Dish Network’s plan to run everything it can on Amazon Web Services' (AWS) cloud marks a significant first for wireless network infrastructure. Making sense of this architecture is further complicated by the dozens of vendors supplying software and hardware for the effort. 

One of those vendors, Mavenir, sits at a unique position in the open radio access network (RAN) framework. Mavenir EVP and CTO Bejoy Pankajakshan described Dish’s strategy as a “hybrid deployment on AWS where the central unit (CU) goes on AWS and the distributed unit (DU) part stays with VMware.”

Mavenir natively integrated its open RAN software into AWS this summer and its focus remains on getting the CU open RAN software running on AWS, he said, adding “that’s already up and running.”

Mavenir’s open RAN CU runs on Amazon’s Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), “so it’s natively using the Kubernetes distribution from AWS. It uses the continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline that AWS provides, so we just provide them an image and then because it’s a cloud-native CU they can take the image, they can integrate and onboard it on the AWS EKS distribution,” Pankajakshan said. 

“In the case of Dish’s deployment, there’s no VMware within the public cloud itself,” he added. For operators, this removes third-party dependency, dual costs, and provides direct access to the tools available on AWS, including monitoring, CI/CD, and eventually orchestration, according to Pankajakshan. 

The DU in Dish’s repeatedly delayed network is another matter. “The DU itself is running on a VMware cluster,” he said, adding “the DU will migrate to a Graviton2-based server off AWS next year.”

That evolution to an AWS processor will effectively remove the need for VMware’s middleware layer in the DU. The RAN DU is always last to migrate to new architecture, in this case a public cloud, because of its stringent sub-millisecond processing requirements, Pankajakshan explained. 

While Mavenir and other vendors anticipate advancements that bring the open RAN CU to the public cloud, thereby removing the need for middleware Kubernetes distributions and portability, Pankajakshan doesn’t expect a complete shift.

“The VMware distribution and way of doing VMware’s solution I think is going to continue to at least some operators who choose to have the flexibility of leveraging all the VMware provided tools. Same with Red Hat OpenShift,” he said.

“The alternative is you only use them as and when it’s needed, which means the application also has to evolve to run this multi-cluster environment,” Pankajakshan explained. 

Mavenir hasn’t yet integrated its open RAN software with other cloud providers, and Dish remains the “most advanced in terms of getting radio also into AWS,” he said. Most operators are still focused on putting the 5G core in public clouds, but not the RAN. “In radio, I would say Dish is in the forefront."