Operators & Automation

China has world’s cheapest electricity. This helps them afford cheapest products.
Even if we talk about cloud computing, we need massive servers.
To run these servers, we need massive electricity.
Since electricity is cheapest for China, their cloud computing cost is cheapest.
Huawei Cloud and Alibaba Cloud are competing with AWS.
Google Firebase is lagging behind Alibaba.

It’s what you put in cloud that matters not the cost of cloud .
And opex of cloud is not much.
Athonet offers 5G core for free to test.
Check internet for this.

It’s huge actually.
60-70% of bitcoin mining takes place in China because of the low cost of electricity.

Compared to MNOs monthly billing to customers it’s peanuts.

Check out Coinshare report on bitcoin mining.
They have done extensive research on electricity prices across the globe.
The underlying cost for every digital business today is cost of electricity.
The key differentiator.
Iran expects to make 8.5 billion USD a year from bitcoin mining.
It’s share in bitcoin mining is only 3.5%.
Now imagine revenue of China which mines 60-70% of bitcoin.

I’m not much into crypto mining.
I also don’t believe in bitcoin’s success.
Money without hard work will never come in a steady way.
Success is temporary without hard work.

Bitcoin is the hardest money on earth.
It’s supply is hard limited to 21 million.
It’s actually fiat money which is produced out of thin air.
It takes too much of hard work to produce a bitcoin.

Bitcoin has still to convince world.
One advantage is that governments won’t be able to print money anymore.
Bitcoin does not allow this, it is impossible with bitcoin.

Is it really cheap or subsidized by government?
I actually have no idea.

Guys do you ever think that PHY layer (low or high) will ever run in cloud?
I don’t think this will happen soon, or anytime to be honest.

Ideally it has to be physical :sweat_smile: should always need a medium.
But then 25 years, who would have thought of having cloud taking over network operations?
So Cloud PHY or similar product might be possible in next 15-20 years. :man_shrugging:t2:

Samsung has PHY on cloud, they are running trails right now and will be available soon.
Their entire protocol stack is now virtual and it’s called VDU - Virtual DU.

I fail to see a way you can do cloud based PHY.
The RF frontend needs to be physical and there’s too much local processing.
And it’s also really delay sensitive.

But i might be wrong…

Yes there are some components that can be moved to cloud.
Whatever software bases processing is done it’s move to cloud.

I think they have split physical layer now in lower physical and upper physical layer.
Lower physical layer is local.
Upper layer can be moved.

It’s cheap because they have too much electricity.
The price of electricity in China is 0.081 USD per kWh. For USA, it’s 0.15 USD per kWh.
For Germany it’s 0.38 USD. :blush:

But massive MIMO needs most of PHY on site and operate at very high speeds.
Wouldn’t cloud introduce delay of more than 1 msec?

All values from China needs to be trated with care.
You don’t know how much is government subsidies for that price.
There is no free market there.

Government is not subsidizing it.
China is making the most of hydroelectric.
It also uses coal and solar energy.

You’ve opened your RAN, now what?
Phase 2 of Open RAN: Automation