O₂ Telefónica selects Amazon Web Services for its cloud-native IMS voice and 5G core networks

At Mobile World Congress, O₂ Telefonica in Germany announced that they have selected Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN) as cloud provider for network workloads. As part of the multi-year agreement, following the successful deployment of its 5G SA Core on AWS in July last year, O₂ Telefónica will expand the current 5G core implementation on AWS, deploying 5G core data plane in its data centers though the new AWS Outposts racks for high throughput, network-intensive workloads. As part of the agreement O₂ Telefónica will also deploy IMS voice in the AWS-cloud on AWS Graviton processors starting from this year. O₂ Telefónica will benefit from AWS Cloud Continuum to extend AWS cloud services to the furthest edge of its 5G network, leveraging same platform, APIs, and tools, to achieve cost efficient capacity scaling to meet the growing throughput demands on one of the most densely populated 5G networks globally. The breakthrough innovations will enable superior end-customer experiences, faster and agile network deployment, better price performance, increased observability and automation, easier integration and operations leveraging cloud native CI/CD pipeline, reducing the total cost of ownership across the 5G data and IMS voice domains. The German telecommunications provider will monitor its entire 5G network with a single set of AWS services, including Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus, and Amazon Managed Grafana. In addition, O₂ Telefónica can simplify 5G network operations with advanced analytics of network metrics data using AWS analytics and machine learning services such as Amazon Athena and Amazon SageMaker.

The high degree of automation, flexibility and scalability, combined with inherent security and resilience provided by the AWS-cloud, will allow O₂ Telefónica to focus even more on delivering the best customer experience. O₂ Telefónica will leverage Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC), a broad range of fully-managed cloud services and on-demand infrastructure to operate its network more efficiently and bring innovation to market faster. O₂ Telefónica’s highly-resilient connectivity combined with AWS’s highly-reliable cloud infrastructure form a strong foundation for the network of the future. The new AWS Outposts racks are built for high throughput and network-intensive on-premises workloads and provide cost-efficient traffic scaling to meet the ever-growing throughput demands on 5G Core UPF. This gives O₂ Telefónica the flexibility to place workloads at different locations based on latency, throughput, and traffic aggregation requirements, enabling advanced 5G use cases of the future. Operators can now use the same AWS infrastructure, AWS services, APIs, tools, and a common continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline wherever their workloads reside, across the voice and packet domains.

“The start of our 5G cloud core marks a decisive step in the transformation of our network architecture. We are proud to have the first fully cloud-native 5G core network deployed on AWS with a million subscribers already being served through it. As a leading mobile network operator with millions of customers in Germany, we want the most modern technology platform without making compromises on the functionality and reliability of our services. The new AWS Outposts racks harmonize with our next phase in our development of the network of the future, catering to the high throughput and low latency needs of our nationwide 5G core. AWS Outposts supports us to offer excellent 5G operational experiences, and enabling new digital applications for our customers. We are continuing our cloud transformation by moving additional network functions to cloud infrastructures. We have taken another crucial step, leveraging AWS Cloud infrastructure to deploy IMS voice service across Germany. Customers benefit from first-class voice functions when making phone calls via our mobile network”, – Mallik Rao, Chief Technology & Enterprise Officer (CTEO) of O₂ Telefónica

“This multi-year agreement where O₂ Telefónica selects AWS as cloud provider for all the network functions across 5G core and IMS voice, marks a pivotal moment in the Telco industry. This agreement comes into place after a long journey culminated in the deployment of the 5G SA core of O₂ Telefónica in Germany on AWS back in July 2024. The excellent in-service performance results have created the trust to extend the agreement at Telefónica Group level and for O₂ Telefónica in Germany to take a further step, leveraging AWS Cloud Continuum across the 5G core and IMS voice domains along 2025. We are proud to help O₂ Telefónica build its Network of the Future, delivering simplified deployment, operations and life cycle management based on the underlaying AWS Cloud Continuum technology.” – Fabio Cerone, General Manager AWS Telco Business Unit EMEA