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Comment by one2three4 | Hacker News Reader

This is gold.

>> In reality, most service providers have not been operating on this model for decades. Driven by balance-sheet mechanics and consultants, service providers have been highly incentivised to outsource anything that could possibly be outsourced, and then some.

>> In a modern telecommunications service provider, new equipment is deployed, configured, maintained and often financed by the vendor. Just to let that sink in, Huawei (and their close partners) already run and directly operate the mobile telecommunication infrastructure for over 100 million European subscribers.

I think it's quite a safe bet that no operator in China went that way by buying and outsourcing from/to Western companies.

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Ericsson threaten to leave Sweden, if actions by Swedish government meant that they lose access to the Chinese markets and running/future contracts.

And those Western companies that sold to China telecos had their IP stolen and appear in Huawei/ZTE products few years later.

It's nearly impossible for telecom to deploy/configure/maintain their networks by themselves due to the scale. For example, I just googled, AT&T seems to have 67000 towers/macro cell sites. Let's say they want to update all of them to install modern 5G equipment. In many cases this equipment may come from different vendors and to deploy it might be multi-day job. Of the top of my head, about 20% of site visits fail due to various reasons (with good percent of them failing even before starting due to scheduling issues, sickness, not delivered at time equipment, etc) .

How much time and people it will take to AT&T to do all the work on it sown ?

> How much time and people it will take to AT&T to do all the work on it sown ?

About as many people as are currently working on it, probably. The work does, in fact, get done by real live humans. That they work for a contractor only adds humans in the middle. Also the money to pay them is present; it just flows through a few extra contractor accounts first.

And who will support existing network: fixing things, dealing with day to day operations, etc ? If it's same people, deployment timelines will be extended by years.

If it's not and you hire extra people in order to work on this deployment, than when job is done, you end up with extra few thousands of employees that have nothing to do and you need to fire them. In this case it's easier, faster and cheaper to outsource the work than doing hiring of thousands of people, training them and then firing them when job is done...

It’s a project based business model and isn’t particularly challenging to staff. For the field service portion of my business, I can tell you how many man hours at each title I need for the next 2-3 years. You know what you maintenance demand is and can project capital projects, because the business knows what capital money it’s borrowing.

End of the day, it’s more to do with accounting stuff like fixed asset inventory, risk management and keeping salaries and benefits low. It’s easier to fire a contractor or hire a shittier/cheaper one than deal with a bunch of employees. IMO, saving hard dollars isn’t a driver.

upgrading 67k towers for 5G and making relevant changes in software/network infra, it's not "project based business model". This particular exercise called "network transformation" and it makes grown men cry and quit their job :)

> If it's not and you hire extra people in order to work on this deployment, than when job is done, you end up with extra few thousands of employees that have nothing to do and you need to fire them. In this case it's easier, faster and cheaper to outsource the work than doing hiring of thousands of people, training them and then firing them when job is done...

Are there enough carriers that the contractors stay busy 100% of the time or do they just hire and fire people as needed?

I get why contract gigs can be mutually beneficial but it seems like either the demand is there for full-time trained technicians to do a particular job, or there isn't. If there isn't, then it does it really matter who does the hiring/firing?

I think what I always figured was that most deployments are rolling and there will always be new tech to train on and then deploy every few years, which sounds fairly sustainable as a full time labor force. I haven't ran a telco before obviously.

Hiring/training it's a time consuming process, especially for large scale project like this (think, 67k towers across entire united states).

Usually telecoms RFI pretty much entire project from third party vendors (or few of them, on order to reduce risks), with very long list of requirements covering everything from software integration to hardware deployment. Vendors will bring teams of their own engineers for "higher level jobs" and a whole bunch of "licenses" subcontractors to do actual track rolls. In case it's a complicated project, like upgrade to 5G, vendor most likely can't provide entire solution by itself, so it will be a "consortium" of vendors that stich up complete solution that is organized by vendor that answers RFI. In this case each vendor may have it's own subcontractors who may have their own subcontractors etc...

They did it before, even had to wire everything together, coast to coast.

"Before" it was simple. Now it's very complex. It's very complex exercise in large scale planning, logistics and coordination. If company tries to do it by itself, it something that will take years of work of hundreds to thousands of dedicated to this task people to accomplish.

Market and customers require faster pace.

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