The Little Mobile Wireless Provider that Could

While the three top operators are saddled with decades of legacy tech and its drawbacks, small but mighty Boost Mobile is sprinting to the future

They’re a group of pioneers with a drive to change the wireless telecom industry, building the world’s first end-to-end 5G standalone core deployment on a public cloud platform. They’re already providing coverage to over 80% of the U.S. population using their own 5G mobile towers; their roaming partners raise that number to 99.9%.

They’re Boost Mobile, and they are setting a new industry standard for agile and scalable network infrastructure, creating the fastest future proof wireless network running on American technology.

Dawood Shahdad, the company’s VP, of Core Network and Innovation Labs, spearheaded the project and spoke to us recently about the landmark achievement. Given his scope of work, it’s a wonder he was able to take a breath to do so.

For the past three years, he’s been responsible for the design and operation of Boost Mobile’s wireless core network in the United States. He’s also responsible for the Open Infrastructure Radio Access Network (O-RAN) validation, and now the Open Ran Center for Integration and Deployment, a lab funded by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration to help promote O-RAN in the wireless ecosystem.

Shahdad also leads innovation labs for everything under the wireless umbrella at the company. Boost Mobile, an EchoStar brand, files patents at a rapid pace that outruns all of the other brands in the enterprise. He’s supported by a muscular hand-picked team of just 100 people, 60 of whom work on the infrastructure initiative.

“We are rapidly growing our on-network subscriber numbers, and although we are just starting our journey, our competitors have the same network and the same complexity in the core network as we do,” he said. “They could easily be having 600 to 800 people running what we’re doing with a fraction of that headcount.”

The engineering team was assembled to ensure the group would be as self-reliant as possible. “We wanted to make sure the knowledge would stay within the company. For that reason, I stayed away from hiring contractors within my core network space.”

To simplify the day-to-day operations, Boost Mobile built a system that makes it easier for their engineers to work on a variety of platforms. An abstraction layer makes it possible to dive into a vendor’s product – to perform diagnostics, checks, all maintenance work, and read out traffic – without actually knowing the complexities of the product.

Every aspect of the project that can be automated is automated. “We’ll be scrappy for the next several years, focusing heavily on automation to help keep our costs low.”

Deeply engaged partners support and provide expertise, and work with Shahdad and his team to find ways to expand the O-RAN ecosystem and build something that can be safe and secure.

Starting off with 5G standalone meant that Boost Mobile wouldn’t have to deal with the legacy technology stacks of the 4G, 3G, and 2G networks that other operators have. “Even today, there are very few true 5G standalone networks because they must migrate from older networks. Because we had a fresh start, we were able to build it to where we are in a position to accelerate significantly faster than anybody else out there going forward.”

Over time, network software has evolved from physical network functions to virtual machines and now to container network functions. Containers are relatively small and run much more efficiently than virtual machines and were a perfect fit for the project.

Eschewing physical data centers meant rethinking deployment. When the project began in 2021, they evaluated how to get power, find locations and equipment, and staffing. Questions abounded around building the network. “Do we pair up with a hyperscaler such as ESS, with data centers all over the country? Or do we partner with them and utilize their data centers in their cloud-centric technologies?”

Boost Mobile is tiny in comparison to the amount of traffic and data that hyperscalers handle. As such, it made perfect sense for Boost Mobile to use the infrastructure already built for scale vs. building its own from scratch and extending its build timelines. “It gives us an enormous advantage in terms of time to market. We’ve also done some very large-scale migrations in a fraction of the time that it would take a traditional operator. We are super excited because this allows us to focus on our transition towards the next generation of technology and innovate towards the future.”

Boost Mobile partnered with their network equipment providers, including Nokia, Mavenir, Samsung, and others, and asked them to accelerate the development of the container-based software, and paired up with AWS to deploy the entire network on the public cloud. “Now we have leapfrogged acquiring the data centers and we’re ready for the next generation,” he said. “The advantages it brings us are immense.”

Their partnership with Rakuten Symphony is another terrific asset. “Rakuten started on a similar cloud-native journey in Japan, although they had to deal with more challenges early on because 5G SA wasn’t there quite yet,” he said. The global leader in IT services has developed cloud-native, open interface platforms that make it possible to launch and operate advanced mobile services in a fraction of the time and cost of conventional approaches. Rakuten does all that with no compromise to network quality or security, making them a great match for the project. “They started off with 4G, and they had to go through that transformation from the data center to their own cloud. They had some extra challenges, but their vision matched what our vision was.”

T-Mobile, Verizon, and AT&T have started transitioning towards 5G Standalone, but Boost Mobile clearly leads the way, not just in being the cleanest deployment of all but also the only one utilizing public cloud. Shahdad posited that the other operators have to factor in the cost of operating their existing data centers with long term investments already made in addition to just the costs associated with moving to the cloud. “Right now, they will have to deal with two separate costs, so they may not want to jump at the same pace as we did,” he explained.

Currently, the rest of the players are aiming to leverage existing investments without adding delta cost. (Delta cost is the change in cost resulting from a change or modification in a project or design.) “It puts us in a better position to adopt the future use cases versus always trying to catch up.” AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile will likely go to the public cloud, but it’s going to take some time.

Meanwhile, Boost Mobile has created a modern blueprint for wireless core network design. “We’ve done a fantastic job getting us where we are at currently and we are very bullish on this being scalable. We want more adoption from the bigger operators because we’ve fundamentally transformed where mobile technology’s headed,” he concluded. “We’re immensely proud to be the world leaders in this journey.”