Elastic Telco Infrastructure

Several operators are currently busy rolling out their own private clouds or offering infrastructure as a service. In most cases this will not be a great business since they are coming two/three years late. Business do not care if their virtual server is ran by Amazon, Rackspace, IBM or their operator. They care about price, innovation and support and operators are only likely to be able to improve this last parameter.

Operators should be focusing on elastic infrastructure but instead of IT infrastructure it should be on elastic telco infrastructure.  Elastic telco infrastructure is telco infrastructure that can be deployed by the click of a button and can autoscale. A TV show wants to have half the country send SMS to vote for their favorite dancer. No problem. They get a virtual SMSC with a virtual premium number. The service will run on 1% of a physical server but when the show is on it all of a sudden will start using 50 servers. Those 50 servers do not have to be part of the operator’s private cloud. A cloud bursting can be done towards a public cloud and 45 servers can be rented for an hour or two. Afterwards when things go back to normal the virtual SMSC will use again 1% of a physical server.

The SMSC example is just one example of a long list of elastic telco infrastructure that operators could use internally as well as offer as a service. The imagination will be the limit…