CTOs, it’s time to stop throwing money at siloed technology. Upgrading your legacy radio access network (RAN) can deliver significant cost savings through improved efficiency and reduced maintenance. According to research firm ACG, potential gains for core networks include 40% total cost-of-ownership savings over five years; 36% reduction in servers required for the network; driving down carbon emissions at data centers; 62% savings in operating expenses; and 18% savings in capital costs. Similar gains can be experienced via RAN modernization. For some communications service providers (CSPs), however, such benefits may appear to be a distant dream.

To make progress toward these goals, an important first step on the transformation journey is recognizing where you are currently. Once you know that, the way forward comes sharply into focus. After supporting hundreds of CSPs through their transformation journeys, we’ve found there are four primary phases in an end-to-end network transformation journey. They can be used as guideposts to keep your journey on track.

1. Traditional networking The traditional approach to RAN has been maintaining silos based on different vendor solutions. Perhaps one function is built with Nokia and another by Ericsson, for instance. CSPs have separate teams and tools sets for each RAN platform, creating operational complexity. But controlling costs and spuring service innovation as CSP expand 5G rolls out, require more agile, cloud-based systems.

This move to the cloud exposes areas of challenge with the traditional RAN architectures such as operational complexities, slow service deployments and limited data access.

Let’s dig into the point of data. Correlating information from one silo to another is challenging. RAN systems interoperate poorly. Businesses end up with a large series of disparate management tools from many different vendors that span both on-premises and cloud architectures. Thus, the various RAN teams are constrained in their efforts to optimize performance and contain costs. Problems take longer to resolve and the number of alarms multiplies.

2. RAN virtualization and containerization Virtualization of the RAN is an important step on the road to network transformation. Instead of the RAN operating purely within traditional black boxes, RAN functions, controls and data planes are separated from the hardware they run on.

RAN virtualization facilitates 5G performance, reduces latency, adds a greater range of 5G functionality and improves overall management agility and flexibility. This opens the door to the implementation of intelligent load balancing, resource allocation based on demand and putting the RAN systems into sleep when utilization is low. In addition, RAN virtualization helps you to place workloads in the right locations, be more responsive to the rapidly changing playing field of cybersecurity, accelerate time to value and leverage cloud-smart automation to deploy thousands of distributed RAN sites with ease.

Many CSPs are in the RAN virtualization stage. It is a good first step toward full open network modernization. However, there is a long way to go. Virtualized RANs may only address the infrastructure of one vendor. They often need to be in line with virtualized areas of all the RAN sites across the entire network. Consequently, administrators may need help with manual, repetitive and time-consuming tasks as automation efforts are severely constrained.

To advance further, however, you must transition from a single-vendor virtualization to open multi-vendor architecture with containerization of the RAN functions. Kubernetes, the primary vehicle for containerization, poses new challenges in terms of migration, management and orchestration. And most RAN specialists lack containerization and Kubernetes skills.

Any initial foray into the open RAN with containerization requires at least a basic understanding of vendor-specific tuning and resource management to be able to coordinate effectively with network equipment vendors. Containerization can also be difficult to deploy and scale.

3. Disaggregation and automation Once the RAN is virtualized, and containerization is well advanced, complete disaggregation of hardware and software can be fully accomplished – opening up the RAN and allowing for greater automation to drive operational simplicity. Vendor interoperability becomes a real possibility. True end-to-end automation and orchestration of the entire multi-vendor RAN sites become possible. This allows you to adopt a more cloud-native approach that helps them realize operational efficiencies while heightening the pace of innovation and greatly lowering costs.

With monolithic RAN software disaggregated into containerized microservices and orchestrated within a Kubernetes cluster, many RAN functions can run on a consistent horizontal platform across distributed RAN sites. The overhead associated with managing multi-vendor RAN functions is minimized and the RAN administrators are freed from manual tasks through automation.

Disaggregation and large-scale automation can take place only if they are established upon a foundation of RAN virtualization and containerization. Further, a horizontal platform approach that runs across distributed RAN and edge sites will enable the operational savings and differentiating revenue you haven’t been able to accomplish before this phase. For those of you who have started automating your networks but still see challenges in reaching these goals of savings and revenue, the answer is in the scale — it’s hard to realize the benefits when you’re only automating a few of your network functions.

Next-generation networks not only bring together multi-vendor RAN functions, but they also enable 5G orchestration and automation, network slicing assurance, multi-layer data collection, from the physical networks to virtualized and containerized software, as well as closed-loop remediation. This is an essential preparatory phase for the introduction of AI capabilities across all CSP services and infrastructure.

4. End-to-end visibility and assurance In this multi-layer RAN world, there is a greater need than ever for visibility to ensure the health of all services. The final step on the journey involves putting the system in place to be able to monitor and manage the entire RAN ecosystem from one end to the other, regardless of the vendor or Application. Full visibility and assurance enable root-cause analysis and remediation across the RAN. Further, it brings benefits such as automated topology discovery as well as a unified dashboard for simplified operations across all layers of the RAN – an essential component to make multi-vendor networks reach efficiency goals.

Network transformation's true value: It's not just about cost-cutting Some may look upon this journey as purely about cost. But it’s so much more than that. Yes, over time, there will be capex reductions by reducing the amount of custom/proprietary hardware. And yes, once disaggregation has taken place, the significant gains from automation and orchestration will show up in operations. Visibility across the RAN becomes possible, software updates are done automatically across distributed RAN sites, all software integrates well together and operations become flexible.

But really, the journey is about new revenue.

5G networking combined with end-to-end automation opens far more revenue streams and provides new service opportunities. Cloud-as-a-service (CaaS) automation simplifies Kubernetes rollouts. Infrastructure policies that can be dynamically implemented can lead to time savings of 75%. Ultimately, your teams will focus less on operations and more on innovation.

For more information on how you can rapidly advance through the RAN transformation journey, visit https://telco.vmware.com/products/telco-cloud-platform-ran.hypertext markup language (HTML)