5G, Data, and the Future of Telecom with Sunrise’s CTO Elmar Grasser

Chad Watt: Welcome to Ahead in the Cloud, where business leaders share what they've learned on their cloud journey. I'm Chad Watt, Researcher and Writer with the Infosys Knowledge Institute. I'm joined today by Elmar Grasser, Chief Technology Officer of Sunrise Telecom, a mobile internet and television provider in Switzerland. Welcome, Elmar.

Elmar Grasser: Hello, Chad. Thank you for having me.

Chad Watt: Elmar, tell us about your work in telecom and technology before Sunrise.

Elmar Grasser: My education that I got from the University of Technology in Vienna, I studied computer science, joined then Siemens, worked, did the standardization for GSM in the US, kind of preaching the GSM religion in the US. Worked for several operators like Iridium, the satellite operator, worked for O2 in Germany and in the UK already in management positions. And then as a CTO for tailoring in Austria for E-Plus in Germany and for Orange in Austria. So pretty long time, 30 years of experience in telecommunications.

Chad Watt: As CTO of Sunrise, what are your top priorities?

Elmar Grasser: It's always quality and efficiency, these are the two most important things in my life. And when I talk about quality, I mean customer perceived quality, not technical parameters, but perception is what counts. Perception is reality, so concentrating of what is relevant for the perception of the customer in terms of quality and on the other side, investing in those things that are really relevant for the customer quality. That is super important.

Chad Watt: What is it that customers expect in 2024 that perhaps they didn't expect from you as a telecom company in 1994?

Elmar Grasser: Overall Chad, I think it's pretty simple. Customers just want to be connected every time everywhere. So basically have coverage everywhere, deep indoor as well as in the rural areas. That is very important. What has changed over time is the data consumption has increased just incredibly in an exponential way. And while we are talking, this is still ongoing, especially on the mobile side. The increase of data is still very high. For example, our customers use in average 36 gigabyte per month on average, our mobile customers. And still growing.

Chad Watt: Switzerland has a history in culture that emphasizes precision and quality. As a technology leader, what do you do to ensure that Sunrise delivers that for your customers?

Elmar Grasser: Well, first of all, listen to the customer, understand of what is relevant for the customer. And then as I mentioned, invest very, very targeted into what are customer-relevant innovations or on the other side, what brings the cost down? These are the two elements we are focusing most or there's a benefit for the customer, or it has an effect on the cost development that we have.

Chad Watt: I want to come back to your point on data. You said your average customer uses 36 gigabytes of mobile data monthly?

Elmar Grasser: Per month, yes.

Chad Watt: And that's continuing to increase?

Elmar Grasser: It's continuing to slightly increase. It's not that much increasing anymore, but it's still increasing. It's not stalling. Yeah.

Chad Watt: So as that increases, what are you doing to get ready for that? How do you prepare to serve a world where people are using 40, 50 and 60?

Elmar Grasser: Well, we were one of the front-runners in introducing 5G. I think we would have a problem on the mobile network if we did not introduce 5G. About over 30% of our traffic is now already on 5G. So it is not easy to find new sites in Switzerland. Landlords are not easily found that give their rooftops in order to be able to install sites. And similar to 4G sites in terms of capacity, are already basically upgraded to the absolute maximum. So 5G is technology that can take more capacity and take it more efficiently.

Chad Watt: Now let's talk about data center consolidation. Sunrise today is a combination of cable television and telecom providers that came together four years ago or so. And more recently, your work has been around consolidating the data centers from those different organizations. Why are you consolidating those data centers now?

Elmar Grasser: Well, there's basically, again, two reasons. One is cost saving, and the second is to introduce geo-redundancy, especially for the IT data center that came from the UPC side. So basically we're introducing more resilience into the network and at the same time lowering the cost of the network, which is again, really remarkable.

Chad Watt: When you look at cost and data centers, how much data and how many locations did you have at the start of this consolidation. And how much data and how many locations do you have as you wrap up this consolidation?

Elmar Grasser: Well, we had four data centers on the network side, which we reduced to two data centers, and we had three data centers on the IT infrastructure side, and we reduced that to two data centers while at the same time introducing geo-redundancy on the IT data center side. So that was really, really important.

Chad Watt: Tell us what you mean by geo-redundancy, and then let's talk about why that's important.

Elmar Grasser: We have now two data centers, one in Dubendorf and one in Otelfingen. They are about 20 kilometers apart. So if there is a real impact on one of the sites, which we have seen, whether constellations, where floodings and power outages have hit data centers. So in this case, if one data center is impacted, then the other data center carries still all the services and all the data, and therefore the customer would still get continuous services if one of the data centers is impacted. And the geo-redundancy, it is very unlikely that this happens with two geographically distant sites in the size as I have described.

Chad Watt: You made this transformation, you did this consolidation, all at the same time you're still serving all those customers. What were the challenges of making this change and keeping the customer satisfied?

Elmar Grasser: Well, it is kind of operation on the open heart when you do something like that. I think we have transferred about 3000 servers and over 350 databases with very critical data in it. So we have worked over 30 weekends where we had to do night work as well. So an incredible amount of work had to be done while everything is kept alive and the customer should not notice anything. I think that worked out very, very well. At the same time, Chad, what we also did this on the network side, we moved from a traditional platform in a absolutely new cloud-native core network, mobile core network service that now adds all the advantages of cloud-native operation of a mobile core network. So that is an additional advantage that we introduced with this data center consolidation.

Chad Watt: You basically have in addition to cost controls added resilience via geo-redundancy, you're adding some new capabilities. Can you describe some of that for me?

Elmar Grasser: Our core is a 5G SA mobile core that runs on cloud-native technology with all the advantages that come with the cloud-native technology, cheaper operation, more continuous operation when introducing new services so that we have achieved at the same time with this data center consolidation. That was certainly done in the context of the data center consolidation, not per se with the data center consolidation. So we introduce new technology at the open heart while replacing also the technology in the platforms.

Chad Watt: Having gone through this and looking back as you close out this consolidation, is there any kind of general advice you would have for people considering this sort of work on your systems?

Elmar Grasser: I think the most important thing is to keep everything stable during the time, which requires a really good plan, a very professional plan, and we had a little hiccup. So what is important when you have an issue that you are able to roll back to a point where the status is defined so that you can bring back the service in very short timeframe, which we had in the context of the whole data center consolidation that I described. We had a maximum of approximately 40 minutes outage during the night, which we then brought back to service pretty quickly. So nothing else. So there was a customer impact that was absolutely [inaudible 00:10:29] because happening during the nighttime and then with the rollback fixing it very, very quickly.

Chad Watt: What is the next project for you as a CTO at Sunrise? What's coming up next?

Elmar Grasser: Oh, there are so many projects, Chad. If I would list them, that's a lot going on. I mean, we are continuously evolving the networks, the fixed network as well as the mobile network and mainly coping with the capacity needs that are coming in. At the same time delivering new services on the TV side. We have a very comfortable TV service for the customer where he can view all the TV programs over the last seven days, and he can always use all this content on the time when he requires to use it. We integrated it with other services like this Disney, Netflix and DAZN and all these services.

So we're delivering a very stable service to the customer everywhere throughout the country, while it is on the mobile side as well as on the fixed side. There was significant cooperation in this data center consolidation with Infosys, and I would like to thank my colleagues from Infosys for the absolute professional work that has been done together with my team, they have planned it through and executed it and towards timelines as well as the financials, everything was perfectly kept within the plan. So a compliment to my team and to the Infosys team who did this together.

Chad Watt: Well, Elmar, thank you for your time today.

Elmar Grasser: Thank you, Chad.

Chad Watt: This podcast is part of our collaboration with MIT Tech Review in partnership with Infosys Cobalt. Visit our content hub at technologyreview.com to learn more about how businesses across the globe are moving from cloud chaos to cloud clarity. Be sure to follow Ahead in the Cloud wherever you get your podcasts. You can find more details and our show notes and transcripts at infosys.com/iki that's in our podcast section. Thanks to our producers, Christine Calhoun and Yulia De Bari. Dode Bigley is our audio technician. This is Chad Watt with the Infosys Knowledge Institute signing off. Until next time, keep learning and keep sharing.