Deutsche Telekom’s Horizontal TelCo Cloud (HTC) establishes a new industry blueprint for telco clouds

Deutsche Telekom’s (DT’s) Horizontal TelCo Cloud (HTC) marks a shift to a disaggregated, horizontal cloud platform for fixed and mobile core networks. HTC reflects DT’s investment in cloudification and automation across its core networks over several years and is guided by earlier initiatives such as the operator’s next-generation IP multimedia subsystem (NIMS) programme in 2018. HTC represents a large-scale, industry-leading implementation of a common cloud-native platform and unified network automation.

This perspective details DT’s implementation of HTC, and explores the motivations and components of the HTC architecture, the outcomes the project has delivered and the key learnings and best practices for other operators. It positions the HTC project as a blueprint that DT’s peers can use for their own network transformations, while also demonstrating what is possible to achieve with the right investment in technology, people and processes.