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Mirantis has new telecom edge cloud offering

Telecom companies are moving to the cloud, and Mirantis has a new Kubernetes offering to help them get there and then manage their forthcoming 5G offerings.
Written by Steven Vaughan-Nichols, Senior Contributing Editor

If 5G is to get anywhere, it needs the cloud. In particular, telecoms need Kubernetes-based edge computing. That's why Mirantis is bringing the open-source converged access gateway software platform Magma to telecom system administrators in its Kubernetes infrastructure edge offering: MCP Edge.

Magma was developed by Facebook to help telecom operators deploy mobile networks quickly and easily. It does by providing a software-centric distributed mobile packet core and tools for automating network management. This containerized network function integrates with the existing back end of a mobile network and makes it easy to launch new services at the network edge.

Mirantis's contribution was to marry it with Kubernetes.

MCP Edge integrates OpenStack, Kubernetes, and Mirantis' flexible infrastructure manager, DriveTrain, and it lets you manage containers, VMs, and bare metal points of presence (POPs) with a unified cloud-based management plane.

The MCP Edge access gateway will:

●      Enable telecom operators to manage their networks more efficiently with more automation, less downtime, better predictability, and more agility to add new services and applications.
●      Enable federation between existing mobile network operators and new infrastructure providers for expanding rural infrastructure.
●      Allow operators who are constrained with licensed spectrum to add capacity and reach by using Wi-Fi and  Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS).

The result? Boris Renski, Mrantis's co-founder and CMO, claimed: 

"New entrants into the mobile operator space like Reliance Jio [a major Indian telecom] have been able to quickly capture huge market share by building networks at 20% of the cost of traditional players and then passing these savings to the consumers. Network virtualization and open-source building blocks are key to achieving these savings."

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