VMware today announced plans to roll a RIC, the radio access network (RAN) intelligent controller, into its Telco Cloud Platform to further abstract RAN infrastructure and allow operators to program the RAN via xApps. 

VMware RIC pulls specifications from the O-RAN Alliance. It includes a centralized RIC for non-real-time RIC for functions that don’t require latency response greater than one second and a distributed RIC for near-real-time RIC that can manage and host xApps that require latency timing in the tens of milliseconds. 

The RIC and associated xApps are gaining interest among communities supporting the development of open RAN, including the Open Networking Foundation’s SD-RAN project. xApps allow operators to design and control the most important RAN functions, providing administrative RAN sovereignty over functions that are typically implemented as proprietary features on base stations.

VMware intends to make RIC software development kits (SDKs) generally available in January 2022, with initial commercial availability slated to occur by late April 2022. The vendor claims its RIC extends choice and flexibility to carriers pursuing open RAN with a more agile architecture, programmability, and intelligence.

RAN infrastructure is of particular importance to VMware, which earlier this year released its Telco Cloud Platform RAN for virtualized and containerized RAN functions. 

“We believe that we will always be in the RAN,” but VMware’s core strategy is to provide a broader and “common software stack” for modern telco infrastructure, Sanjay Uppal, SVP and GM of VMware’s Service Provider and Edge Business Unit, said in a recent phone interview.

“Our role in the underlay is to be both in the core as well as in the access part, which is the RAN as well as the fiber. And our role there is, in a disaggregated system, to provide the software stack on which the workloads will run,” he said.

Nokia this month claimed to be the first network equipment supplier to certify all 5G core network functions on the VMware Telco Cloud Platform.

VMware’s determination to root its software and service in wireless network infrastructure traverses three layers of network infrastructure: the RAN, core, and transport; secure access service edge (SASE) and SD-WAN; and the edge and public cloud. 

“Our contrast would be that we sell at all these three layers of the stack. It’s a software-based solution that doesn’t lock you into a particular provider that is more monolithic,” Uppal explained.

“There's a commonality in the software components of what we need at that edge application layer, the overlay layer, and the underlay layer. They're basically built with a set of common components in the data plane. And then in the management plane we're tying together the management entity,” he said. “We are tying these together from a telemetry standpoint and then we’re expanding from there, again to follow the installation, configuration, operations, and maintenance lifecycle.”

VMware today also introduced a public and edge cloud variant for its Telco Cloud Platform; automation and orchestration features for multicloud operations; and a network slicing module under a new effort called Project Lattice.

VMware Telco Cloud Platform - Public Cloud, which is designed to help operators migrate telco and IT workloads to VMware Cloud on Amazon Web Services (AWS), is scheduled for general availability by late January 2022. VMware Telco Cloud Platform - Edge, extends the recently announced Edge Compute Stack, an integrated virtual machine and container-based stack for edge-native apps, for operators and enterprises to deploy at the edge.

Each of these efforts reinforce VMware’s multicloud strategy. “Our belief is that there is the need for an uber-layer that cuts across many of these hyperscalers,” Uppal explained. “When you have a service, regardless of where and who provides it, you should be able to add it to your repertoire of what you need to get done to build your applications.”

This abstracted layer allows service providers to pick and choose services from different hyperscalers without being beholden to them, he added. 

“We’re the Switzerland, we’re the ones who will provide choice. We don’t own the stack end to end so it’s not like everyone runs everything on VMware,” Uppal said. “We have enough portions of the stack. And our belief is that if you spend some on the software upfront it’s going to pay back over a period of time because we ease all of the operations, we ease that installation, configurations, operations, and maintenance continually.”