There is an amazing amount of FUD in this article. I have worked in the telco industry for the better part of 30 years, and am back on it now after a 5-year hiatus in cloud computing.
Before I "left" there was certainly a trend towards outsourcing and large "swaps" of radio gear (Nortel-Ericsson in my case, and Motorola-Huwawei at a direct competitor, to quote only two examples), but there was no way in $UNDERWORLD that we would let a vendor have direct access to our gear unsupervised (be it Cisco, Ericsson, whatever). Remote troubleshooting was possible, but usually via jump boxes and VNC (only very seldom we would let anyone VPN in, and even then it was only to sub-sections of the network). Nothing left our O&M network. Nothing came in, either, because upgrades were rolled out from internal servers.
And it is still very much the same thing today. Although there are outsourcers and vendors who work alongside core staff in my telco customers (like myself now), we don't have access to anything but lab or dev environments, and even then mostly with MFA and very stringent limitations.
Outsourced staff _does_ do field service of various kinds, and they do have access to base stations, DSLAMs and various other physical infrastructure, but that's usually done with (usually much cheaper) local technicians and not vendor staff. There are certifications for those.
The reality is that most telco services are being "automated out" and moved to virtualized stacks that are easier to manage. And yes, VoIP on the core (no more SS7 if anyone can help it) and Kubernetes everywhere...
But what I found to be really weird was the notion of outsourcing billing. Besides being a GDPR nightmare (and I'm in Europe, like the author, so I find it doubly unsettling), that was only done "off-prem" when all companies involved were in the same group (which was customary when fixed and mobile operators were separate). These days billing is, comparatively, greatly simplified (thanks to flat fees, real-time billing systems for prepaid and streamlined bundles), so the only data that actually leaves the BSS core goes to the (smaller and smaller) printing facilities.
So I would take it all with a massive dollop of salt.
Before I "left" there was certainly a trend towards outsourcing and large "swaps" of radio gear (Nortel-Ericsson in my case, and Motorola-Huwawei at a direct competitor, to quote only two examples), but there was no way in $UNDERWORLD that we would let a vendor have direct access to our gear unsupervised (be it Cisco, Ericsson, whatever). Remote troubleshooting was possible, but usually via jump boxes and VNC (only very seldom we would let anyone VPN in, and even then it was only to sub-sections of the network). Nothing left our O&M network. Nothing came in, either, because upgrades were rolled out from internal servers.
And it is still very much the same thing today. Although there are outsourcers and vendors who work alongside core staff in my telco customers (like myself now), we don't have access to anything but lab or dev environments, and even then mostly with MFA and very stringent limitations.
Outsourced staff _does_ do field service of various kinds, and they do have access to base stations, DSLAMs and various other physical infrastructure, but that's usually done with (usually much cheaper) local technicians and not vendor staff. There are certifications for those.
The reality is that most telco services are being "automated out" and moved to virtualized stacks that are easier to manage. And yes, VoIP on the core (no more SS7 if anyone can help it) and Kubernetes everywhere...
But what I found to be really weird was the notion of outsourcing billing. Besides being a GDPR nightmare (and I'm in Europe, like the author, so I find it doubly unsettling), that was only done "off-prem" when all companies involved were in the same group (which was customary when fixed and mobile operators were separate). These days billing is, comparatively, greatly simplified (thanks to flat fees, real-time billing systems for prepaid and streamlined bundles), so the only data that actually leaves the BSS core goes to the (smaller and smaller) printing facilities.
So I would take it all with a massive dollop of salt.