Telenor Research and Innovation (R&I) has successfully conducted its first multi-vendor 5G standalone (SA) deployment within a hybrid cloud environment, covering both public and private cloud infrastructure.
This milestone underlines the feasibility of creating a 'Best of Breed' approach, affording CSPs the latitude to rapidly build and deploy a 5G network in the cloud with their vendors of choice.
The public cloud was provided by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), while Telenor R&I’s data centre in Oslo hosted the private cloud component. Within OCI, Telenor provisioned and operated control plane components from Oracle and Enea, specifically Oracle's Policy and Routing functions and Enea’s Subscriber Data Management (UDR, AUSF, UDM). Casa Systems’ packet core (AMF, SMF, UPF) as well as cloud-native application protection platform (Prisma Cloud Compute) plus ML-Powered NGFW Strata - both from Palo Alto Networks, run on-premises with Red Hat OpenShift and were fully integrated with the control plane on OCI.
A notable outcome of this implementation was Telenor R&I’s ability to leverage OCI to elastically scale the 5G core in sync with demand fluctuations, ultimately resulting in substantial cost reductions.
