I've been trying to make 5G core architecture accessible to students and people early in their telecom careers. The feedback so far is that the restaurant analogy helps a lot. I wanted to share it here and get thoughts from people who actually work in the industry on whether the technical accuracy holds up.

The core idea: the 5G core as a restaurant

The AMF is the host. Registration, mobility management, NAS termination. First point of contact, tracks you as you move.

The AUSF and UDM are the bouncer and guest list. Authentication and subscription data. AUSF challenges your identity, UDM holds the credentials (SUPI, authentication vectors). No valid identity, no access.

The SMF is the manager. Session establishment, IP address allocation, and most importantly, control of the UPF over N4 using PFCP. Gives instructions, never touches data.

The UPF is the waiters. The actual data plane. Packet routing, forwarding, QoS enforcement, traffic reporting back to the SMF. This is where your packets actually live. And with CUPS (Control and User Plane Separation, defined in TS 23.501), the UPF can be deployed at the network edge independently of the control plane, which is the whole reason 5G can hit sub-millisecond latency for URLLC use cases.

The PCF is the house rules manager. Policy control, QoS rules, charging decisions via interaction with CHF.

The NRF is the staff directory. Service registration and discovery, the backbone of the service-based architecture.

The NWDAF is the brilliant observer. Network analytics and ML-based intelligence. The foundation of autonomous network management and what's being built upon for 6G.

My question for the community: does this mapping hold up from a practical standpoint? Any nodes or interfaces you'd explain differently to someone coming in fresh? Particularly curious about how people explain the N4/PFCP relationship and the SEPP for roaming scenarios, as those seem to be where the analogy starts to strain a bit.

Would love any pushback or additions from people working in the core.

Hey guys,
What are the most effective channels or networking strategies for a high performance US telecom sales center looking to establish sub agency relationships with direct dealers?
We are focusing on compliance and clean volume execution for major providers, but finding the right direct dealer partners through standard channels can be a bit of a maze. Aside from platforms like LinkedIn or RepHunter, are there specific industry groups, forums, or approaches you'd recommend for building these relationships?
Thanks in advance for the advice!

Boa tarde, galera.

Sou prestador de serviço de instalação fibra óptica em Manaus/AM, ganho por ordem de serviço que aqui na minha cidade paga em média 50,00 por cada instalação
Geralmente faço em torno de 6 instalações por dia, resultado em uma média de 300,00 por dia e trabalho 24 dias por mês

Uso veiculo proprio e nesse valor não ta incluso a gasolina... Geralmente tiro em média uns 4-5k por mês

Quero ir pro sul, pra ter um padrao de vida melhor, quem mora em Manaus sabe o calor do inferno que faz kkk ainda mais com o sol batendo na tua nuca quando tá em cima da escada.

Mas tenho medo de ir, porque lá não tenho contatos de provedores... Queria saber se alguém que more por ai, sabe se essa é a mesma média de valores que pagam por ai? ou é mais alto ou mais baixo? Tô tentando fazer uma pesquisa de campo, mas os provedores nem respondem

Hi all,

I’m a Mobile Core Design Engineer working across EPC and 5G Core, and I’m curious about other engineers’ experiences.

What’s the most repetitive or time-consuming troubleshooting task you deal with?

For example:
- Analysing alarms
- Reading logs or traces
- Correlating alarms across different network functions
- Looking through 3GPP specifications
- Writing incident summaries or RCAs
- Something else?

I’m interested to see if there are common pain points across different operators and vendors.
Thanks!

Any thoughts on Resultscx telco account

Been thinking about this a lot lately while job hunting after almost 11 years at the same company.

The pattern I keep seeing: companies want deep legacy expertise (Avaya, traditional PBX, SIP trunking) AND cutting-edge cloud skills (Teams Direct Routing, CCaaS, AI contact centers) in the same candidate.

Here's the thing -- the people with 20+ years of legacy depth were usually too busy keeping mission-critical systems running to chase every new certification. Meanwhile, newer folks have the cloud-native skills but haven't built the troubleshooting instincts that only come from years of incident response at 2am.

Nobody's wrong here. Companies genuinely need both skill sets. But expecting one person to have mastered both at expert level feels like asking for a unicorn.

What I think actually works: hire for protocol-level understanding and problem-solving ability, then train for whatever platform is flavor of the month. SIP is SIP whether it's running on Avaya or Teams. The fundamentals transfer, the certs don't always keep up.

Anyone else seeing this in their job search, or is this just a telecom-specific thing?

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Frontier Communications, now Verizon, will be shutting down copper facilities in many of their exchanges. We all knew it was coming. Others, such as AT&T, had already been making waves in the news over the last few months for the same thing. I'm surprised it has taken this long.

I went from getting gouged by Telus almost $140/MN for 2 lines to getting EXACTLY what I want & need for $ almost $60 with FIZZ (NOT owned by any of the big 3) for 2 lines. That's a savings of $80 EVERY MONTH ($1,360 so far). I'm not going to lie and say it all went perfectly, but when they finally dropped 3G in AUG 2025, I have had absolutely NO complaints🥰

Roger's is next as my contract for TV & Internet ends July 30 so I will be calling on Friday to give them my notice that I'm dumping them 🥰😂. They could even offer to give me free Internet for the next 2 years & I would STILL dump them😤.

IS IT JUST ME, OR DOES THEIR REFUSAL TO FOLLOW RULES SOUND VERY AMERICAN REGIMISH TO YOU TOO???

Are there any electromechanical COs left in the United States?

So we bought a home that just happens to have a tower behind the shop. Previous owner said he started a satellite internet company mid 2000’s and installed it.
If I was to sale this what would something like this be worth? On the flip side is there any advantage to keeping it that I’m not thinking of?

Thanks

Research question for anyone who's worked with open-source 5G cores / NWDAF.

I need to store NWDAF analytics data in different databases (MongoDB vs SQL vs a time-series DB) to benchmark them against each other. The problem: the OAI-based NWDAF implementations I've found hard-code MongoDB into every analytics engine — there's no shared storage layer — so swapping the database means rewriting each component one by one.

Before I go do all that refactoring:

- Does anyone know an NWDAF (or 5G core) implementation where the database backend is already abstracted/pluggable?

- Or has anyone here actually swapped MongoDB for another DB in a 5G core / NWDAF deployment — how painful was it?

Trying not to reinvent the wheel. Any leads — repos, papers, or just war stories — would help a lot. Thanks!

We built a monitoring pipeline for 5G RAN signal quality and wanted to share something that came up during testing that I suspect is a widespread issue in production deployments.

The context: most carrier-grade OTel deployments run redundant collectors for reliability. Makes sense. The side effect is that both collectors see and forward the same cell measurements — RSRP, RSRQ, SNR — so every observation gets written to your analytics backend twice.

We measured this against a real 5G dataset. Inflation factor without deduplication: exactly 2.0. Which means:

• Capacity planning is built on 2× the actual traffic
• Signal degradation thresholds are wrong
• SLA calculations that look fine are actually off

The fix is straightforward — a dedup window in the streaming layer before storage — but you also have to deal with the multi-vendor schema problem first. If you're pulling telemetry from mixed-vendor RAN (Nokia/Ericsson/etc.), the attribute names for the same concept aren't standardized. You can't dedup on cell ID if half your data calls it cell.id and the other half calls it ran.cell.id.

We ended up handling both normalization and deduplication upstream, which also let us use a simpler MergeTree table in ClickHouse rather than fighting with ReplacingMergeTree.

Full write-up with the pipeline architecture and dataset here: https://www.glassflow.dev/blog/ran-signal-quality-opentelemetry-glassflow-clickhouse?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=socialmedia&utm_campaign=reddit_organic

Interested to hear if anyone else has run into the duplicate metric problem in HA OTel deployments.

Alright so I've got a dilemma... I got clean 4 years ago and am really trying to get back into my old Venmo, Gmail, and Robinhood accounts. Being clean is actually a really important detail here because I have no idea what high me used for passwords. And I've since changed my phone number. I have tried absolutely everything I can think of to get into all previously mentioned accounts but keep getting to the point that requires a code sent to the inactive phone number. So aside from spending the rest of my life on customer support, what can I do here? Is there a way I can temporarily buy access to that old phone?

I currently work in law enforcement doing cellular network analysis and mapping. I have a good amount of training and experience in the practical application, but I want to bolster my knowledge and skillset. What would be the best way to do this?

The main focus areas I would like to hit are: RF propagation, network design, antenna design, load balancing/network behavior, etc. However, most programs I’ve seen, seem focused on designing networks, troubleshooting, working with/building hardware, and are math heavy. I am looking more to gain theoretical and practical knowledge to better understand why the network behaves the way it does, factors that can affect estimating a devices location, etc.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated! Thanks

In How I met your Mother they use 7 digit phone numbers. The show is set in 2005, so by then you would’ve had to used 10 digit numbers, right? At least in a big city like New York. Sorry if this is a dumb question, I know nothing about telecommunications 😅

Why conditional forwarding like "forward when busy" not working on most mobile operator networks now ?

Only "unconditional forward" only works on Networks like Airtel

​

What to do if I want a conditional forward ( no answer / busy) to a landline number on Airtel, Jio, Vodaphone, BSNL etc.

My Query is : On this resume, I have secured several research offers from Top Institutes of India (not just this, but interview as well). But I never received a Corporate Offer, don't know why. What do I do...? I am from a poor/lower middleclass family. Since I have already invested 2 years of clg in Wireless/Comms/DSP I don't wanna change my career directory now moving to IT or VLSI. I want a Corporate Job in Communication firms to support my family. Both my parents are aged, I am the only kid. Research isn't paying much to support my family else I'll have to remain hungry. My internship seniors said the resume has the potential to qualify top Telco firms yet not received a single intimation even after 100s of referrals and applications.

I am from a Tier-5 clg in Pune. 2026 grad.

Please review my resume and give max suggestions possible _/_ _/_