Cisco Spearheads Multi-Vendor Open vRAN Ecosystem Initiative For Mobile Networks

First ecosystem of its kind brings together innovators including Reliance Jio, Altiostar, Aricent, Intel, Mavenir, Phazr, Red Hat, and Tech Mahindra

 

BARCELONA, Spain, Feb. 25, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Mobile World Congress - Mobile network operators are facing strong pressures to evolve their businesses and operations for profitable growth and differentiation. Explosive demand for bandwidth persists, while ARPU pressures mount due to competition and limited service innovation. Addressing these challenges requires industry innovation focused on delivering new revenue-generating services based on a more flexible and agile service delivery environment, while reducing Capex and Opex.

Innovations such as network function virtualization have laid the groundwork for a new fundamental architecture to emerge. While many functions of a mobile network are being virtualized, including the Evolved Packet Core (EPC), IP Multimedia Subsystems (IMS), the Gateway Internet LAN (Gi-LAN) and data transport, the radio access network represents the final domain for disaggregation and virtualization. It facilitates a true end-to-end, software-defined mobile network. An open, standards-based virtualized Radio Access Network (vRAN) is a key enabler for this new architecture and the creation of a dynamic multi-vendor ecosystem. Together, they deliver an economical and flexible platform that satisfies a variety of use cases and applications.

While there is significant innovation happening in and around open vRAN today, there are considerable gaps and challenges that make it difficult to assemble end-to-end solutions, putting heavy burden back on operators and startups with limited scope. We believe it is the ideal time to align and collaborate to solve the key challenges to deliver innovative RAN solutions ready for commercial deployment.

Today, with more than 30 years of experience building the largest multi-service, open IP networks in the world, Cisco is announcing plans to form a multi-vendor ecosystem designed to address these issues and accelerate the viability and adoption of Open vRAN solutions.  

Cisco is working with ecosystem vendors who have confirmed plans to join the initiative including Altiostar, Aricent, Intel, Mavenir, Phazr, Red Hat and Tech Mahindra to spur rapid innovation in both hardware and software domains. Through this initiative, Cisco and the other ecosystem parties plan to focus on assembling viable solutions that build on an open and modular architecture, drawing from existing industry efforts and that will support a variety of use cases. The work of this ecosystem will be customer-driven, leveraging input from top worldwide operators such as Reliance Jio. Priorities include activities that simplify the transition to Open vRAN and software-defined mobile networks including: