DISH Network has selected IBM to help automate the United States’ first greenfield cloud-native 5G network.
DISH’s new smart network will be designed to be agile, scalable, and fully virtualized, benefitting enterprise customers across all industry verticals. DISH will leverage IBM’s AI-powered automation and network orchestration software and services to bring broad 5G network orchestration to DISH’s business and operations platforms. Intent-driven orchestration, a software-powered automation process, and artificial intelligence (AI) will be utilized to drive the operations of DISH’s cloud-native 5G network architecture.
DISH has engaged IBM Global Business Services to use IBM Cloud Pak for Network Automation software with DISH’s 5G network architecture. Central to this is the intent-based orchestration functionality designed to stitch hardware and software resources together more seamlessly and efficiently, expected to help DISH make network slicing possible and accelerate the creation and delivery of new services.
IBM Cloud Pak for Network Automation software is designed to continuously learn, provide insights, and use financial impact analysis to prioritize and manage issue resolution and network function. The ability to simultaneously regulate the lifecycle, optimize the performance and customer-specific needs of each slice on the network is a key differentiator for DISH as it seeks to drive innovation benefitting the enterprise market.
DISH also plans to use advanced network slicing to offer new use cases and industry vertical opportunities that are customized to each business and customer who leverages the private hybrid 5G network. Network slices – individual pieces that comprise said network – will be managed by customers to set service levels for each device appropriate to their use of the network. For example, an autonomous vehicle can be supported by very low latency while an HD video camera can be allocated high bandwidth.
Marc Rouanne, Chief Network Officer, DISH Wireless
IBM’s orchestration solutions are designed to leverage AI, automation and machine learning to not only make these slices possible, but to help them adapt over time as customer use evolves.
Steve Canepa, MD, IBM Global Communications Sector
By utilizing IBM’s AI-powered automation and intent-driven network orchestration software, DISH can develop and deploy network offerings, applying advanced AI with IBM Watson and orchestration capabilities to help optimize network operations and performance.
