Chapter 1: How do telcos manage network updates without downtime?
Okay, Sam, let's say you're about to buy a new home.
Okay.
What are the things that you look for in a new house?
Price first, probably location. And for me, a big one is walkability.
Oh, yeah. Yeah, I'm with you on that. Do you think about internet speed? I know you and I both do a bit of working from home. Does internet speed factor into it?
I generally assume because I live in the Bay Area that I'm going to be able to have good internet access. But if I were not here, if I were like out in more rural areas, then I could see that being a huge part of the conversation.
I get my internet through overhead lines and I've got quite a slow internet connection. Sam, you'll know when we do these recordings, sometimes...
That was a perfect impersonation. You started to become quite robotic right as it happened to.
You know, what does it take for us to stay connected? Have our communication systems constantly updated all while keeping our data safe? Sam, in this episode, we're going to be finding out more. I'm Michael Bird.
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Chapter 2: What challenges do silos present in telco networks?
Exactly.
That makes this whole thing even more important that you protect it. Just think about it. Just one minute. How many lives may depend on that? That's something we are very, very aware. And that's one of the reasons why we take all the efforts and really, really make sure we do everything that you can think of that this is not going to happen.
So from a migration perspective, there must have been a moment where you had to switch a new system on and switch the old system off. So how did you manage that? Was that quite a challenging process?
Actually, no, because in fact, it's rather similar than doing an update. So what do you do? You build a new system in parallel. Of course, you test and test and test again because you want to be really, really sure this thing is working properly. Then you start first, you bring a few customers, you do pilots, you see how this is working. And step by step, you increase it.
You know, the good thing is you're not on the phone all day long. And as soon as you hang up your phone, if I switch then in the back, the anchoring where your phone will talk to if you dial, you don't even recognize. And next time you suddenly go instead of that system over the other system. Same for data. Typically at nighttime, you may not consume that much.
So if you disconnect you for a few seconds in nighttime and bring you back, it's a different IP address you don't recognize. This switching over can be done relatively easily, but it needs tremendous amount of planning, but that's a manageable problem.
I guess avoiding downtime is really important. The new way of structuring your system, does that help to avoid downtime?
It doesn't help to avoid downtime because Telcos always took pride in having this famous five nines availability. We also did it in the old world. The new system, though, helps people like me who are in charge for certain part of the systems to sleep a little bit better. Because you have more resilience in the network, right?
There's always something going on and we do tremendous number of updates and changes in the network all the time. And if in a classical setup, you only have two or three sites and one of the sites is going down, you're suddenly having two or maybe even only one lag. In a cloud environment, that's fundamentally different. Let's take a simple example. You have one network function.
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