How AI and Open Source are shaping the future of Telco Cloud

The telecommunications industry is undergoing a profound transformation, with AI-native and open-source technologies taking center stage. These innovations are not just enhancing operational efficiency but redefining the architecture of networks. Here’s an overview of how leading standard organizations are leveraging AI‑native and open-source tools to build the telco cloud of tomorrow. ETSI ISG NFV organized a new “Telco Cloud and AI Native” open session on October 7th, 2024, during the ETSI NFV#47 meeting in Paris, France. This event was a key opportunity for telecom operators, vendors, and other participants to exchange opinions on this important topic. It also explored the opportunities and challenges of using AI technologies in the telco cloud domain. The open session was divided into the following 3 parts, with 6 presentations from industry partners.



Sophia Antipolis, 07 February 2024

On December 11, the third Cloud Native Roundtable was held as a special session of the 44th ETSI NFV Plenary Meeting in Tokyo Japan. This time, the roundtable mainly focuses on sharing the experience and research achievements of the Asian operators.

NFV 44 Roundtable 1

Four prominent engineers leading the commercial development of network virtualization for major Japanese operators (KDDI, Softbank, Rakuten Mobile, and NTT DOCOMO) were invited to share the current development status, challenges of the Telco cloud and expectations for future network virtualization concepts and standardization. Researchers from University of Tokyo, NTT, and China Mobile were invited to present their view on the further evolution of mobile network architecture and network virtualization technologies. Besides these, the CTO of Linux Foundation Networking was invited to this roundtable as well to give a keynote speech on open-source activities for network virtualization and how could open source and ETSI NFV can further collaborate.

Ranny Haiby, CTO of Linux Foundation Networking (LFN), gave an overview of the activities of ONAP, Nephio and ODIM, which are representative open source projects for network virtualization under the LFN umbrella. He also highlighted the importance of cooperation between these projects and standardization, and made a proposal for strengthening cooperation with ETSI NFV in the future. Ranny said that key to successful collaboration is having individuals active in both open-source projects and standardization with acknowledgement on the differences between the two. He also mentioned the importance of face-to-face collaboration and encourage more activities to be held in the future.



Over 50 delegates participated to this 39th meeting of ISG NFV which took place under the beautiful blue skies and very refreshing weather in the south of France. Although some of us were still unable to travel due to constraints caused by COVID-19. The face-to-face meetings resumed at the 39th ISG meeting, and I am very happy to be back and able to meet with you face-to-face in the ETSI building.NFV 39 blog ETSI parking

The standardization discussions in each working group during the meeting week were very efficient and steady, taking full advantage of the face-to-face discussions. The number of contributions has increased since the last meeting due to the situation where the confusion by COVID-19 is calming down. Thanks to the standardization delegates for their hard work! Four new Work Items and 22 final drafts were approved and published between the previous meeting and the 39th meeting.