Adam Koeppe, the senior vice president for technology strategy, architecture and planning at Verizon, said the operator's move to virtualized infrastructure is ongoing. "For us, it's a super-efficient way to architect next-generation networks, those capabilities and that technology concept feeds right into the radio access network," he said.
Koeppe, speaking at a recent 5G World panel hosted by Light Reading's Mike Dano, continued: "What we're in the midst of now is virtualizing the baseband radio functions within Verizon's 4G and 5G networks.
"The trick shot of the challenge for global network operators like ourselves and Vodafone has been how do you take telecommunications infrastructure and the functions they provide and use that in a virtual environment," he added. "That's where the lion's share of the work has been over the last few years."
A lot of progress has been made and Yago Tenorio, group head of network architecture at Vodafone Group, added that the operator has been working on open RAN for five years. "We've been very active since then," he said. "We've had trials set up and working, taking live traffic in India and Turkey. These are pretty significant size trials, I would say. More recently, we've set up trials in two countries in Africa, Congo and Mozambique and we brought them to Europe as well, to Ireland and to the UK."
Both speakers agreed that the early efforts have turned into the momentum that is fueling further progress. "I agree that this is for real," said Tenorio. "I would even add, this is unstoppable now. The tests that we've done over the last couple of years have been very successful. The performance that we've been able to extract from the open RAN systems we deployed in all cases ended up matching the incumbent software engineering vs computer science and, in some cases, they even got slightly better KPIs."
No comments:
Post a Comment