Hello and good morning, and thank you very much for
spending your time with us today and learn about the private 5G market. Today I would like to share
three things with you. The first thing is I want
to share our insights into the private 5G market, why are enterprises are
looking for private 5G. The second thing on the agenda is I will share with
you our approach to 5G, how we are leveraging Fusion Core and Azure private Edge zones to provide a 5G Edge solution
for this private 5G market. And number three is I
will hand it over to Rob who's going to walk you through
a very simple experience of how to bring a 5G network online starting with the cloud, and
then getting on the Edge. So let's start in the beginning. Why is private 5G important and critical for the enterprises? And the answer is very simple. It's all about real time data processing to maximize the business value. The way we are looking at this market is in three categories. The first one is automation, which really is about capturing machine to machine interactions to really automate anything
from factory floors, transportation, and it really
relies on a very reliable, dedicated data flow so that
these machines can operate to the specs that they are built for. And they absolutely need very
low latency communication to ensure that they run safely. The second category is around telemetry, which is all about data
collection and capturing, and for the enterprises or
the people in IT or security use that data to secure
and safeguard their assets. This category may also
include certain things, like low-latency voice
communications for first responders, for safety industries, which is essential for them
to do their jobs right. And finally, one of the biggest trends is the adoption of AI. And one of the most interesting
applications for AI we see is everything around human interaction. So whenever there is video
interactions, messaging, we see a lot of interest in enterprises being able to respond and
interact with human users to provide them better
customer experiences. So this could be in the retail area, in the entertainment
area, campuses, healthcare where they can supplement
human staff with AI driven bots to provide a better user experience. In the end the conclusion
is all these use cases depend upon providing
low-latency access to data so that the enterprises
can use their applications and provide real business value, whether it's more inside-looking or to provide better user
experiences to their end users. Here are some examples that
we see through our customers and through our channels as some of the verticals who are working on different types of
interesting applications. Everything ranging from Industry 4.0 to defense and military applications, to retail warehouses. This is just a small sample, obviously, I have not captured all the verticals, but we do see the demand
for dedicated networks being out there. In fact, it's a very
interesting time in the industry because we see that the applications and the business case for
private networks already exist, and the technology is behind. (interference drowns out speaker) Industry we are used to the reverse where technology comes first before people figure
out what to do with it. So we are really excited
about this industry. So the way I would summarize this is we, enterprises,
really see the pain point to adopt 5G. What's interesting also, we see that the governments
are also further ahead in many of these initiatives by offering enterprise spectrum, like in the U.S. we have CPRS, we see U.K. Germany and Japan
offer enterprise licenses. So it's a very interesting time that governments are much ahead
of the technology industries in providing or excavating
the adoption of 5G. If you were to ask me
about the front runners, we think Industry 4.0,
the education sector, defense and retail industries
are the top consumers of private 5G networks at this time. Let's go and see what we have to offer. Metaswitch has acquired by Microsoft, so we are really excited about bundling in our capabilities with a
wide range of applications and cloud platforms that Microsoft offers. So we hope to bring a very
powerful bundle of capabilities to help accelerate this market. So what is 5G Edge? What we have done is we have taken our Metaswitch Fusion Core five, which is a standard 5G
next generation Core and optimized for the Edge deployment. So let me take a step back for a moment and explain you what are
the key components for 5G? So the first component is, obviously, the core network because
it's a starting point for any network. So the core network is where
you define the network, where you define the
identity of the network. You provision the subscribers,
you provision the policies. It is a central control
point and the control point that connects the radio access
network to the applications. So from our perspective, the core network is a starting
point for any 5G network. The next key component is the 5G Edge, or the Edge platform. The Edge platform is very critical for us because it provides you
the low-latency needs at the facility where these
applications are being deployed. Not only does it provide
higher performance, but it also provides reliability because you're not dependent on a backhaul or (interference drowns
out speaker) behind you, it provides you the local
control and the cost savings. So we believe that the best
way to deploy private 5G is using Edge platforms, which is something that Azure offers as part of their private Edge zones. The other two components are obviously the radio access network, our approach to that is
to work with a wide range of partners on 4G and 5G standalone RAN, to provide you the end-to-end solution. And obviously as part of Microsoft, the final component is
all the applications available on the Azure Cloud, both on the Edge and in
the hyperscale clouds. Our mission statement in
order to deliver our solution is to simplify the consumption of 5G. What that means is we fundamentally think the way 5G networks are
deployed in the operator space for consumers for large scale networks is fundamentally different from how enterprises consume technology. So in order to do that, we have come up with a
fundamental set of innovations that we believe will
help to the contribution of adoption of 5G. There are two ways to
simplify 5G consumption. One is to offer you a bare bones product, or we believe the right
approach is to provide you a premium high-performance product with a powerful set of innovations that help you deliver the
use cases that you need. Now, as Metaswitch
becomes part of Microsoft, one of the key tenants of our Edge product is the go-to market. The way they want to go to market is to enable operators and MSPs to serve the end enterprises. We believe in this partnership model, we will work with everyone,
including the enterprises, to figure out what the right solution is, what the right go-to market is, but our primary go-to market is to enable or empower operators and MSPs
to serve the enterprises. So let's jump into the
product a little bit more. The first aspect of our product, the Fusion Core product is we will provide the complete set of 5G
Core network functions to enable you to launch the network. In fact, one of the key
innovations that we have patented is the native support or
4G access on the 5G pole. What we have done is fundamentally solved the problem of evolution. We recognized that the only
access network out there that's available at a low cost is 4G, but we also know that
everyone wants 5G standalone as soon as it's available. So instead of trying to
invest in two different cores or dual core technology, what we have done is come up
with an interworking function that takes 4G access and
plugs it into 5G Core. So we have simplified the
whole concept of evolution with our solution. We offer open interfaces towards both 4G and 5G standalone RAN partners, and we will work with a
whole range of RAN vendors to provide you the best
solution in your market. RAN selection is usually a complex thing because it depends upon
the spectrum you have or it depends upon indoor
versus outdoor spectrum and there's different
specification and power settings. So the best approach is to bring your own RAN go-to market
to deploy your network. The final aspect of our solution is that everything is containerized. So we manage the network,
we deploy the network using Kubernetes, so
it's built for automation and portability from day one. So to conclude on this chart, we have simplified the
selection, the deployment, and the evolution of the core components, so that you don't have to burden yourself in terms of putting the solution together. One of the biggest
differentiators that we offer is we have invented a packet
processing engine called CPP. It has been created by Metaswitch
over the last three years. One of the biggest advantages is it provides the highest throughput as a containerized software
on any commodity hardware. In this case we are using x86
compute platforms from Intel. So one of the key benefits
we get for the Edge market is that we can actually
put the entire 5G Core into as small packaging
as for physical CPUs or AP CPUs. We can optimize it further
into two CPUs, if required, or we can expand it or
scale it up on demand through our containerized software. So essentially what you
get as an enterprise or an MSP who is selling
applications to enterprises is they can actually provide an appliance, which also supports the
RAN, open RAN technology, like CUD on the same platform, and even bundling key
application capabilities on the same Edge platform. So what we have done
through this innovation is fundamentally simplify how you deploy, how you plan for compute, how you utilize compute, and how you grow. So we have taken that whole
complexity away from you, so that, again, you can
simply deploy 5G networks in a heartbeat. Once you've deployed the network, the next thing is how do I
run it, how do I operate it. So we have this whole
set of managed ServiceIQ, management and automation tools that are broken down into monitoring, tracing and automation, and the good news here
is that we are using a lot of open source tools that a lot of the
industry is familiar with. For example, on the monitoring side, we are using standard Grafana, Kibana, tool sets for Prometheus, Elasticsearch that a lot of people in the
industry are familiar with. On the tracing side we
have a built-in tracing that is always on that helps
our enterprises and MSPs debug issues or do
integration testing with RAN. And finally on the deployment
and configuration side we have you're not only using
HELM and Kubernetes tools, but we are tightly integrating
them into the Azure portals to provide you the
configuration simplicity that you will actually see
in Rob's demo later on. So what we have also done in addition to providing the performance and the multi-access capability is we have simplified
the network deployment and operations on the Edge. And you'll see a preview
of that from Rob's demo. And finally, one of the
frequently asked questions from our customers is, how do you control this, where you control this network from? So the standalone networks
can actually be controlled from either the local premise on the Edge without needing any cloud capabilities. So this is really useful for scenarios like the industrial applications, like robotics who need
complete dedicated networks without any interference
from outside world, control and deliver the network locally. It's also useful for remote locations, like mining and offshore oil
fields or whatever it is, there cloud connectivity
is difficult to get. The most popular model is the middle one where most of our
enterprises expect to deploy private 5G into multiple sites, and they want a single point of control. So like I said, one of the innovations that we are working on closely with Azure is to integrate this tightly with the Azure Cloud management tools so that you can control multi-site single enterprise
deployments via the cloud. And obviously many of our MSP partners are looking to differentiate by offering network as a service or provide operations capabilities over and above what we
have in our product. So we offer open API so
that they can be integrated into MSPs or operators backend systems so that they can manage and
control the network on day one. This is really useful for enterprises who do not have the talent or do not want to build a domain expertise to manage these networks locally. With our standalone offering we can really provide
different control points and simplify that for the enterprises. So what does this all mean? In the end, it's like I said, our mission statement is to simplify the consumption of 5G by enterprises. So I want to hand this over to Rob who can demonstrate the
whole onboarding experience starting with how he brings
up the core on the cloud to the marketplace. He will then highlight some differences on when you're ready to deploy how you can extend the
deployment of the 5G Core on Azure Stack Edge. And then once the network is deployed, he will give you a preview of tool sets, one is the ServiceIQ
monitoring using Grafana, and then he will also
show you the tracing tool, a real system that's up and running with one of our RAN partners who is testing our end-to-end
5G standalone network. So word to you, Rob. - Thank you, Shubh. So fusion Core is a 5G packet
Core for the private Edge, but we've also made it
extremely easy for operators and integrators who are
ready to start testing with 5G private Core to get
started with Fusion Core now by making it available in the Azure Cloud. The entire process to spin
up a brand new packet core in the cloud is fully automated and can be completed within minutes. And this creates a fully self-contained, dedicated packet core that operators and radio
network vendors can use to connect their radio networks over a VPN and be ready for testing within minutes. There's no hardware to ship or install, and this makes it extremely
easy to get started with testing and reduces the
configuration and setup time that would typically be
needed to set up a new core from days or weeks to a few minutes. This is all available in
the Azure Marketplace today, fully integrated with the Azure Portal and it creates a full deployment of the Fusion Core 5G packet core, including all of the components
that you can see here in the center gray box. When connecting over the cloud, it also includes a VPN gateway
that creates a VPN tunnel to connect to your radio network. All of these resources are
created and deployed on demand within your Azure subscription and remotely managed by
Metaswitch as needed. When deploying in the 4G interworking mode there are some additional components that get created in the cloud also, the blue components shown here, these provide backwards compatibility for the Fusion Core packet core to connect to a 4G RAN when needed. And let me now show you
how easy it is to create a brand new packet core
in the Azure Cloud. So the starting point for
creating a new packet core in the cloud is the Azure Marketplace. So search for Fusion
Core or 5G packet core in the Azure Marketplace, and then choose the
Metaswitch Fusion Core offer that is in the marketplace. There are three different steps
to create the packet core. The first step is to choose a region. So choose a region that's
close to your radio network. This helps to keep the latency low when connecting to your radio network. Create a new resource group for the resources to be created in. Give the deployment a name. And then the next set of
settings is for the VPN tunnel that connects the packet
core to your radio network. So here you'll put in VPN settings, such as the public IP for the radio network side of the tunnel and VPN settings, such as the IP protocol and also the pre-shared
key that you'll use to secure the tunnel or just use the randomly
generated secure value suggested by the wizard. And then the final set of settings is to configure the packet core with the 5G network settings that you want to use for your testing. So here you can select the type of radio that you're connecting to,
a 5G or 4G radio network. You can set parameters, such
as the mobile country code and mobile network code. You can choose the MSIN
range that you want to use with your SIM cards, set the UE authentication
secrets that you want to use. And other 5G network settings,
such as network slicing, or tracking area codes. Then you're ready to create the resources, this will spin up a brand new packet core in your subscription and create all of the necessary resources to connect to your radio
network over the VPN tunnel. This takes a few minutes to create. Here's the resources that get created once everything is spun up and ready. So the entire 5G packet core is deployed on a single
four core virtual machine in the cloud. It's a standard four
CPU VM 14 giga memory. As well as the VM, all of the networking that's necessary for the connections to set up, public IP addresses are assigned, and the VPN gateway is created. This makes it extremely easy
to connect your radio network to a 5G packet core for testing and there's no need to ship
or install any equipment in order to get started with this. Once you're ready to move on to more in-depth performance
testing or production use, then the next step is
an onsite deployment. For example, deploying Fusion Core on an Azure Stack Edge server shown here running in an Azure private Edge zone. Again, the entire packet
core can be installed as a virtual network function running on the Azure Stack Edge server, and it uses SRI via enabled network cards to provide up to 40 gigabits
per second of throughput on a single four CPU instance, or this can be scaled
up further if needed. Just like for the cloud deployment, all of the resources are
integrated with the Azure Portal and can be managed in the portal. This provides a simplified
management experience. So here we have Azure Stack Edge server that's deployed in one of our
engineering labs in London. You can see the
configuration is all viewable through the Azure Portal. So for example, here's the
networking on this device. The Fusion Core itself
is deployed as a VNF. So again, all of these resources
are viewable in the portal, makes it extremely easy to manage these, and you can see the provisioning stage and other key information in the portal. Fusion Core is a fully-cloud native containerized packet core. It uses industry standard
tools, such as Grafana to monitor the deployment
and view key metrics, such as the UE registration
rates, active sessions, throughput, packet rates and so on, all of this is fully customizable using standard Grafana function. And (interference drowns out speaker) CPU resource utilization, and anything else that you need
to monitor your deployment. This particular example is
one of our cloud instances running in the Azure Cloud, but it uses the exact same dashboard in the onsite private
Edge zone version as well. All of this function is available today, Fusion Core is in active trials
with both 4G radio networks, like the one shown in the
Microsoft lab in Redmond here, and also in 5G deployments, such as the lab deployment seen here in one of our 5G radio partner labs. This also includes full end-to-end testing of the 5G standalone network. The Fusion Core includes a
built-in protocol analyzer, which shows all of the end-to-end flows within the 5G control and user plane. So this lets us see all of the flows between the different components in the three GPP 5G
service-based architecture, which is fully implemented by Fusion Core. So here we can see, for
example, the core flows for U registration and PDU session setup in a 5G standalone network end-to-end. So here we see the registration coming in from the G node B, all of these
flows are captured in full, and all of the packets can be inspected to view the flow of the call through all of the different
components in the packet core. So this greatly simplifies
integration and testing, this always on diagnostics
makes it very easy to see the flows, to see the user
plane being programmed, to look out the different settings that are deployed, bit rates and so on, all of this is visible in
the built-in diagnostics. So hopefully that gives a good flavor of how easy it is to deploy a Fusion Core, all of this can be deployed in the cloud for initial testing within minutes, and all of this is available today. Shubh, back to you. - Thank you, Rob, for
the great demonstration. So hopefully you saw how
easy and simple it is to bring up a 5G core starting with the demo
system on the cloud, which can get you going and start doing your RAN testing. Once you're ready to deploy and once you have the
ASC platform on site, you can extend that 5G
Core onto the ASC Edge and bring up your 5G
network with a RAN partner. I just want to conclude by highlighting some of the key
differentiators that we offer. One is it is the smallest
footprint Edge product in the market that supports
both 4G and 5G networks. And it has built-in tools for
you that you're familiar with, like Grafana and built-in tracing tools that provides you all the visibility into the network performance. And you have open APIs to
extend that operation capability into your backend tools
and IP backend systems. So that's really how we are
approaching this market, hope you like it. I want to conclude this presentation by allowing you to reach out
to us through our website, metaswitch.com/private5g. If you're brave enough, please go ahead and log
into the marketplace and play with our 5G Edge
core on the Azure Cloud. And once you are qualified and
deploying the Azure ASC box, you can even start your deployment
on the private Edge zone. And we hope you can essentially
leverage these tools that we have available in addition to all the Azure
toolkits and applications to really deploy and
monetize new use cases and applications, and we look forward to
learning your requirements as we go ahead. Thank you very much and
appreciate your time today.
