- Wind River will provide core-to-edge cloud infrastructure for the Boost network
- Wind River’s win is a loss for VMware
- The transition marks the largest CaaS vendor changeover on an open RAN network
It appears that Boost Mobile is giving the boot to Broadcom's VMware as it welcomes Wind River to its 5G network.
Boost Mobile didn’t say that in so many words Tuesday when it announced Wind River as its containers-as-a-service (CaaS) vendor. But it described the situation as the telecom industry’s largest CaaS “vendor changeover” on an open Radio Access Network (RAN) system.
A spokesperson for Boost Mobile, formerly Dish Wireless, declined to name which vendor Wind River is replacing. In 2020, Dish announced it had chosen VMware’s cloud platform.
Given that Wind River has been known for its wins in the RAN across Elisa, Telus, NTT and Vodafone – and its deep partnership with Dell, which provides the servers for Boost Mobile's RAN – plus the use of the term "changeover" in the press release, “it's almost certain that they are swapping Wind River in for VMware,” AvidThink founder Roy Chua told Fierce.
Boost Mobile Chief Technology Officer Eben Albertyn hinted of the change last month, telling reporters that Boost Mobile would very soon demonstrate open RAN’s ability to interchange significant components in the network without disrupting service for customers. That’s one of the advantages of open RAN – swiftly swapping out network components from one vendor to another.
He suggested there’s a pricing factor in the decision, which tracks with the complaints companies have been making since Broadcom’s takeover of VMware over a year ago. But performance and strategic roadmap issues also were cited.
“There's likely a pricing component to this given VMware's pricing strategies, but we're also hearing concerns across the telco industry about the long-term commitment and sustainability of using VMware's container offerings for their workloads (given recent re-organization of the telco group in VMware),” Chua said.
Fierce reached out to Broadcom for comment but did not hear back before publication.
Open RAN = flexibility
Boost Mobile, which increasingly is positioning itself as capable of taking on the Big 3 wireless carriers head on, emphasized how the use of open RAN in its network enables it to do timely changeovers.
“Implementing Wind River’s solution is much easier and quicker on our Boost Mobile Network versus legacy carriers due to our open RAN network architecture,” the spokesperson told Fierce.
Indeed, open RAN's disaggregated architecture certainly lowers the barriers to these kinds of switchovers – the reduced lock-in is one of the reasons service providers like these open architectures, Chua said.
“However, there's still integration, performance and compatibility testing that has to be done and operational costs that are incurred regardless,” he said. “But it does make switching possible and easier.”
No, it's not dead
Just for good measure, when we checked in with Albertyn last month, we asked what he thinks about some of these reports that open RAN is dead in the water. To no one’s surprise, he said reports of open RAN’s death were greatly exaggerated.
“I can absolutely say categorically, it’s not dead. We’ve proven open RAN technology works. We’ve proven it at every single level that it could be possibly proven,” Albertyn said.
“We have a national network covering more than 200 million people for voice, 260 million for 5G broadband. We’re in more than 100 markets,” he added. “There can be no doubt in any human being’s mind that open RAN works and it works at scale and it works well.”
While it’s true that operators are pulling back on their capital expenditures compared to more aggressive years of 5G rollouts, that has more to do with capital-constrained markets rather than technology, he said. “I think when the capital markets change a little bit, it will be more rapidly start to see changes in that landscape,” he said.