Paradise Mobile Offers New Take on What a Provider Can Be, Top Executives Say

Paradise Mobile, which launched last year in Bermuda and will start operations soon in the Cayman Islands, offers a new take on what a wireless network can look like, executives for the mobile network operator said Tuesday during a Light Reading webinar. The network is a completely virtualized open radio access network.

Paradise has been able to hit 1.2 Gbps download speeds to an average end user, with “aspirations” of hitting 2.2 Gbps download speeds, more than 300 Mbps upload, said Zlatko Zahirovic, chief technology officer. “The results speak for themselves,” he said. “The network is geared for high performance” and is the fastest “by quite a long way” in its market.

The largest risk of losing market share is to over-the-top players, not to other carriers, said Paradise CEO Sam Tabbara. “The real risk here economically is you become a dumb pipe, and you’re capturing only a minority of the revenue,” he said. All the revenue streams telcos relied on foundationally, because they had the most infrastructure and reach, they’re not losing to other telcos, they’re losing them to the Skypes, the WhatsApps and the Netflixes of the world, he said.

If carriers could move away from proprietary hardware and software, “they would be able to innovate at the speed of a startup, which is really their No. 1 competitor today, and be able to roll out products, features, services and test them, with real customers … in weeks versus quarters or years,” Tabbara said. “We’ve been really keen to prove this model,” he said.

Open application programmable interfaces (APIs) are emerging as a “glue” to connect services and a way to drive the monetization and agility of networks, said Jim Hodges, chief analyst at Heavy Reading. “We’ve also seen a lot more adoption of seamless cloud-native services” and “the rise of third-party APIs,” he said. “This is something that’s really going to impact a lot of service providers,” he said. The trend is that everything is becoming a “service,” he said: “Network is a service. Infrastructure is a service. Software is a service.”

As the world moves to an API-driven world, “it really gives service providers to up their game in terms of how they deliver content and how they work with content providers,” Hodges said.

Beth Cohen, Verizon technology strategist, said her job is to create new products, “which is pretty cool.” Cohen stressed the importance of “staying cutting edge.” Verizon is seeing API use cases “all over the place … at all aspects of the network stack,” she said.

“We have a whole suite of APIs that we expose … that allow our customers to access their services and their data pull, more specifically, that they can pull into their own systems,” Cohen said. Verizon also uses APIs internally to build applications “and in some cases we’re exposing some of those APIs to our customers,” she said. “We’re very, very heavily invested in APIs” and support open APIs, she said. “APIs are extremely important, both to Verizon and within the industry in general,” she said.

Paradise Mobile is looking to build as flexible a platform as it can, allowing experimentation, Tabbara said. “We’re exposing almost anything network related to third parties,” he said. The carrier is already running hundreds of APIs, he said.