Comcast moves 5G core to AWS, embracing cloud for agility and cost savings

Comcast announced it has migrated its 5G core network to Amazon Web Services (AWS), transitioning from on-premises infrastructure to cloud operations, including Amazon EC2, VPC, NLB, and EKS. The move allows Comcast to efficiently develop new solutions and scale services—offered through Xfinity Mobile and Comcast Business Mobile—using multilayered AWS infrastructure and telecom-specific automation frameworks.

Comcast will use AWS’s telecom-specific features, analytics, and continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) to “innovate and deploy new features, autoscale network capacity and perform lifecycle management.” AWS infrastructure includes the fourth generation of its ARM-based Graviton chips, which outperform x86 and others on a price-performance and power-consumption basis. In a 5G core network trial, NTT DOCOMO saw a 72% reduction in energy use running second-gen Gravitons vs. legacy x86 processors.

The transition reflects a broader industry trend toward cloud-native solutions. O2 Telefónica was first to launch such a network in May 2024. In the US, Dish Network deployed a 5G stand-alone network in the AWS cloud covering 70 percent of the population as of June 2023.

Telecom workloads demand scale, reliability, and security. As carriers become comfortable the cloud can meet these, they hope to realize new use cases, such as APIs for network management and cost-efficient high availability and disaster recovery (DR) leveraging the cloud’s enormous elasticity.