Vodafone leverages Wind River Studio for UK Open RAN rollout
Wind River, a software provider for mission-critical intelligent systems, has announced its latest collaboration with Vodafone. The partnership involves using Wind River Studio in Vodafone’s Open RAN deployment across Wales and South West England.
Wind River Studio is a cloud-native, Kubernetes and container-based architecture built on the open-source StarlingX project. The company says it enables simplified and automated management of distributed edge networks at scale.
Studio tackles the challenges of deploying and managing a physically distributed, cloud-native infrastructure to deliver traditional RAN performance in a vRAN/Open RAN deployment.
As part of this deployment, Vodafone is taking significant strides towards modernization by replacing traditional, legacy equipment with Open RAN, impacting approximately 2,500 sites. The companies say the shift to Open RAN is essential in telecom evolution, offering more flexibility and enhancing service agility.
According to Paul Miller, the chief technology officer at Wind River, the company is excited to work with Vodafone and other partners to drive the development of Open RAN.
“Wind River Studio delivers cloud-native solutions that enable the high-scale deployment of next-generation network infrastructure for service providers worldwide,” says Miller.
Vodafone says a series of tests and several successful European deployments underpin its Open RAN program. These deployments’ key performance indicators (KPIs) affirm that Open RAN matches or outperforms traditional equipment.
The Open RAN deployment in Wales and South West England follows Vodafone’s successful introduction of Open RAN in urban environments across Europe in 2022. This earlier project was also executed in collaboration with Wind River and other key ecosystem partners.
According to James Grayling, the head of Open RAN Product Integration at Vodafone, Open RAN has the potential to bring diversity to the telecommunications supply chain and drive innovation.
“To successfully meet the complex challenges of a changing telecom landscape, it is important to work with technology partners such as Wind River, who can deliver proven solutions to help us move the industry forward,” adds Grayling.
Both companies say open RAN enables service providers to transform business models, reduce OpEx, improve energy efficiency and enhance customer experiences with a cloud-based environment.
Wind River says it has made other significant contributions to the telecom industry by supporting the world’s first successful 5G data session, developing commercial vRAN/Open RAN programs, and introducing the first fully automated edge data center for commercial service.
In addition, earlier this year, Wind River announced that KDDI is utilizing Wind River Studio for its open RAN-compliant 5G virtualized base station. By leveraging Wind River Studio Cloud Platform technology, KDDI says it can automate configuration and monitor geographically distributed far-edge clouds.
Vecow, Stereolabs team up to reshape the spatial AI landscape
Comments