Engineers on the Cloud and 5G Networks Need to Know About Open RAN Trends

After the Mobile World Congress (MWC) wrapped up last month in Barcelona, Spain, and the dust settled, a trend emerged: many of the announcements were focused on Open RAN. One of the biggest benefits of Open RAN is its ability to combine the strengths and technologies of many different companies. Therefore, at MWC, a lot of partnerships were extended with the aim of enabling companies to take full advantage of 5G capabilities for mobile networks.

So, lets, dig into some of these announcements and then theorize what it all might mean for 5G, the cloud and beyond. Then, in a future article, engineers can learn more about how the Open RAN technology works and what they need to know about it for their cloud setups.

At MWC, VMware had two major announcements related to its steps toward expanding Open RAN services. First, VMware announced an expanded partnership with NTT DATA to support large-scale Open RAN deployments with their combined portfolio of solutions. In other words, NTT DATA’s continuous framework for CI/CD/CT, which is already used across operators, will now incorporate the VMware Telco Cloud portfolio of solutions. NTT DATA plans to use the cloud-enabling technology to improve scale, efficiency and agility within its networks to meet the expectations of customers. The companies specifically highlighted that their partnership would aim to address multi-domain service management and orchestration as well as configuration management to make Open RAN adoption easier at scale.

Long-term, the goal will be to improve the configuration, testing and operation of cloud-native functions in large-scale Open RAN deployments. The companies are also working on solutions that can be used on either new or existing network deployments.

“VMware and NTT are further simplifying and accelerating the transformation of service provider networks,” said Zia Yusuf, senior vice president of strategic ecosystem and industry solutions at VMware. “As a GSI ecosystem partner focused on the Telco industry, NTT DATA brings a unique set of capabilities and experience to our mutual customers that enable them to adopt open, modern network approaches such as Open RAN more quickly.”

Both companies seem particularly invested in this endeavor, as both are current members of the 5G Open RAN Ecosysten eXperience (OREX), a research lab that allows communication service providers (CSPs) to test and verify vRAN and Open RAN solutions. 

Beyond NTT DATA, VMware also announced an expanded partnership with Samsung, which will integrate Samsung’s O-RAN-compliant virtualized RAN solutions with the VMware Telco Cloud platform for the DISH Wireless 5G network.

This is an expansion of their collaboration to deliver global 5G capabilities, originally announced in 2020. Since then, the two companies have codeveloped an architecture and cell site deployment model that integrates Samsung’s virtualized distributed unit (vDU) with the VMware Telco Cloud platform. They’ve already tested and validated the system to be interoperable and support RAN deployments at scale. Plus, Samsung collaborated on the 5G Core solution for the VMware Telco Cloud platform, which supports essential functions within mobile networks, such as network slicing selection and session management functions.

With the next steps in their partnership, the companies seem motivated to make Open RAN adoption as easy as possible for other CSPs and to make fully cloud-native infrastructure a reality for anyone.

“5G investments will continue to accelerate globally, and over time, CSPs will expand their focus on delivering Enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB) to include Ultra-Reliable Low-latency Communications (URLLC) and Massive Machine-type Communications (mMTC), leveraging new core, edge and RAN infrastructure,” said Patrick Filkins, IDC senior research analyst in the original 2020 release. “To efficiently and simultaneously support these new services, CSPs are best-served adopting cloud-native architectures that can provide the service agility, accelerated innovation and end-to-end optimization to meet today and tomorrow’s customer requirements. VMware and Samsung have demonstrated their leadership in 5G, and we see this partnership beneficial for CSPs as they modernize their network infrastructure.”

Earlier at MWC, HPE and Nokia announced an expansion of their existing partnership to offer an Open Cloud RAN solution for Nokia customers. With the partnership, HPE telecommunications servers will now be used for Nokia mobile customers when their Cloud RAN solution is deployed in a given network. In the future, the Cloud RAN solution will integrate with purpose-built RAN infrastructure and hardware for mobile networks. In light of this, the two companies hope the future network solution will improve performance, connectivity and capacity for mobile users.

To start, the companies are focused on the Nokia product solution that will combine the Nokia 5G Cloud RAN software (among other solutions) with the HPE ProLiant DL110 platform. Initial testing has already been successful, with an end-to-end Layer 3 data call running the 5G RAN software on HPE’s platform

Together, the two companies highlighted their mutual goal (echoed among many of the Open RAN announcements in the last few weeks) of taking full advantage of 5G networking capabilities through the expansion of Open RAN solutions. The solution will be available worldwide later this year.

Adding to the Open RAN announcements at MWC, Samsung and Vodafone announced their plans to expand their 5G Open RAN network capabilities across Europe, beginning with Germany, Spain and the UK.

The announcements expand on the already successful partnership between the two tech giants, which had their first 5G Open RAN site launched in Bath, UK, in January 2022. New developments now include the use of Samsung’s Massive MIMO radios, compliant with Open RAN, across Vodafone’s commercial network in the UK. Plus, the companies have successfully demonstrated the interoperability long promised for Open RAN by completing a data call using NEC’s Massive MIMO radio and Samsung’s vRAN.

“Samsung’s virtualized Open RAN solutions are successfully running in Vodafone’s commercial network in the UK, delivering performance on par with traditional mobile radio networks and providing Vodafone with an agile network on which to deploy new services and features,” said Thomas Riedel, head of Samsung Networks Europe.

At MWC, NEC also announced its next generation 5G vDU, powered by the Qualcomm X100 5G RAN Accelerator card, that run on the HPE ProLiant DL110 platform. The solution is designed to meet the need for low-latency and high-capacity networks for mobile users. It will also help CSPs to manage increasing data loads through the improved capacity and flexibility of Open RAN.

Echoed among all the announcements from MWC was a commitment to the realization of 5G’s full cloud potential. Companies seem to agree that Open RAN is the best way to realize this goal and that it will support the open, interoperability necessary for flexible networks that can handle massive and ever-changing data loads.

Unfortunately, most of the announcements remained light on technical details and focused more on the broad strokes of how these collaborations will lead to decreased costs and increased performance for CSPs. However, we’ll learn more over the next few years as we witness the rollout and global expansion of 5G Open RAN.