Verizon: Commercial Traffic On 5G Core

October 18, 2022

After initial testing and friendly user trials of Verizon’s 5G core, the company recently began moving customer traffic onto the new cloud-native, containerized design core, which will offer unprecedented levels of service agility, flexibility and automated scalability.

The Service-based architecture of the core consists of software applications, compute resources, networking, and storage. It is the part of the network that enables IP connectivity between a customer on the Verizon network and the services that a customer wants to use such as Internet access, voice calls, and enterprise applications. A higher level of operational autonomy unleashed in Verizon’s 5G core design will be critical for the next generation of services being enabled by new network technologies to serve consumer and enterprise customers.

“Our mission has always been to build and operate the best, most reliable, highest performing, and secure networks in the world,” said Adam Koeppe, Senior Vice President of Network Technology, Strategy, and Planning at Verizon. “The 5G Core is a critical step in achieving our goal. From the densification and virtualization work in the Radio Access Network, to the architectural design changes in the core of the network developed specifically for telco workloads, we are working to ensure customers not only have access to 5G, but have the most advanced, secure, and robust network to support the remarkable new solutions being developed on 5G technology.”

The Verizon Cloud Platform (VCP), on which the 5G core is built, is based on a Webscale software architecture with advanced technologies designed specifically for telco workloads. VCP is a distributed platform that supports edge services, private cloud services, Network Function Virtualization tools, Cloud Native Functions, Web applications, mapping and spatial analysis tools, orchestration tools, service assurance tools, auto-remediation, and compute offerings. Using VCP, Verizon’s 5G core will be able to achieve new levels of operational automation and adaptability to create differentiated customer experiences. This directional technology platform that enables MEC will support stand alone, non-stand alone, and VoNR services.

Benefits of the 5G Core

The advanced capabilities, high speed, increased bandwidth, and low latency of 5G is inspiring development of a wide variety of new use cases that include everything from massive numbers of IoT devices that use very few network resources, to smartphones with nearly infinite opportunities to use data, to more complex solutions such as AR/VR and mixed reality that will require massive computing capabilities and low latency on the edge of the network. Those solutions will each require different combinations of network capabilities. The 5G standalone core’s cloud-native virtualized applications, in combination with built-in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), will enable the dynamic allocation of the appropriate resources, referred to as network slicing. It will also allow for automated network configuration changes, including the ability to scale up or scale down network function capacity - to provide the right service levels and network resources needed for each use case.

In addition to network slicing and dynamic resource allocation, Verizon’s new 5G core will provide other benefits:

Real-time resource management of Radio Access Network and core virtual container-based network functions

Advanced analytics of network data to improve network performance

Optimized services between Verizon's fixed and mobile networks

Scalable, more cost-efficient architecture

Ability to move workloads to fit use case requirements

“Bringing traffic onto the newly designed core coincides with the ecosystem development around us. With a critical number of customers now having devices that can access the advanced features of the 5G core and the solutions and applications development – especially for enterprise customers – really taking off, now is the ideal time to move traffic onto the new core,” said Koeppe.