Analysis of business opportunities for tower companies enabled by virtualization

Abstract

After describing the modifications introduced in the telecom landscape by the emergence of tower companies (for short, TowerCos), we present potential innovations which can be achieved by enriching towers with edge cloud resources capable of supporting virtualized network functions, notably virtualized Broad Band Units (BBUs) of radio access networks. In particular, we discuss the opportunity of deploying in addition service nodes to host services by service providers in such far edge clouds. This would definitely change the business relationships between TowerCos, network operators and service providers. While this analysis applies mainly to mass market, we discuss how the concept of TowerCo could be extended to B2B market. It turns out that for developing business at the edge of the network, notably requiring local breakout of traffic f1ows, some fundamental principles of the mobile network protocol stack have to be revisited. We also present how an alternative solution based on Magma initially developed by Meta for radio coverage extension could be used in the business of TowerCos for B2C and B2B markets.