VMware’s telco cloud ambitions today reached the most broadly deployed infrastructure of all: the radio access network (RAN). 

The vendor today released VMware Telco Cloud Platform (TCP) RAN, an expansion of its recently reorganized and repacked stack of technologies for network operators. The company’s push from virtualized network cores into virtualized RAN (vRAN) has been underway for years.

“Dish is the launch customer for TCP RAN,” and the offering is commercially available today, said Sachin Katti, a strategic advisor at VMware and co-chair of the technical steering committee at the O-RAN Alliance.

Dish Network last week said it will have its first 5G network operational in Las Vegas by the end of the year. The aspiring greenfield operator inked a deal with VMware in July 2020 that effectively cemented VMware as its central hub for network automation, integration, and third-party vendor validation. 

The carrier is also using VMware’s platform as an abstraction layer running across multiple network domains and will allow Dish to tap into hyperscale public cloud capacity while maintaining core control points. Dish last week struck a deal with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to act as the preferred cloud provider and base for its 5G network.

VMware’s Telco Cloud Platform is composed of two layers — infrastructure and automation, Katti explained. The RAN sector has always been vertically integrated with proprietary hardware tightly coupled with software and a management system, but the cloud is helping operators embrace a series of steps leading to vRAN and then, eventually, a fully open RAN, he said. 

“To really bring the cloud to the RAN it has to solve a bunch of pretty important challenges. Primary among them is the fact that the RAN workloads are extremely real time, and so you have very tight latency constraints,” Katti said. RAN also typically has “very unique requirements around access to bare metal hardware” for time synchronization and hardware acceleration, he added.

RAN is also highly distributed, “so unlike the core of the network where you put down maybe 10 data centers for an entire network and collect, aggregate all of the processing needed for the 5G core in those 10 data centers, the RAN by definition will look like 10,000 to many more small cloud deployments or small data centers,” Katti explained. 

VMware’s cloud infrastructure can now manage the real-time workload requirements and support the unique, compute-intensive features that are needed in vRAN, he said. 

VMware’s Telco Cloud Platform RAN follows Intel’s FlexRAN software reference architecture, which is widely considered the industry standard for vRAN. Intel and VMware last year formalized a collaborative effort to develop a more integrated and interoperable platform for vRAN and open RAN.

VMware’s new vRAN stack also includes the vendor’s vSphere ESXi for virtualized and containerized RAN functions, its Kubernetes-based Tanzu for Telco platform, and VMware Telco Cloud Automation for network orchestration across network functions, services, and management.

“The transformation of the RAN will significantly change how operators purchase, construct, and maintain their mobile networks. It presents a significant economic opportunity and will allow for the introduction of new capabilities and expand the pool of solution providers,” Daryl Schoolar, practice leader of fixed and mobile infrastructure at Omdia, said in a statement.

“We forecast the convergence of openness and virtualization will generate around $3.4 billion in annual revenues by 2025, giving it about 9.5% of the total 4G and 5G RAN market. But before we get there, operators must figure out how to transition from legacy solutions to open and virtualized architectures without disrupting their services — quite a task,” Schoolar explained. 

VMware, according to Katti, is striving to deliver on the performance requirements of the RAN while providing operators with the benefits of the cloud, including the flexibility and management capabilities offered by Kubernetes.

“There's always this tension between abstraction that a cloud provides, and the performance requirements of highly unique workloads like the RAN, and that's the tension that we're solving,” he said, adding that VMware is confident the performance of vRAN running on VMware’s platform will be on par with tightly integrated implementations from traditional RAN vendors.

VMware’s sole competitors in the virtualized cloud space for RAN include Red Hat and Wind River, according to Katti. Those two companies “are the other cloud-only providers for this, so those will be the main competitors,” but ongoing vRAN implementation from RAN incumbent vendors like Ericsson, Nokia, and Samsung could change that dynamic, he said. 

That will be especially true if or when the RAN incumbents choose to package their own Kubernetes distribution as part of the vRAN network function framework, but that would be a more vertically integrated approach. Katti described VMware as a horizontal cloud player and a platform provider that doesn’t sell or make network functions directly today.

VMware is in discussions with Ericsson, Nokia, and Samsung about its Telco Cloud Platform RAN and “some of them are already in the lab and working with us, but I’m not at liberty to say exactly who,” Katti said. 

RAN virtualization is a “stepping stone” to open RAN and VMware continues to work toward that goal with additional support for O-RAN interfaces, he added. “We look at this as an essential and needed first step in the journey toward opening up the RAN completely.”