Clarence Reynolds, TelecomTV (00:07):
The telecommunications industry is witnessing a fundamental shift as operators embrace open architecture and cloud native technologies to build agile future-proof networks. And at the heart of this transformation is the strategic partnership between network operators and technology providers. Today we're joined by Eben Albertyn, executive Vice President and CTO at Boost Mobile and Paul Miller, chief Technology Officer at Wind River to explore how their collaboration is redefining what's possible in modern network deployment. Thank you both for being with us.

Paul Miller, Wind River (00:41):
Good morning. Thanks. Great to be here.

Clarence Reynolds, TelecomTV (00:43):
Eben, could you share an overview of Boost Mobile's position in the telecommunications landscape and what key strategic priorities are driving your technology decisions?

Eben Albertyn, Boost Mobile (00:52):
Hi, Clarence. Yes, sure. Boost Mobile is the world's first cloud native operator operating a standalone 5G core in the public cloud. Also, the first national operator operating an O ran 5G standalone radio network nationally. And the first thing that we did is we actually proved that open RAN does actually physically work as a technology. The second thing that we proved is that that technology is actually open and interchangeable, which allows us to make the changes architecturally at pace that we need to make to be able to deliver the services to our customers that we need to. And thirdly, as you can see by the campaign that we're running in New York, we're actually showing that open ran outperforms quality wise and reliability wise traditional radio networks by being the best network in the entire New York City at the moment.

Clarence Reynolds, TelecomTV (01:43):
Tell us about the origin of your partnership with Wind River.

Eben Albertyn, Boost Mobile (01:47):
So the openness of the open Ran stack and the fact that it actually behaves a lot like an integrated IT pipeline means that as we transitioned away from the VMware stack that we used to have in the cas, we were able to make the decision to align much closer with a strategic partner like windriver, which has automation benefits for us, it has reliability benefit for us and it has software benefits for us in the software stack between the roadmaps of Boost and Windriver, which has given us the strategic future that we need to have and the change moving to towards windriver is a lot less painful than people would think that it would be. And we're able to do that at a much, much higher pace than any traditional vendor could ever think of being able to do with that. So it gives us the relationship with Wind River, which has strategic advantages not only at the technology stack level, but also at an enterprise level in terms of how we can interoperate and the ability for Wind River to integrate into our system is much, much greater speed than what we would ever expect from a traditional setup.

Clarence Reynolds, TelecomTV (02:57):
So Evan, since implementing Wind River Solution, what tangible benefits and improvements have you observed across your network operations or what outcomes are you expecting to achieve?

Eben Albertyn, Boost Mobile (03:08):
The critical component here for us with Wind River is both the fact that from an architecture perspective and how we do operations and automation, there is a very, very strong alignment between how we achieve those outcomes and how Wind River helps us to achieve those. First and foremost, their solution is extremely robust, exceptionally reliable, and they have a proven track record in the industry of being able to provide four and five nines uptime and that is critical to us as we move forward. The benefits that we get is that their architectural roadmap in data order operations and automation and the availability of data for us to be able to manage our network is it very closely aligned with what we need to be able to achieve. We have not achieved what we've been doing without the massive use of automation and the fact that they are also architecturally aligned with how they want to make sure that they can facilitate that. Automation has given us the ability to move with speed and the ability to move with speed and accuracy is key to how we want to operate our network going forward because we rely so heavily on automation and have very little done in a manual fashion, it's important for us to be able to be accurate there.

Clarence Reynolds, TelecomTV (04:22):
Paul, looking at your journey with 5G Open RAN deployments, what have been the most significant lessons so far and how has this experience shaping your approach to network architecture going forward?

Paul Miller, Wind River (04:34):
Well, thanks Clarence. It's really interesting. We have a history going back about six or seven years with our investments with Virtual and open ran and we've become kind of the defacto standard for infrastructure within that technology stack with many deployments globally. And what we've really learned from that is it's not so much just about the hosting of the infrastructure. A lot of vendors can do that, but as we began deployments, we started to learn that automation and management and what we call day two operations, the ability to control and manage your deployment is where most of the effort and complexity went. And so we made enhancements to our product portfolio to embrace those kind of opportunities and changes and that's really brought us to the position that we have in the market today.

Clarence Reynolds, TelecomTV (05:11):
Paul, how has the partnership between Boost Mobile and Wind River extended beyond technology implementation to support your broader business objective and innovation roadmap?

Paul Miller, Wind River (05:21):
Yeah, so it's interesting what even just spoke about the level of automation in this carrier is unlike anything we've ever seen and we've made investments for several years now. In that automation layer, as I mentioned, the day two operations and the management of the network is critical. As many people know, the open ran stack is a very complex stack. You have off the shelf hardware and a virtualization technology such as Kubernetes. You have virtual applications coming in as containerized systems from many, many vendors. And the integration and deployment and management of those systems is extremely complex and therefore we've really found the only way to have a lower cost and a better performance than traditional RAN is to have a high level of automation. And the only way to really make it effective so that you can have a smaller operations team drive and run a large network is to emphasize automation. So we made investments in that space and that's where we really found a philosophical alignment with Boost that embracing that automation and making heavy investments there is the key to making Open ran successful.

Clarence Reynolds, TelecomTV (06:18):
Evan, based on your experience, what guidance would you offer to other operators who are considering similar technology partnerships for their network transformation journey?

Eben Albertyn, Boost Mobile (06:28):
I think the most important thing to realize is that as you move into Open ran, you are becoming two things far more fundamentally than what you used to would've been. The first and foremost is you're becoming more of a software company than a telecommunications company. The way that your systems connect to each other look far more like integrated CICD pipelines that you would see in software deployment companies than typically what you would see in telcos. The second thing is that you are becoming the systems integrator. So understanding the architecture, taking control of the architecture, taking control of how data flows across your network and how automation frameworks actually have to interact with each other on a real time basis on a reliable basis means that your role as the systems running integrator lifts significantly because being able to have this done all by third parties has proven to be a challenge that we do not see being able to be overcome. You have to become the systems integrator yourself. Those would be the two big shifts that I think people need to be aware of as they go down this journey. But I think Paul pointed out to that when you embrace those two things, the level of automation that you can actually achieve when you combine the expertise of software engineers and telecommunications engineers is remarkable. And the pace at which you can move for us in certain cases is an order of magnitude. Sometimes two orders of magnitude faster than classical ran.

Clarence Reynolds, TelecomTV (07:58):
Evan and Paul, thank you very much for providing these valuable insights.

Eben Albertyn, Boost Mobile (08:02):
Thank you very much. Thank you.