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This will not happen this year. But in the long run you don't need much own HW to be an operator. And fiber connectivity is (as the startpoint of this comments)

This will not happen this year. But in the long run you don't need much own HW to be an operator. And fiber connectivity is (as the startpoint of this comments) outsourced in large scale.

walrus01 5y ago
"in the long run you don't need that much HW to be an operator" - have you ever worked for a facilities based ISP or Telco and visited the interiors of dozens of different POPs? Please do so and then come tell us all about how telecom infrastructure on a national and global scale isn't composed of massive amounts of hardware all over the place.
- ng55QPSK 5y ago
  I work in a team that created 5G. And around ~2014 it was clear: operators want to go away from own HW.
  - walrus01 5y ago
    Just because you've outsourced some function to another contractor or telecom doesn't make the physical stuff go away. It just abstracts it away to someone else's responsibility.
kazen44 5y ago
how? the hardware needs to be there because you actually need to run the physical infrastructure to locations, no matter the technology, you still need geographical coverage to actually build connectivity.
- tguvot 5y ago
  well, around ~2011 network operators discovered that it's possible to virtualize network&compute, i.e. run routers, switches and computers in VMs. As result of this they came up with a grand plan where they will stick everything to virtual machines on top of cheapest hardware (preferably). A bunch of conferenced happened in order to define standards for all this happy future. Only most of it crashed and burned for multiple reasons. But it was back then. Now, in theory, it's pretty much possible to run operator based on leased lines (many operators actually run over leased lines anyway, in many countries and they don't own physical fiber networks due to regulations or other reasons), and interfaces with antennas/enodebs that are "virtualized" (to support multiple operators at once) or even using cloud-ran while deploying rest of software stack "in cloud".

This will not happen this year. But in the long run you don't need much own HW to be an operator. And fiber connectivity is (as the startpoint of this comments) outsourced in large scale.

walrus01 5y ago

"in the long run you don't need that much HW to be an operator" - have you ever worked for a facilities based ISP or Telco and visited the interiors of dozens of different POPs? Please do so and then come tell us all about how telecom infrastructure on a national and global scale isn't composed of massive amounts of hardware all over the place.

ng55QPSK 5y ago
I work in a team that created 5G. And around ~2014 it was clear: operators want to go away from own HW.
- walrus01 5y ago
  Just because you've outsourced some function to another contractor or telecom doesn't make the physical stuff go away. It just abstracts it away to someone else's responsibility.

kazen44 5y ago

how? the hardware needs to be there because you actually need to run the physical infrastructure to locations, no matter the technology, you still need geographical coverage to actually build connectivity.

tguvot 5y ago
well, around ~2011 network operators discovered that it's possible to virtualize network&compute, i.e. run routers, switches and computers in VMs. As result of this they came up with a grand plan where they will stick everything to virtual machines on top of cheapest hardware (preferably). A bunch of conferenced happened in order to define standards for all this happy future. Only most of it crashed and burned for multiple reasons. But it was back then. Now, in theory, it's pretty much possible to run operator based on leased lines (many operators actually run over leased lines anyway, in many countries and they don't own physical fiber networks due to regulations or other reasons), and interfaces with antennas/enodebs that are "virtualized" (to support multiple operators at once) or even using cloud-ran while deploying rest of software stack "in cloud".