Cisco and Altiostar have joined with World Wide Technology to develop an Open vRAN blueprint to help accelerate the deployment of 4G/5G OpenRAN equipment in service provider networks. This will be based on equipment created by Cisco and Altiostar and brought to market using the sales, integration and deployment capabilities of WWT.
The partnership comes as the first open RAN are commercialised since the start of this year, at Etisalat and Rakuten. The partnership will build on Altiostar's vRAN software and Cisco infrastructure, including its Cisco Virtual Infrastructure Manager platform, Ultra Packet Core and Converged SDN Transport.
The open vRAN approach enables a new ecosystem of vendors to participate in the RAN industry while leveraging the benefits of cloud-based architecture including web-scale hardware and systems. The blueprint is a step towards realization of the industry’s 5G vision by delivering an open, agile, software-driven network that enables richer services, with greater flexibility at a lower cost, the companies said.
The Open vRAN blueprint will be validated in WWT’s Advanced Technology Center, a testing and validation facility equipped with roughly USD 1 billion in hardware and software, and take advantage of WWT’s integration and deployment expertise through its global integration centers in Mumbai, Singapore, St. Louis and Amsterdam. The ATC can help operators make critical technology decisions faster, from designing and conceptualizing solutions to validating new industry architectures, WWT said.
WWT will then take the Open vRAN blueprint to market as a fully integrated solution that will be available for customers to test and deploy in their networks with the support of services from WWT and Cisco.
