Microsoft Enters the 5G Market With Latest Acquisition

Microsoft is getting into the 5G market with a new acquisition. The company today announced it is acquiring Affirmed Networks, a company that provides virtualized, cloud-native mobile network solutions.

That probably won’t make a ton of sense, but Affirmed Networks’ solutions essentially help network operators reduce costs and rapidly launch new services.

Windows Intelligence In Your Inbox

Sign up for our new free newsletter to get three time-saving tips each Friday — and get free copies of Paul Thurrott's Windows 11 and Windows 10 Field Guides (normally $9.99) as a special welcome gift!

"*" indicates required fields

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

[ad unit=’in_content_premium_block’]

With the acquisition of Affirmed Networks, Microsoft is getting into the 5G game in an interesting new way. Of course, Microsoft will eventually be launching its own hardware with 5G connectivity at some point, but this is completely different from that. Instead, what Microsoft aims to do with the technology of Affirmed Networks is to offer network operators with new solutions that help them deploy and maintain 5G networks efficiently.

“With Affirmed Networks, we will be able to offer new and innovative solutions tailored to the unique needs of operators, including managing their network workloads in the cloud,” says Yousef Khalidi, Corporate Vice President of Azure Networking at Microsoft.

Microsoft essentially plans to integrate Affirmed Networks technology into its own cloud solutions part of Microsoft Azure to offer carriers with new services that help them improve overall profitability in the world of 5G connectivity.

Tagged with

Share post

Please check our Community Guidelines before commenting

Conversation 3 comments

  • VancouverNinja

    Premium Member
    26 March, 2020 - 3:59 pm

    <p>Smart move.</p>

  • bart

    Premium Member
    26 March, 2020 - 4:27 pm

    <p>With google offering Google Fi, would it be far fetched for MS to launch something similar?</p>

    • joeaxberg

      Premium Member
      26 March, 2020 - 10:11 pm

      <blockquote><em><a href="#534135">In reply to Bart:</a></em></blockquote><p>I think this acquisition is about keeping up with AWS as a cloud services provider. Just like companies are moving compute workloads to the cloud, so to are some communications providers moving networking workloads to the cloud. Software Defined Networking, Network Function Virtualization. The scale needed to support Mobile, IoT, and 5G is huge and carriers are looking for ways to save money. Traditional networking gear replaced with virtualized versions running on plain vanilla servers – or on somebody's cloud.</p><p><br></p><p><br></p>

Windows Intelligence In Your Inbox

Sign up for our new free newsletter to get three time-saving tips each Friday

"*" indicates required fields

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Thurrott © 2024 Thurrott LLC