Cisco, Intel, Red Hat Take Aim At Closed 5G Radio Systems

Cisco has used Mobile World Congress 2018 to promote a group of providers working in open technology for the mobile radio access network.

"Virtual RAN" - Radio access network: refers to a change in the architecture of the base station that moves away from the proprietary functions that run on the hardware of the provider's specific base station.

vRAN rebuilds the mobile network according to the principles of the Network Function Virtualization (NFV) standards of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU): the base station becomes a minimally functional radio unit, with baseband functions, administration and subscriber in general shared, virtualized purpose computers in the bearer's core.

An Open vRAN movement began to shake at the end of 2017, when Red Hat, the vRAN Altiostar specialist and the Indian Tech Mahindra service team started working together (Tech Mahindra analyzes that arrangement here).

The Cisco group gathered for the Open vRAN effort includes those three, in addition to Intel, the radio vendor Altiostar, the engineering company Aricent, the software company Mavenir, the LTE operator based on Mumbai Reliance Jio, and the developer of wave 5G and mm Phazr.

The Tech Mahindra blog post says that the virtualization efforts of mobile networks to date focus on the core of the package and the IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem).

Gathering the group, Cisco's announcement said, will help close those gaps. The Open vRAN group will work on an "open and modular architecture".

The group's task list includes roadmapping, testing and integration, validation of the solution, execution of concept tests, creation of management templates and evolution of transport.

Intel has also been pushing the vRAN for a couple of years. His previous efforts included an agreement with China Mobile, Telefonica and Alcatel-Lucent at the Mobile World Congress in 2015.

The contribution of Intel at that time was to bring their Xeon processors to virtualized baseband units (vBBU).

Intel was already working with Altiostar and Mavenir on its Network Builders program, while Red Hat has a long-standing relationship with both Chipzilla and Cisco.