“We don’t just follow telecom evolution — we engineer the bridge between its legacy resilience and tomorrow’s innovation.” — Scalicon Inc.
Overview
Erlang was created in the 1980s at Ericsson to solve a specific — and massive — problem: how to build telecom switches capable of running non-stop, handling thousands of concurrent connections, and recovering gracefully from failures without dropping calls. The answer was a language and runtime system designed from the ground up to deliver reliability, concurrency, and fault isolation at scale.
Today, Erlang/OTP still forms the backbone of telecom infrastructure. The principles embedded into its architecture now power components of modern 3G, 4G, and 5G networks, carrier-grade routers, and network orchestration systems. Companies like Ericsson and T-Mobile continue to use Erlang deep within their stacks. Cisco ships millions of devices per year containing Erlang-based components — with some sources estimating that up to 90% of global internet traffic passes through routers managed by Erlang-powered control planes. Erlang has moved from switching centers into the heart of cloud-native telecom.
Why Erlang Leads in Telecom
Erlang/OTP was never a general-purpose language — it was purpose-built for telecom. Its process model is based on the actor paradigm, where each process is isolated, lightweight, and fails independently. Supervision trees ensure recovery happens at the right scope and in the right order. These features aren’t just architectural luxuries — they’re essential for networks that require five or more nines of availability.
With built-in support for clustering, soft real-time guarantees, and hot code upgrades, Erlang/OTP allows live systems to evolve without service interruption. Its native support for binary protocols makes it an ideal platform for working with Diameter, ASN.1, SCTP, and SNMP — all critical to telecom systems. Parsing and handling complex message flows becomes declarative and safe, and distributed systems emerge as first-class citizens.
Scalicon Inc. builds on this foundation by designing custom mobile core components, event-driven telecom middleware, and runtime platforms that gracefully handle network churn and signaling noise.
Soft Real-Time Performance at Scale
In telecom, milliseconds matter. Whether you’re coordinating handovers between towers or processing charging requests across multiple data centers, systems must behave predictably under load. Erlang’s BEAM virtual machine offers soft real-time scheduling, ensuring that time-sensitive operations aren’t blocked by background memory management.
The runtime supports hundreds of thousands of processes concurrently, and thanks to preemptive scheduling, no single process can stall the system. TCP, UDP, and SCTP socket management is non-blocking and scalable by default. For packet-processing pipelines, Erlang provides a concurrency model that’s far more resilient and introspectable than traditional threading.
At Scalicon Inc., we optimize these patterns to deliver control-plane services and distributed messaging layers that perform consistently under dynamic traffic patterns.
Ecosystem & Open Source Foundations
The Erlang telecom ecosystem is not a theoretical concept — it’s a proven, evolving foundation actively driving production systems worldwide. Open-source projects like SigScale implement a wide range of 3GPP protocols (MAP, NGAP, SCCP), RADIUS and Diameter gateways, TAP decoders, and CDR mediation modules — making it easier than ever to build reliable OSS/BSS platforms on Erlang.
Erlang/OTP itself includes essential telecom tooling out of the box: diameter, asn1, os_mon, and others — enabling the development of charging gateways, policy engines, and even full virtualized packet cores without external dependencies.
Meanwhile, companies like Travelping maintain an extensive suite of Erlang-based telecom components — including gtplib (GTPv1/GTPv2 support), eradius (RADIUS server framework), and <strongergw, their Erlang Gateway implementation used for PGW/GGSN functionality. Travelping’s AAA architecture also supports real-time authentication, authorization, and accounting — showcasing Erlang’s strength in managing binary protocols and mobile core functions.
Otolo Networks adds to this ecosystem with contributions like rebar3_osv (for building Erlang unikernels) and VRRP-based HA tooling, demonstrating how Erlang remains relevant in cloud-native, high-availability telecom environments.
This rich ecosystem — spanning ASN.1, Diameter, GTP, and AAA — reflects a broader movement: engineers around the world actively use, extend, and maintain Erlang-powered platforms for carrier-grade systems. At Scalicon Inc., we leverage and contribute to these open foundations while delivering custom, production-grade systems with deep focus on fault tolerance, observability, and performance.
Proven in Production
Erlang’s record in production speaks for itself. Ericsson’s AXD telecom switches achieved legendary uptime — 99.9999999% — and ran for years without reboot. Cisco uses Erlang in its NSO and ConfD platforms to manage intent-based networking across millions of devices. WhatsApp famously relied on Erlang to handle messaging at global scale. And dozens of Tier-1 telecom vendors continue to integrate Erlang into their signaling, monitoring, and orchestration stacks.
The real measure of Erlang’s success isn’t just uptime or throughput — it’s the graceful handling of failure. Whether it’s an overloaded tower, a failed routing node, or a bad packet, systems written in Erlang recover autonomously and continue functioning with minimal disruption.
Resilience, Security, and Future Compatibility
Telecom systems must resist failure, adapt quickly, and evolve over time. Erlang’s design makes all three possible.
Supervised processes restart cleanly on crash. Distributed nodes communicate transparently with built-in messaging. TLS, secure hashing, and strong cryptography libraries are part of the standard stack. And hot code upgrades mean that fixes can be deployed live, without the need for customer-visible downtime.
As 5G introduces new layers of complexity — from dynamic edge infrastructure to core slicing and orchestration — Erlang’s design patterns remain highly relevant. And Scalicon Inc. stands at the intersection of legacy stability and modern telecom agility.
Summary
Erlang/OTP was built for telecom — and it’s still the best tool for the job. Its ability to handle binary data, orchestrate high-concurrency workloads, and self-heal under pressure make it uniquely qualified to power control planes, message brokers, charging engines, and everything in between.
At Scalicon Inc., we bring decades of Erlang/OTP experience to telecom clients who need more than a backend — they need a resilient distributed system they can depend on.
Let’s build the core network logic that doesn’t blink when things go wrong — let’s build it in Erlang.
