AT&T teamed with Dell Technologies to develop open-source automation tools the pair claim will be essential for operators in the 5G era.

Specifically, they will work on provisioning and automation capabilities spanning hardware, networking and storage. They also aim to accelerate the release of second-generation specifications from Airship, an open source community focused on cloud infrastructure.

AT&T, SK Telecom, Intel and the Open Stack Foundation launched Airship in May 2018, with its first release in April 2019.

Kevin Shatzkamer, VP of Service Provider Solutions for Dell EMC, said in a statement the pair’s work will help enable “new breeds of experiential edge and 5G services”.

A company representative told Mobile World Live provisioning and automation is a key focus for the company, with the AT&T collaboration addressing “one of the biggest challenges service providers face: managing, provisioning and automating these massively distributed architectures”.

“For service providers to be successful in a 5G world, they need the ability to rapidly commission, and decommission, service capabilities and delivery. Operators don’t have time to use traditional data centre models for deployment and this is where automation comes into play. Our mutual goal is banishing complexity.”