Cloud and edge networks are two of the hottest topics in the world of communications at present. Combine the two, and a new, complex and increasingly influential mobile telecoms technology emerges – Open RAN.
In its simplest sense, Open RAN as a concept represents a more open radio access network architecture than is provided today. In addition, many different claims have been made around the potential of Open RAN (O-RAN) to improve competition, network flexibility and cost.
Randy Cox, Vice President of Product Management for Intelligent Cloud at Wind River, is well-placed to discuss the challenges and opportunities associated with this new strand of technology. Joining Steve Saunders on the Cloud 9 podcast, he explains some of the learnings made so far in the company’s deployment of Open RAN (and vRAN) with key clients, including the likes of Verizon and Vodafone.
“I think the interactions and dependencies with our partners in the ecosystem are really important,” he tells us. “If we look at the stack, Wind River finds itself directly in the middle of that stack… this means we’re having to integrate in both the southbound and northbound direction. I believe the dependencies between us have shown to be way more important than people had expected.”
Another key learning Randy goes on to talk about is the importance of automation capabilities when rolling a complete network at scale, as Wind River is currently doing with Verizon.
To learn more about this, and to hear Randy’s insights on what is being done to accelerate the uptake of Open RAN, listen to the full interview.
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Interview Transcript
Steve: Hi, I'm Steve Saunders on cloud nine. Now two of the very hottest areas in communications right now are cloud and edge networks. Take those two things and put them together and you get O RAN or Open RAN, a vital but complicated category of 21st century technology. With me today to discuss ORAN is Randy Cox, Vice President of Product Management for Intelligent Cloud at WindRiver.
Steve: How are you, Randy?
Randy: I'm doing well, Steve. Thanks for having me today.
Steve: You have a lot of experience in this technology, more than most. What have you learned from that experience deploying vRAN and Open ran at scale, with some of your largest customers like Verizon, and Vodafone?
Randy: There's a lot of learning, I think that we could probably talk about, but let me just highlight two.
The first one is, both in vRAN as well as O RAN, I think the interaction sand dependencies with our partners in the ecosystem are really important. And if I highlight when I say partners, I'm speaking of the likes of Intel, Dell, HP and Samsung. If I look at the two customers you mentioned,Verizon and Vodafone. I think, as we look at the stack, Wind River finds themselves directly in the middle of that stack where we're having to integrate in both the southbound as well as the northbound direction. And so the dependencies between us as partners I think are way more important than people had expected when we're in the field, the things like changing the firmware or the BIOS settings or changing the drivers and the implications across that stack are crucial to understand and plan out, in a manner that, that makes our customers most successful. And I think, we've spent a lot of time and learning in that specific area. So that's number one.
Number two, I would say is end to end automation. rolling out in a complete network at scale, like we are in Verizon with tens of thousands of nodes across a large geographic area when you're doing things individually on a specific workload or a specific piece of hardware and you need to do it on every single site, it's important and an absolute must to be able to have automation, and be able to do that in a manner that's really simple. And that, that helps reduce, cost as well as time to market.
Steve: I guess those are the end goals, right? Lower the cost, accelerate time to market for new services and applications and make money. But what you're seeing, what you seem to be saying is that it's too much for one company. It requires a sort of, it takes a village, right? And you have to choose, your co-dependencies in that ecosystem wisely. And you've mentioned some of the leading companies in communications. Are we at a point where all of those inter-dependencies are seamless, or is there still work to be done there do you think?
Randy: They're not seamless. There's always work to do. And the question is, and when I say that, when I say there's work to do, what I mean by that is as we develop these solutions and progress the capabilities in the network. there's always interactions between these partners and a disaggregated network that rely on each other. So we're going to always have to be planning our road maps, and have road map alignment with our different partners, as well as when we're resolving issues in the field.
As an example, there always will always be close collaboration and planning that's required there.
Now, the question is that you're implying is will that go away? No. But what can go away is the challenge around that and we can get better at how we actually do that together, and I think we are right in the middle of that. We meet. I meet on a regular basis with our partners in planning road maps, resolving issues for our customers and so I think from that perspective, we're, we've improved a lot and we'll continue to figure out how we do that better.
Steve: In some ways, what I'm hearing about Open RAN is that some of those issues are being brought up by the customer. So the solutions are being almost customer driven. One of the ones I'm hearing about is total cost of ownership.Getting a handle on what the cost of the network is. What's your take on that? Is that something which is poorly defined or are we getting a better handle on TCO and what the actual Quantitative data is around deploying open RAN now?
Randy: There's probably many opinions on that, Steve, I think we're making progress there, but I don't think, I don't think we've solved every item there. I think from my perspective, of course, as we look at TCO we're looking at, areas where we can improve. As an example, energy efficiency as one example, and we were doing that in a couple of areas. One would be as an example.We just, end of last year, achieved the ability to really run our software with this with the use of a single core on a server. And so as we do that, that really enables more horsepower and capacity for the RAN workload or any other workload. Therefore that really enables the customer to use less hardware for, for more workloads. And that's one area.
The other is we're coming up with innovative features on energy efficiency and so areas where we would work with both the hardware as well as the workload to optimize power consumption, in order to, based on network usage. And so those are two examples on how we're helping reduce TCO.
Steve: Is there a role for AI in managing the power profile of open RAN?
Randy: Without getting too detailed, I think there, you could call this AI as an example. If your network is running at some level of usage and it's very low, you could have AI determine actions to be taken in the network to reduce CPU usage and how that would be done, obviously there would be alot of, detailed and complex, feature work behind that. But sure, AI could do those sorts of things back based on network usage.
Steve: It also seems to be something which AI, people would be comfortable with using AI for something like that, as opposed to running their core network, or perhaps where, having totally AI enabled automated solution in the core is going to make people very nervous, for good reasons, whereas having an agent AI in the net, in the edge of the network that's doing things like enabling that power consumption optimization seems like something which is a real low hanging fruit example of something that we could be using AI for.
I certainly expect to see it. See a lot of that. What about this question of whether you know something which is a virtual technology can ever achieve parity in terms of performance with traditional RAM. Do you think we're going to get to that point? Are we there now? What's what? What should people what should your customers expect?
Randy: I guess we like to say our competition is no company. Our competition is the traditional network that's out there today. So as we look at this, in some respects, I can say we're meeting that, that traditional, cellular technology that we're at par or better than the, that performance today.
Of course, there are other areas I think we can still make improvements, but if I look at both Verizon and Vodafone have both said publicly that their V RAN and O RAN, networks are performing at a level of the traditional, network design. So we're feeling great about that. If I look at a specific example and most recently Vodafone and you would have seen their press release on the achievement in their golden cluster in the UK. We were literally on exec calls reviewing, and in detailed manner, where we are against performance. I'm talking about KPIs, traditional cellular KPIs, things like availability, drop call rate, call success rate, handoff success rate, and data throughput. These kinds of metrics that we were literally comparing to their traditional network down to the tens of percentage points. So a 0.1 percent improvement, we needed to get to before they would give the green light, I believe we're there and from my experience in those specific customers.
Steve: What other things is Wind River doing to accelerate, uptake of open RAN?
Randy: Our focus right now, Steve, in the next, 12 months, 18 months is really around operations at scale. Thank you. And this is really to bring feature capabilities that enable our customers to operate and run their network at scale. So tens of thousands of nodes, or cell sites, and being able to do that in the easiest manner. And when I speak of this, I'm thinking of literally being, going from what I would call a dark knock, where there's literally no power on the server from that point, all the way to having an installed, deployed up and running network and do that through automation. And this is the when I say operations of scale, this is the kind of capabilities that we're on a quest to be able to deliver between now and the next 12 months, to get to full day to operations in an easy manner. I think that's, that's a really good example there.
In addition, continuing to work closely with the RAN workload partners. So Samsung, Nokia, and Ericsson as well and we're doing that today and we'll continue to move that forward in order to bring the best feature capability and performance to our carrier customers.
Steve: Fantastic. Randy, I really appreciate you giving me and our audience, your insight into what's happening, with O RAN right now, it's obviously an amazingly important and exciting area of the communications market. Congratulations to you and Wind River for doing such a great job with it. Thanks for being with us today.
Randy: Oh, thanks for having me, Steve. Yeah, it's an exciting time and we're happy to be able to contribute to the industry in this way. So thank you.
Steve: We'll check back with you in 24 about it. Thank you.
Randy: Sounds great.