NetNumber announced the industry’s first cloud-native platform designed to ensure InterGENerational™ network performance. The innovative NetNumber TITAN.IUM™ platform provides concurrent support for 2G, 3G, 4G and 5G on a single platform.
The majority of operators across the globe will continue to manage, update and make significant revenue from their 2G, 3G and 4G networks for the foreseeable future, and are seeking solutions that protect that investment while bringing legacy technologies forward to integrate with 5G. According to GSMA Intelligence’s Mobile Economy North America 2019 report, nearly 20 percent of U.S. subscribers are still using 3G networks while an October 2019 report from TechUK indicated the need for 2G services is likely to continue into the 2030s to support elderly subscribers, users in rural locations, and machine-to-machine (M2M) applications.
“For decades, the telco network has been monolithic and complex—but today, the industry is undergoing a dramatic shift in the transition to 5G and cloud-native infrastructure,” explained Steve Legge, NetNumber Chief Operating Officer. “However, while vendors continue to innovate new technologies, legacy technologies have a longer life than expected as they continue to meet the needs of operators and their subscribers. During the last 18 months NetNumber has been working with our customers to validate the approach we are taking to develop the platform, including with a key customer in Asia, demonstrating that CSPs across all regions are undertaking the cloud-native journey.”
Leveraging the capabilities, knowledge and experience gained from the NetNumber TITAN platform—a multi-protocol, centralized signaling and routing platform, which is widely deployed in over 250 CSP networks worldwide—the TITAN.IUM Platform provides an ideal approach to realize operators’ network evolution plans. NetNumber TITAN.IUM is designed to reach the next evolution in performance and scale, making it ideal for 5G and Mobile Edge Compute (MEC) architectures, providing vertical and horizontal scale-out with low latency, coupled with a suite of data replication capabilities that provide flexible architectural options which can evolve with the changing network over time. It offers a rich set of InterGENerational applications for 2G, 3G, and 5G that enable Secure Signaling and Routing; Subscriber Data Management; Access, Authentication & Authorization; Fraud Prevention and Internet Protocol (IP) Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) control.
According to Sue Rudd, Director Networks and Service Platforms for Strategy Analytics, “Cloud-native software solutions put operators on the path to 5G Service Based Architecture, enabling them to leverage microservices for faster upgrades, flexible service creation and easier interoperability testing. NetNumber has taken its innovative approach another step forward with a cloud-native platform that is backward compatible to protect the operators’ investment in their core infrastructure, while bringing 5G service and network interoperability to their legacy technologies.”
The key building blocks of the TITAN.IUM Cloud-native platform includes a streamlined container-based design, orchestrated by Kubernetes. This design enables fully automated lifecycle management that allows operators to instantly install, provision, upgrade and auto-scale resources. The TITAN.IUM data model is a secure, open access, solution that easily integrates into any operator environment. The platform supports a “deploy anywhere” implementation that facilitates the use of native containers and containers wrapped in a Virtual Machine (VM) or a turnkey hardware/software solution. This combined open model, deploy implementation model and InterGENerational support makes TITAN.IUM easy to integrate with any operator’s network, reducing evolution risk and time-to-market for new 5G services.