Affirmed Networks is still basically acting as a stand-alone company even though it was purchased by Microsoft in April. Affirmed announced today that it’s working with the Swedish company Netmore to set up a private 5G wireless network in the U.K…It will be interesting to watch Affirmed as it gets more integrated with Microsoft. The cloud giant hasn’t been heavily involved with the wireless industry to date.  Mewada said, “Private LTE is obviously an important part. That becomes a low-hanging fruit.” But he said Affirmed’s virtual evolved packet core will allow any mobile operator to move its core network functions and compute workloads to Microsoft Azure's public cloud. He referred to this as “mobile core as-a-service" ported onto the Azure cloud platform.

(Fierce Wireless, Aug 18)

Gareth Owen's key takeaways:

• Microsoft has big ambitions in the telco space and has been quite active on the acquisition front recently buying Affirmed Networks, a vEPC provider in April and UK-based Metaswitch, an NFV pioneer in May.
• Affirmed’s vEPC will allow any MNO to move its core network functions and compute workloads to Microsoft Azure public cloud. This is essentially a “mobile core as-a-service” ported onto the Azure cloud platform. 
• Although private networks are the low-hanging fruit, there is basically no limitation on the size of the core as scale is not an issue in the cloud. Microsoft could thus even host mobile cores for Tier-1 MNOs.
• The Internet giants such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft see the telco cloud as a major opportunity. Clearly, they will be competing against mainstream mobile vendors such as Huawei, Ericsson and Nokia but also they will be partnering with them.
• While most Tier-1 MNOs have already developed partnerships with the big cloud providers to host their IT infrastructure, we doubt whether these MNOs will be happy to entrust the most sensitive part of their networks to public clouds. In fact, it is imperative that MNOs leverage multiple cloud environments, including private and hybrid clouds, rather than being reliant on a single public cloud provider.