Telstra launches suite of enterprise 5G Standalone automated and orchestrated services

In what the leading Australia-based telecoms provider has called the world’s first, Telstra has announced fully automated 5G network slicing for a commercial network.

In the partnership, Telstra and Ericsson will be going outside the lab and into to the real world of business to deploy an automated standards-based network slicing service orchestration capability in the commercial network, using Ericsson Orchestration and Ericsson Inventory.

The new capabilities, described by the partners as industry-leading, include interworking with fully automated 5G network slicing, delivering network-defined differentiated services to customers; Local Packet Gateway, providing enterprise customers with on-site local data breakout; and 5G enterprise routers with network slicing capabilities, delivered by Ericsson business Cradlepoint.

Together with the 5G RAN and dual-mode 5G Core, these capabilities are designed to enable Telstra to provide enterprise customers with new differentiated services that the two companies believe have the potential to deliver assured network characteristics such as throughput, latency, and the resilience required to support digitised operations and processes.

In what is claimed to be a first for its home territory, Telstra has also successfully deployed the Ericsson Local Packet Gateway in Telstra’s commercial 5G network.

The deployment is being demonstrated via a 5G remote-controlled car designed to show how Telstra’s enterprise customers can benefit from 5G bandwidth, low latency and data localisation. The Local Packet Gateway keeps the video feed of the remote driving demo on-site, avoiding looping the video back through the mobile network.

The service’s data localisation is designed to allow customers to take advantage of edge computing in virtual and hybrid 5G private network environments. It delivers efficient use of bandwidth, data security, low latency, and creates a more efficient network overall.

The Local Packet Gateway delivers a small-footprint, easy-to-deploy edge user plane which brings network user traffic management closer to its source so that Telstra’s enterprise customers are able to keep traffic on, or close to, their premises.

To bring together 5G network capabilities and make them available to the enterprise, Cradlepoint has delivered its 5G-enabled routers and adaptors – including the E3000 branch router, R1900 vehicle router, W2005 outdoor adaptor and W1850 indoor adaptor – powered by Cradlepoint Netcloud.

“In the past, it took a long time to deploy and scale new service constructs in our network,” said Telstra’s executive for product enablement technology, Shailin Sehgal.

“Now, with 5G’s service-based architecture combined with automation via network orchestration, we are able to work with our customers to imagine and deploy new differentiated services quickly and scale them economically. We have been working with Ericsson to bring these new innovations to our enterprise customers for several years, and these latest world- and Australian-first capabilities are another example of this collaboration.”