Samsung inched closer to its open RAN vision today, landing an agreement with Red Hat that makes it the first major radio access network (RAN) vendor to publicly build 5G services on OpenShift.

The vendor recently pledged to make its fully virtualized RAN 5G offering commercially available before October. Samsung’s collaboration with Red Hat on OpenShift illustrates another activity aimed at accelerating its path to open RAN. 

The agreement calls for Samsung to use the full range of Red Hat’s hybrid cloud portfolio, including OpenShift, OpenStack, Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux, Ansible Automation Platform, and OpenShift Container Storage. The effort involves Samsung’s 5G virtualized RAN, core, and mobile edge computing. 

Red Hat released the latest iteration of its OpenShift platform last month with general availability of virtual machine (VM) management tools, Kubernetes cluster management features, and a new path for low-resource edge environments. 

While other major RAN vendors are working with Red Hat on OpenShift, Samsung is the first to publicly adopt the Kubernetes container platform. “It’s a big one, but there’s others that we’ve been working with for some time,” Ian Hood, chief technologist at Red Hat, told SDxCentral. 

Other RAN vendors’ “customers are kind of holding them back on that until they’re a little further along,” Hood explained. Efforts to open 5G RAN and the entire architecture of mobile networks is a big undertaking that’s further complicated for incumbent vendors that are more deeply ingrained in traditional proprietary systems. 

Operators are leading this push to open RAN because they want to cut costs, hasten deployments, and diversify their vendor pool, but some are making more pronounced commitments to open RAN than others. That disinclination to embrace open RAN extends to incumbent vendors because they’re being held to service level agreements (SLA) by operators, Hood explained. 

“It's a balancing act for being able to deliver what the operator wants you to deliver at the right cost point, meet the SLA, and make sure that we've got mature, secure technology,” he said. “We're not quite there yet with all the pieces in the open RAN.”

The virtual centralized unit (CU) portion of the RAN is “solid,” but the distributed unit portion that sits between the CU and the radio is more difficult and still under development, Hood said. Outstanding questions remain about how open and interoperable the interfaces for controlling network slicing, dynamic spectrum sharing, and other core 5G features will be between incumbent vendors, he added. 

“That’s the piece we need to open up, which is why we now have two competing approaches in the open standards world,” Hood said, referring to the O-RAN Alliance and the Open Networking Foundation’s recently formed SD-RAN project. 

A collective move to microservices and containers, a return to bare metals, and an embrace of the hypervisor model with real-time capabilities enabled by 5G, have all been improved in the world of open source and driven down to the hardware level, according to Hood. “Hardware acceleration beyond x86 has been a key thing in the last six to 12 months that’s also opened up,” he said. 

Considering those market dynamics, Hood puts Samsung in the same camp as Altiostar, Mavenir, Parallel Wireless, and other upstart vendors that are driving the push to open the RAN from a vendor perspective. 

“This is directionally where the industry is going, and a lot of work has been going on for quite some time to get to this point,” Hood said. “Our customers are very much headed to deploy this type of technology, open RAN technologies on OpenShift. They’re all poised to go do this around the world with not just Samsung but other partners as well.”