver the best connectivity experience for its customers through:
- Design and deploy next-generation services on its wireless network to expediate 5G monetization
- Create an intent-driven programmable network, tailored and reusable for different products to support new customer use cases
- Modernise and digitise processes of how to build and control the network environment and expose it to customers
How
In partnership with Ericsson, Telstra implemented Ericsson Service Orchestration and Assurance, to enable the Ericsson Dynamic Network Slicing solution. With this solution Telstra can commercialize, operationalize, and industrialize innovative new services at scale. Telstra already started this journey by building on foundational wireless orchestration capabilities across Core and RAN networks.
“The true opportunity of 5G is to be found in its ability to deliver premium, dependable and differentiated service experiences, beyond standard mobile broadband, through network slicing. With Ericsson’s Dynamic Network Slicing capability, we are able to design experiences and deliver a service to meet the needs of specific customer use cases.”
Shailin Sehgal, Group Executive, Global Networks and Technology, Telstra
The challenge
With Telstra’s legacy environment, several challenges were apparent:
- Slow design and deployment of network services on its wireless network, with manual work, prone to error and slow turnarounds for orders.
- Navigating network complexity while simultaneously balancing customer expectations for faster turnaround for their services.
- Increased costs and operational inefficiencies requiring the latest technologies to drive automation and scalability.
- Difficult and inefficient to innovate and launch new types of services quickly because of time consuming processes.
- Complicated to adapt to rapidly changing service requirements and to introduce new services at scale.
- Ensuring consistent service quality and a positive customer experience, as services become more complex and diverse.
To ensure superior service experiences, Telstra recognized the need to operate differently and implement a new set of systems and processes:
Telstra’s key business drivers
- Deliver diverse services with differentiated connectivity at scale over complex networks
- Improve service experience with fast turnaround for customer orders
- Enable simplification, ease of use, reusability and agility.
- Automate service lifecycle management for network slicing.
- Provide operational efficiencies and cost reduction.
The solution
With Ericsson Service Orchestration and Assurance enabling Ericsson Dynamic Network Slicing solution, Telstra can now commercialize, operationalize, and industrialize innovative new services at scale.
Telstra is building on foundational wireless orchestration capabilities across its Core and RAN networks including:
- Working with Ericsson end-to-end across Core and RAN services to speed up delivery of 5G slicing orders on the mobile network with programmable, just-in-time construction of services.
- Exposing services through Telstra’s Network as a Service (NaaS) layer supporting Telstra’s Reference Architecture Model (TRAM) using standardised TMF APIs that promote reusability and API first strategy.
Leveraging the latest technologies to drive the automation and scalability. Telstra is evolving service orchestration and assurance capabilities to:
- Quickly deploy additional network configuration and features on-demand using a fully automated process
- Implement an orchestration and assurance framework for dynamic end-to-end network slicing including purchase-to-order (P2O) and order-to-activate (O2A) flows with supporting systems to manage service qualification, inventory, subscription provisioning and assurance.
- Providing enterprise customers guaranteed service level agreements (SLAs) to support critical orchestration flows.
The result
With Telstra award winning solution leveraging Ericsson Dynamic Network Slicing / Ericsson Service Orchestration and Assurance, Telstra can now:
- Deliver a 5G slicing services order for a customer in a couple of minutes with a programmable network in place.
- Enable opportunities to work with industry use cases through 5G slicing technology providing high performance and differentiated connectivity with guaranteed SLAs. This is evidenced in Telstra’s proof-of-value engine for 5G slicing combined with Ericsson Service Orchestration and Assurance.
- Evolve, prototype and build use cases and capabilities much faster for customers leveraging Ericsson’s solution for network slicing.
- Expand into application specific based solutions and offer enterprises control on how to steer critical applications to slices that are further tailored for these applications.
Telstra aims to take slicing services to greater levels of exposure and programmability with different channels to market beyond B2B into B2B2X. Slice capabilities can start to be exposed, through APIs, to application developers and other ecosystem partners to ensure that the experience of their applications is fit for purpose that they can rely upon for a permanent setup or on-demand and timebound use.
