Intel this week won its first open radio access network (RAN) compliant deal, landing an agreement with Dish Network to provide multiple pieces of hardware and its FlexRAN software reference architecture to the greenfield 5G network operator. 

The deal calls for Intel to supply Dish with its Xeon Scalable Processors, Ethernet 800 Series network adapters, and vRAN Dedicated Accelerator ACC100 cards. Intel’s other recent agreements with mobile network operators, including one announced in August with Verizon, have been more focused on virtualized RAN (vRAN) and mostly inspired by open RAN but not fully compliant, explained Dan Rodriguez, corporate VP and GM of Intel’s Network Platforms Group. 

“We have aligned with Dish from the beginning to ensure that this is [open RAN] compliant,” he said in a phone interview.

“We’ve seen a tremendous amount of the network, certainly from the wireless core, shift over to a more software defined, more agile and more scalable network, and now we’re starting to see that take place within the radio access portion of the network,” he added. 

Dish Maintains Strict Adherence to Open RAN

All of the software and hardware sourced by Dish to date has been strictly open RAN compliant, according to Marc Rouanne, EVP and chief network officer at Dish. That includes recent deals it made with Altiostar, Fujitsu, Mavenir, VMware, Matrixx, Nokia, and others. 

“All the software we have can run on any location on any server, and I think it's the first time in telco that this has happened,” Rouanne said. “Before you had domains like radio domains, core domains, transport. For us, we have a distributed set of servers and we can place the software where we want, and mix and match it.”

Intel won’t be providing Dish with those commercial off-the-shelf servers, but rather providing the processors that other vendors that are Intel customers will package into that hardware, he explained. For the first phase of Dish’s network buildout during the next 18-24 months, “we’re going to leverage heavily a lot of the equipment powered by Intel, the x86 or accelerator cards for our radios and our core.”

Dish also plans to tap into public clouds for different instances, but the vast majority of servers it owns will be based on Intel technology for the next couple years, Rouanne said. The agreement is not a direct contract with Intel, Rouanne explained as he declined to pin a value on the deal. The multi-year partnership will be valued by the number of Intel-powered servers Dish buys to power its RAN sites, edge computing footprint, and data centers, he said.

Dish Eyes Next-Generation Chips Around 2022

The operator, which has yet to deploy a commercial network, is also working with Intel and other chip vendors on next-generation technology as it eyes advances for small cells, private 5G architecture, and massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radio antennas. 

“We’re lucky at Dish because we are always coming once there is a certain level of maturity in the ecosystem, so for the next generation of products we will be able to source the best servers again,” Rouanne said.

“There is an incredible activity between silicon vendors to get ready for the [open RAN] and open architecture that is coming now,” he said. “We've looked at many different silicon vendors and we have found over the last year that the most mature ecosystem, and the one that would serve us best, is the Intel FlexRAN architecture or the first phase of our deployment.”

Intel is working with a variety of original equipment manufacturers and software vendors to suit its technology for RAN, integration with its FlexRAN software, and other flavors of SDN for virtual network functions (VNFs), Rodriguez said. As such, in this case with Dish, Intel has a tight relationship with VMware, Altiostar, and Mavenir to integrate those various offerings, he explained.

Intel’s Approach to Software Customization

Intel’s FlexRAN software can be customized in the software layer and that work is “handled directly by the ecosystem of who’s doing the VNF and the communications service provider,” Rodriguez said. Most of the customization, where required, occurs on the FlexRAN software while the processors, network adapters, and accelerator cards are identical for any operator that uses Intel’s chips, he added. 

“The hardware is common standard hardware, and then our FlexRAN software goes in as an ingredient into the ecosystem software provider, and then that software provider may make adjustments as they need in their final commercial grade software that goes to Dish or another communications provider,” Rodriguez explained. 

Dish, for its part, isn’t embracing that level of customization, according to Rouanne. “We try to avoid any customization. Whatever we do, we want it to be the same that operators would use,” he said.

“What is unique about us is in the automation, it’s in the orchestration, it’s in the scale of what we do, but the software has to be the same that anybody else would use,” Rouanne said.