Dish To Use AWS For 5G Network

"Dish Network is partnering with Amazon to roll out 5G service in Las Vegas," writes Slashdot reader fermion. "They will evidently not only be the first cloud-based 5G service, but also will allow Amazon to test its network in a large telecommunication situation." CNBC reports: Dish will start operating "the first standalone, cloud-based 5G Open Radio Access Network in the United States, beginning with Las Vegas later this year," the company said in a statement Wednesday. The statement said Amazon and Dish will work together to see how organizations including Amazon and AWS use 5G or build their own networks. Terms of the deal weren't disclosed.

Dave Brown, vice president of AWS' core Elastic Compute Cloud service, told CNBC's "TechCheck" on Wednesday that the collaboration with Dish will "absolutely" serve as a sort of case study Amazon can take to other telecommunications providers to show that 5G networks can run in clouds, rather than in data centers with special-purpose infrastructure.

I don't even know what that means.

[XXongo]

"...case study Amazon can take to other telecommunications providers to show that 5G networks can run in clouds, rather than in data centers with special-purpose infrastructure. "

I don't even know what that means. Something "run in clouds" is running in data-centers with special-purpose infrastructure. What do they think the "cloud" is? Something floating in the air with no support?

Re:

[saloomy]

I think this means that the radios in the devices are registered on a network that is layer-2 linked or layer-3 routed to an AWS network, rather than locally peered (or carrier-NAT'ed) to the internet directly. This means they can provide their content (and internet access) from those servers without the peering costs the eyeball networks charge the content providers, me thinks. It is pretty vague in terms of architecture or aim.

Re:

[h33t l4x0r]

The radios in the... satellite dishes?

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

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[oldgraybeard]

"routed to an AWS network" So when AWS kicks you off you are really off the internet. All hail King Bezos! The controller of All that is acceptable.

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[Bradac_55]

Almost, they will live natively in one or multiple AWS Dish zones and back haul to a Dish data center.

We (T-Mo) have a fairly large AWS data center plus Sprint's multiple smaller units so it's not all that much of a stretch for Dish other than the 5G part.

The hardest part of a telco AWS system is the network security. Amazon only cares about there security it's up to the customer to figure out how to make it work so in the end we do not connect to the web directly everything still has to back haul to a rea

Re:

[Tablizer]

I means Bill Gates will implant you with microchips and make you do pedo things at pizza shops

What the heck is a cloud based 5G network?

[LagDemon]

I've read the article twice and I still don't see how the cloud intersects with 5G radio. Are they putting their cell towers in AWS datacenters? That doesn't seem likely.

This article reads like someone chewed up a press release and regurgitated it directly into a news article.

Re: What the heck is a cloud based 5G network?

[Aighearach]

Maybe it is a web proxy?

Re:

[fahrbot-bot]

I've read the article twice and I still don't see how the cloud intersects with 5G radio. Are they putting their cell towers in AWS datacenters? That doesn't seem likely.

Close. Every cell tower will also be an AWS data center ...

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[Kaenneth]

I'm *guessing* that the cell sites send calls/data over the Internet to the nearest AWS server farm to be routed in software, instead of to a telecom owned server/dedicated hardware facility.

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[Ingenium13]

It's virtualized RAN. So right now, cell towers have equipment at the base running vendor specific software to talk to the radios. This will be moved to vendor agnostic software running in a datacenter. It will then talk to the radios at the towers presumably over an IPsec tunnel, and tell them what to broadcast. So all the LTE/NR signaling, authentication, etc, etc will happen in a datacenter rather than at the cell site itself.

Amazon To Offer Wireless Service?

[phalse phace]

I guess this means it's only a matter of time before Amazon offers their own wireless/5G service?

Get Dish to do the testing and if it turns out to be viable, enter Amazon.

See: How Amazon Wins: By Steamrolling Rivals and Partners [slashdot.org]

dish != satellites

[at10u8]

I seem to have slept through the event when Dish stopped being geosynchronous satellites.

Re: dish != satellites

[Aighearach]

Dish is the zombie pretending to be a cell company, so the government would let T-Mobile buy Sprint and there would still be Competition(tm).

Re:

[bill_mcgonigle]

They own Boost and Ting, which are MVNO's.

And apparently the Sling box too.

In case you are wondering what this means

[XNormal]

O-RAN is a digital antenna. It takes a chunk if radio spectrum and digitizes it with an analog-to-digital converter, and vice versa. It is an antenna connected with 100G ethernet.

Everything else about the 5G network is software running on virtualized hardware. Not too different than any other VM you might have in the cloud, with the exception of some real-time guarantees, management and being physically closer to antenna for lower latency (tens of km rather than the more typical hundreds or thousands of km to the regional aws datacenter)

Latency.

[blang]

The combination of network distances and speed of light, is the one thing that may fuck this up. Even 2 ms can cause response time for a chatty integration to go from a fraction of a second to minutes. Application guys, architects, network guys are different teams that rarely knows enough details across each others domains to see this coming.