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With innovative services like IoT RedCap, NTN, high-speed uplink, network APIs and GenAI just around the corner, communication service providers (CSPs) are eager to validate use cases that harness the full potential of 5G Standalone (SA). After substantial investments in 5G infrastructure, CSPs are now looking to generate new revenue streams by leveraging the advanced capabilities of 5G SA.
However, much of the market for 5G services remains unchartered territory, spanning a range of industry verticals like manufacturing, mining, and automotive. In addition, the 5G multivendor ecosystem is vast with high levels of complexity and competing implementation approaches. To date, key stakeholders have had limited capacity to build a multivendor development environment to test and explore use cases.
Expanding the 5G ecosystem for faster monetization
To address this challenge, AWS offers a 5G SA network development environment in the cloud that makes it easy for solution developers, vendors, and service providers to experiment immediately without the burden of building on-prem multivendor test networks. The development environment expands the service provider 5G ecosystem by lowering barriers to entry and simplifies use case testing to accelerate time-to-market. Since the environment is in the cloud, service providers can benefit without the Capex costs of creating on-premise test environments.
When prototyping is completed, service providers can deploy new solutions as a private 5G network right in the cloud. Or the cloud can be used to scale out a public 5G network when additional resources are needed for the new solutions.
The AWS 5G SA network development environment
The re:Invent demo
AWS’s annual re:Invent learning conference, late last year in Las Vegas, attracted an estimated 65,000 attendees, who got an up-close look at several AI-driven developments. This included Amazon Q, a generative AI-powered assistant embedded in AWS services to streamline business tasks for developers, contact center agents, and more. Many presentations and demos focused on generative AI (GenAI) use cases, including how new tech can help CSPs monetize 5G in private network environments.
To validate this concept, AWS, Spirent, and Mavenir teamed to demonstrate how a 5G SA development environment, together with GenAI, can help service providers quickly stand up 5G networks, including private 5G networks, and experiment with new services. The demo showcased how service providers can take advantage of these capabilities to accelerate 5G technology and monetization.
Mavenir provided a 5G core network, as well as a network data analytics function (NWDAF) to collect data from the network and a Network Exposure Function (NEF) that exposes 5G core network capabilities to external applications such as AWS GenAI capabilities or third-party apps. The demo also included a 5G Core Access and Mobility Management Function (AMF) to handle connection and mobility management tasks.
In the cloud environment, Spirent Landslide provided emulation of the Radio Access Network (RAN) with numerous active users moving around to create mobility activity in the core network. Spirent also supported the development of new solutions with analytics functions.
In addition to hosting the 5G environment, AWS GenAI services CodeWhisperer and Kendra were used to demonstrate how developers can quickly create new services by focusing on the business logic instead of the APIs and code generation required to interact with the 5G network and Spirent’s test solution.
Productive outcomes highlight GenAI’s added value
The re:Invent demo showed how operators can quickly stand up 5G network resources in the AWS cloud, rapidly experiment with new end-user services, and validate and assure everything works as intended.
The network data analytics function extracted data from the network for analysis by apps. GenAI was used to analyze vast amounts of data to support the art of building 5G networks, industrial-scale use cases that require managing and analyzing large volumes of data, and to experiment with new applications.
GenAI and AWS are positioned well to help service providers accelerate the monetization of private network applications, enable quick and efficient experimenting with innovative use cases, and to build 5G networks faster and manage them better.
By adding Spirent to the AWS cloud, service providers can ensure that 5G networks are built to scale and work as expected. This comprehensive validation and assurance, right from the start, is like insurance. It reduces costs and makes sure the 5G network and its applications will be ready to generate revenue reliably when they go live.
Exciting days are ahead as GenAI is incorporated into the cloud and applied to 5G public and private networks.
Delve into the details of the re:Invent demo with this video.
Learn more about how Spirent’s Landslide scalable platform tests and emulates 5G and O-RAN mobile networks.
