CISCO, INTEL, RED HAT AIM AT CLOSED 5G RADIO SYSTEMS

Cisco has used Mobile World Congress 2018 to tout a group of vendors working on open tech for the mobile radio access network.

“Virtual RAN” – Radio Access Network – refers to a shift in base station architecture away from proprietary functions running on vendor-specific base station hardware.

vRAN remakes the mobile network on the principles of the International Telecommunication Union’s (ITU’s) network function virtualization (NFV) standards: the base station becomes a minimally-featured radio unit, with baseband, management, and subscriber functions on shared, virtualized, general-purpose computers in the carrier core.