The promise of a trusted, secure and open 5G future

The race to 5G is on and I am excited to be a part of it.

5G will advance the way people live and work, with end users benefitting from new digital services never before imagined. The promise of hyper-connectivity, ultra-low latency and exponential bandwidth performance will open up entirely new digital experiences throughout cities, venues, health care facilities, campuses, at work, and in the home.

However, the pervasiveness of 5G brings risks. Data loss, privacy breaches, and cyberattacks on individuals, organizations and governments are possible if control of 5G networks falls into the wrong hands. I am committed to ensuring that HPE customers in the USA and abroad have the most secure and highest performing 5G networks. Today, HPE has unveiled a 5G portfolio that can make this happen.

HPE’s 5G vision is based on four fundamental principles. We believe that telecommunications companies that deliver 5G services, and the consumers that use them, should benefit from a 5G network that is open, secure, proven, and delivered as-a-service. This is what telcos, consumers and nation states around the world want in 5G. And HPE’s 5G portfolio, which is built on these four pillars, is ideally suited to enable a positive 5G future that benefits everyone.

With 5G, global communications networks are changing. While previous generations of cellular networks relied on proprietary, integrated systems from a small number of incumbent suppliers, 5G standards have been designed to take advantage of open, cloud-native platforms that allow telcos to deploy new 5G services faster and in a more flexible way. To fully realize the benefits and power of 5G, an open approach is required. I am encouraged that the White House has embraced this approach in calling for 5G software to replace the proprietary telco hardware that the industry has traditionally relied upon. It is the right approach, and is a fundamental tenet in HPE’s edge-to-cloud platform-as-a-service strategy.

While efforts to open up the radio access network are gathering momentum, with HPE systems being deployed at the telco edge by some of the world’s biggest operators, it is even more crucial to ensure that the network core is open. This is the most sensitive part of the network and operators, as well as government authorities, need assurance that they are working with trusted partners and secure technologies. The new HPE 5G Core Stack provides this essential trust and transparency, by enabling telcos to access new revenues faster and future proof their network with an open ecosystem, network slicing and seamless integration with previous generation networks.

It may seem counterintuitive, but in this instance open equals secure. By utilizing open standards and modular software functions, telcos gain increased visibility into their system and can constantly adapt and embrace the most effective cloud-native security software, to combat the dynamic evolving threat of hackers and bad actors. HPE’s recent acquisition of Scytale, an innovative open source company focused on security across cloud, container, and on-premises infrastructure, is a great example of leveraging the benefits of an open community to strengthen an organization’s security posture. Furthermore, HPE offers the first industry-standard servers to include a silicon root of trust built into the hardware. The silicon root of trust provides a series of trusted handshakes from the lowest level firmware.  By working with HPE, an open, secure 5G network becomes far more attainable.

HPE is a proven leader in the telecoms industry with more than 30 years’ experience working in more than 160 countries, and provides hardware and software that is decoupled from proprietary systems to help telcos transform their legacy networks into a service-based architecture ready for 5G. HPE's edge-to-cloud, platform-as-a-service strategy is uniquely positioned to help telcos capitalize on the 5G opportunity. Although 5G lends itself to a multi-vendor approach, telcos require trusted partners to take responsibility for delivery. Working with partners, HPE has one of the broadest portfolios in the market spanning the telco core, to telco edge and into the enterprise.  Our offerings enable telcos to start deploying 5G in the core, virtualize the radio access network (RAN) and extend 5G connectivity into the enterprise with Wi-Fi 6.  Our new portfolio will accelerate telcos’ path to revenue growth with 5G and enable them to rapidly deploy 5G services.

The race to 5G is a technological, geopolitical, and financial challenge. Vast sums have been invested by governments and vendors in R&D across the industry, but the journey to 5G is still in its early stages. Although the functional gains and operational efficiency improvements of 5G are substantial, the pace of adoption and the technical capabilities required for the new use cases that will monetize 5G are still largely unclear. HPE can help operators fill this financial gap by deploying HPE 5G technologies as-a-Service with HPE GreenLake. This way carriers can acquire a 5G core with minimal up-front investment, and scale according to demand, with an elastic software ecosystem, ready to support unpredictable growth and future-proofed for forthcoming 5G evolutions.

With HPE’s breadth of experience and wide-ranging portfolio, US-centered 5G network solutions are available today. We have the right expertise in both hardware and software, as well as the right industry partnerships.

We are open, we are secure, we are proven and we can deliver 5G networks as-a-Service.

We are ready to help customers win the race to deliver on the promise of a trusted, secure and open 5G future.