5G represents a fundamental shift in how networks are built
Today 5G deployments are relatively limited in coverage scope, although that will rapidly change as the telecom industry enters a multi-year investment supercycle. The early focus will be on delivering enhanced mobile broadband but, as standards continue to progress, that will expand to include massive support for the internet of things and ultra-reliable low latency communications.
As this seachange unfolds, the importance of creating open, multi-vendor network environments is highlighted–delivering on the promise of 5G will require interoperability between best-in-breed products, as well as swapping out proprietary, single-purpose boxes for general purpose hardware capable of dynamically spinning up the needed virtual network function. But underneath these increasingly open, disaggregated networks, what’s the glue holding everything together?
“As this whole disaggregation happens both in the wireless and wireline industry, we really position ourselves as the aggregator of this disaggregation,” Neeraj Patel, vice president and general manager of Software and Services, Radisys, told RCR Wireless News during Mobile World Congress Barcelona. “What that means is we want to be the full solution integrator bringing the different components from functional testing, compliance testing, hardening…and eventually we want to become the engine that helps customers do these deployments at scale.”
Radisys specializes in bringing a DevOps approach to taking open reference implementations into turnkey solutions built on an open ecosystem of hardware and software purposefully assembled to meet the specific requirements of a service provider. The company’s MobilityEngine solution gives telecom ecosystem stakeholders the production source code needed to launch 5G New Radio networks at millimeter wave and sub-6 GHz frequencies in both the non-standalone and standalone modes of operation.
Patel explained that MobilityEngine, which has garnered more than 15 customer design wins, enables OEMs, ODMs and service providers with the software basis needed to develop 5G NR products. “We actually have the enabling stack from the MAC layer all the way up, the layer 2, layer 3 software source code. At Radisys and especially in MobilityEngine, we’ve been investing in 5G for almost 18 months. 5G is happening is now.”
Click here to learn how openness, the network edge, shared spectrum, NSA/SA and trial deployments are accelerating the shift to 5G. And click here to learn more about Radisys.
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