If continuous software updates makes sense on PCs, tablets and phones regularly, why should it be any different for telecom nodes that handle mobile broadband traffic for entire cities?

To provide continuous software updates, one must provide both continuous delivery and continuous deployment. These two terms are sometimes confused so let’s see what they mean.

 

What is continuous delivery & deployment

Continuous deployment means that every change is automatically deployed to production.

Continuous delivery means that the team ensures every change can be deployed to production but may choose not to do it, usually due to business reasons. In order to do continuous deployment one must be doing continuous delivery

Continuous Delivery is actually a subset of agile, in which the team keeps its software ready for release at all times during development. It is different from “traditional” agile in that it does not involve stopping and making a special effort to create a releasable build.

What are the benefits of continuous software updates?

Telco Vendor Benefits

  • Development of software that is better focused on customer needs and updated more frequently to introduce cutting-edge functionality
  • Increased software quality, significantly reducing the number of trouble reports received from customers
  • Operational expenditure savings of up to 50 percent

 

Telco Operator Benefits

  • Increases the Operator’s responsiveness to changing market demands
  • Enables the Operator to keep pace with technological innovation

 

Ericsson realizes continuous software updates

The realization of the benefits of continuous delivery and deployment has transformed the way Ericsson delivers software updates to network operators. Before now, continuous delivery and deployment of software releases has not been seen in a telecom environment or on this scale.

For example, customers of Ericsson Continuous Software Delivery and Deployment are able to get Packet Core software updates monthly rather than every six or 12 months. Also, new software can be live in an operator’s network within as little as two days of general availability, reduced from six to nine weeks.

 

Packet Core is one of the first offerings in Continuous Software Delivery and Deployment.Other ‘early adopters’ already include Ericsson Network Manager, Ericsson IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) and Ericsson User Data Consolidation (UDC) software, but the change is taking place more widely within Ericsson too.