EU Data Regulation Complicating Telecom Sector Moves
Steps that EU countries are taking to protect data have major implications for the telecom sector, software provider CSG's Sean Casey said Thursday during a Mobile World Live webinar. Other speakers said geopolitical considerations are playing a big role in how carriers manage their move to the cloud and regulators are forced to pay more attention to where data is stored.
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“Telecom data is some of the most sensitive data that there is,” said Casey, CSG senior vice president-product management: “Phone calls, internet transactions, there’s a lot that can be learned from that [data] and it’s very sensitive. We’re seeing a lot of countries in the EU lean into how to better protect that data.”
EU countries are also increasingly looking at telecom networks as critical infrastructure, Casey said. “That’s driving a lot of trade-offs between public cloud and private cloud in terms of decision-making,” he said. “Some of that is anticompetitive.”
Since the introduction of the iPhone, a lot of revenue has shifted to tech companies like Apple and Google, Casey said. “They face very different regulations than telecom operators do,” he said. “There’s certainly a push and pull between protecting privacy, protecting critical infrastructure” and competition.
Florian Otel, GitLab telco solution manager for the Europe, Middle East and Africa region, said EMEA operators there can’t compete with carriers in the U.S., China and other parts of Asia. “Regulations still require them to have active cores confined to one country,” Otel said. Data rules mean “strict requirements” on how they manage their networks.
The move to the cloud is a continuation of a path carriers have been on for decades, Otel noted. “It’s all a quest for increased efficiencies, faster time to market [and] better operational efficiency.”
Regulatory hurdles and concerns about protecting their “brand” have slowed carriers' move to the cloud, said Peter Jarich, head of GSMA Intelligence. The move to stand-alone 5G networks requires carriers to adopt cloud-native technology, he said.
The big cloud players are offering tailored services to carriers, Jarich said. “Different things that you’re doing will require different sorts of silicon, different sorts of servers [and] processors,” he said. “That’s why Nvidia sells lots and lots of chips and why a lot of the cloud players are developing their own solutions." Cloud services are “easy to consume,” but they’re not cheap, he said.
“It has always been kind of a complicated question -- where is the edge? What is the edge?” Jarich said. “I kind of like the idea” that the edge is “distributed cloud.” The idea of the edge is to move processing closer to the end user, he said. We know there are certain use-cases that will require processing at the edge to address issues like latency, he said. But the cloud is about more than lower latency; it’s also about resiliency, data privacy and lower costs, he said.
Hyperscalers like AWS, Google and Microsoft continue to dominate the public cloud space, and they have “pivoted hard” to support AI in the cloud, Casey said. Telecom has been among the slowest industries to move to the cloud, with North America in the lead, "and we’re still just scratching the surface,” he said. “There’s a long, long way to go.”