Ericsson and Dell Technologies tightened a long-standing telecommunications partnership that is set to help open and cloud radio access network (RAN) deployments, including AT&T’s highly touted deployment that’s set to start in earnest later this year.

The tightened work will see Ericsson and Dell focus on developing network cloud transformation plans to operators tailored to their particular needs. This includes support and guidance on how to construct cloud-native architectures to support the specific telecom-needs of cloud and open RAN deployments.

That work will also include the commercial introduction of Ericsson’s Cloud RAN software on Dell PowerEdge servers. This will involve pre-certification of that combination to help ease the deployment and management of this system in a commercial environment.

Dennis Hoffman, SVP and GM for Dell Technologies’ Telecom Systems Business, told SDxCentral that the deal builds on one announced between the two vendors early last year. That agreement brought the server giant’s PowerEdge platform into Ericsson’s ecosystem as part of its Cloud RAN offering, with the new agreement adding what Hoffman said were three key components.

Hoffman explained these included a higher strategic focus, more comprehensive in scope and is more customer driven.

“It's significantly more strategic in the sense that it's something we did at a much higher level of the two companies in terms of interacting and deciding what to do and agreeing, and I think it's a something we are very fully philosophically aligned on in terms of an activity we can do together that drives both companies’ strategies forward,” Hoffman said.

This includes a more comprehensive approach to putting together their respective platforms to move on the broader ecosystem strategies toward network transformation efforts.

“I think a lot of people don't know what to do,” Hoffman said of those efforts. “They have an objective to transform. They understand that their network architecture changing is a big chunk of that. But they're, frankly, it's just a big daunting program and it's got a lot of moving parts, and they need support, guidance, advice to do anything, to help planning.”

Dell wants to broaden the open RAN ecosystem The customer-driven angle builds on Ericsson and Dell’s work tied to AT&T’s ambitious open RAN plans. Those plans were announced late last year and call for the carrier to spend $14 billion over the next several years to deploy open RAN components across its network.

Ericsson is handling a significant part of that deployment work, with Dell added as an announced product vendor earlier this year.

“This is something we felt we were going to have to do anyway, something we thought we needed to do for the industry,” Hoffman said of how the latest agreement with Ericsson fits into the AT&T move. “The beauty of it is that it's very much customer lead and we're not doing any of this on a whiteboard. We're able to take what we're doing together with AT&T and the idea was how do we formalize that and scale it and bring it to other operators around the world and see if we can't help accelerate their transformation.”

AT&T recently started deploying Ericsson’s Cloud RAN technology on its commercial 5G network at a location south of Dallas. This involved migrating one of AT&T’s C-band frequencies to the Cloud RAN infrastructure, which is now supporting commercial traffic.

AT&T and Ericsson also completed a test call across the commercial Cloud RAN infrastructure and stated “third-party vendors will be able to use this configuration for open RAN in the future.” AT&T has provided a goal of having 70% of its wireless network traffic flowing through its open RAN platform by the end of 2026.

Hoffman noted this early work has accelerated the notion of open network architectures up the executive tree and out into the field.

“This question of open network is moving from a an architectural question that is being investigated, debated and decided in the CTO office, to a working architecture that is being pragmatically reviewed for operational risk and reliability by the ops team,” Hoffman said. “That and that's huge for the industry that if this journey has moved off the whiteboard and into the field, and we're now starting to get a lot of questions about, look I don't have any time to troubleshoot. All I'm going to do is tell you my RAN is down in this city or it's experiencing problems, and I don't want any finger pointing. You're going to take [service level agreements] and liquidated damages as a unit so that I am confident that we all have shared incentive to get that problem addressed as soon as humanly possible. That's just not something we talked about in any level of detail with CTO organizations.”

Hoffman also explained that the deal is different from a Dell agreement earlier this year with Nokia that was more focused on expanding Nokia’s private 5G distribution and “Nokia effectively exiting the branded x86 space.”

Hoffman did add that the latest Ericsson is “every bit as interesting to Nokia and Samsung” in terms of where those vendors might go with their deeper integration efforts.

“I think there's very broad philosophical alignment now amongst at least all of the non-Chinese network equipment providers that some partnerships like this are going to be critical to accelerating the industry,” Hoffman said. “So I would say stay tuned. I'd expect to see a few more.”