Wind River has announced that Wind River Studio is being used by Vodafone for its open RAN (radio access network) deployment across Wales and South West England. With this new deployment, Vodafone is replacing traditional, legacy technology and installing open RAN equipment for 2,500 sites.
“Vodafone has been a leader in open RAN from the start. With this new milestone, Wind River is proud to collaborate with Vodafone and major ecosystem partners to advance the evolution of open RAN. Wind River Studio delivers cloud-native solutions that enable the high-scale deployment of next-generation network infrastructure for service providers worldwide,” says Paul Miller, chief technology officer, Wind River.
“Open RAN can provide much-needed diversity to the telecommunications supply chain and accelerate the pace of innovation. To meet the complex challenges of a changing telecom landscape, it is important to work with technology partners such as Wind River, who can deliver proven solutions to help us move the industry forward,” says James Grayling, head of open RAN product integration, Vodafone.
Through trials and now multiple deployments across Europe, the Vodafone programme’s key performance indicators (KPIs) demonstrate that the performance of open RAN matches or exceeds that of traditional, legacy equipment.
Previously, Vodafone deployed the first instance of open RAN in urban environments in Europe in 2022, with additional sites installed over time, working with Wind River and other key ecosystem partners. These open RAN milestones are helping to evolve the telecommunications industry, introduce greater flexibility and service agility, and create new opportunities not possible with traditional infrastructure.
Open RAN’s cloud-based environment allows service providers to expand business models to reduce OpEx, be more energy efficient, grow new use cases, and be more responsive to customers and further enhance their experiences.
In addition to its ongoing work with Vodafone, Wind River has played key roles in supporting the 5G data session, building commercial vRAN/open RAN programmes, and launching the fully automated edge data centre for commercial service.
Based on the open source StarlingX project, Wind River Studio provides a cloud-native, Kubernetes- and container-based architecture for the development, deployment, operations, and servicing of distributed edge networks at scale. It delivers a foundation for a geographically distributed managed solution able to simplify day 1 and day 2 operations by providing single-pane-of-glass, zero-touch automated management of thousands of nodes, no matter where their physical location. Studio addresses the challenges of deploying and managing a physically distributed, cloud-native infrastructure to provide traditional RAN performance in a vRAN/open RAN deployment.
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