Clarence Reynolds, TelecomTV (00:22):
Open RAN deployments and innovation are reshaping the telecommunications landscape with significant implications for network architecture and service delivery. In the next instalment of the Open RAN Vanguard inside the TELUS Open RAN transformation, Prakash Desai, Denior Director of Product Management at Wind River joins us to discuss the evolution of open RAN interoperability, challenges and emerging innovations in telecommunications infrastructure. Prakash, thank you for joining us today.

Prakash Desai, Wind River (00:54):
Thanks for having me. Clarence. Pleasure to talk to you.

Clarence Reynolds, TelecomTV (00:58):
So Prakash, is the industry ready to accelerate open, RAN deployments at scale and what has Wind River learned from its experience?

Prakash Desai, Wind River (01:07):
I would say we are seeing a lot of momentum with open RAN technologies. We recently announced Boost Mobile, which is the truly first open RAN network in the US. We're also seeing some positive momentum with major European and Japanese operators. So when you look at some major announcements coming in from the likes of AT&T and DOCOMO, it further endorses the fact that Open RAN is the way to evolve as we move to 5G and beyond. And with Mobile World Congress coming up, I'm sure we'll see a lot more news coming up about open RAN deployments across the globe. We strongly believe in Wind River that 2025 we'll see a major shift towards open RAN globally. Greenfield operators by default are going to go open, RAN. However, we now are seeing some of the Brownfield operators going the open RAN route, primarily as they see the benefits because of the open desegregated network infrastructure that it offers.

(02:11):
I think Open RAN as a technology. It's definitely proven beyond doubt. If I just look at the Wind River customer base globally, many of our tier one CSPs, they're deploying open RAN networks. We have seen good success with Verizon in the us. We have seen TELUS in Canada. We have now Boost America, not we have Boost in North America, Vodafone in the uk. In fact, Vodafone is now expanding to other regions in Europe. Telefonica has started deploying in Germany. We have multiple trials going on in Asia and Middle East. So if you look, a lot of tier one CSPs globally have already embraced open RAN, but the adoption and the scale is not as where we would expect. So Greenfield operators are going open, RAN for sure, but Brownfield operators like TELUS and Vodafone are setting the stage to accelerate open RAN. In terms of wider ecosystem, we have OEMs like Nokia and Ericsson promoting Open RAN. So to summarise, good progress so far more to come, but open RAN as a viable commercial. Technology is definitely proven.

Clarence Reynolds, TelecomTV (03:29):
Interoperability is crucial in a multi-vendor open RAN environment. So how is Wind River contributing to improved integration as a CaaS platform vendor?

Prakash Desai, Wind River (03:42):
Thank you for the question, Clarence. What a better way to prove a point than a customer actually endorsing our technology. I would like to refer to Bernard Bureau of TELUS who quoted something like Integrating Open RAN network elements has not been as difficult as imagined. That's great news for the industry. Interoperability was always considered one of the biggest challenges while deploying Open RAN. We working with our partners in the ecosystem. I'll share some of the ways by which we help clear these interoperability hurdles. Number one, we are a big promoter of open source. We started stalling X with Intel about five years ago and it's based on four os, open source, open community, open design, and open development. We upstream all of our code to Starling X and then we downstream the code back, productize it for commercial distribution. Number two, we have excellent relationships with Intel and the hardware vendors. In fact, we pre integrate and validate the chip sets and the server so that when we deliver to our customers, they get a pre-integrated, pre-validated infrastructure plus cloud platform stack ready for workload deployment. Number three, we have strategic partnership with Samsung where we work with them and are continually integrating their telecom workloads so that we can left shift the integration activities and deploy earlier. And we have similar plans with all of our other hardware vendors and other partners to mitigate interoperability concerns.

Clarence Reynolds, TelecomTV (05:42):
Wind River has deployed, RAN at both the Edge and 5G core in European data centers. How do functional and performance requirements differ between these environments?

Prakash Desai, Wind River (05:54):
So when it comes to virtual RAN deployments, Wind River is the leader, right? However, the lesser known fact is Wind River also has 5G core deployments in Europe and in North America. Now, to answer your question about the difference between edge versus core, I would say Telco Edge implementation is more complex when you compare with the core implementation. Okay, let me give you some specific examples. With the 5G networks getting more complex, there is a very stringent requirements on the latency. There is a very stringent requirements on the timing between the video and the radios. It should be in the order of few microseconds, right? The video and the radio have to work in perfect synchronisation. There are layer one accelerators that we need to actually worry about without impacting the performance. Now moving on to operations. When you have a 40, 50, 60,000 distributed node network nationwide all have to have the lowest footprint, lowest power consumption and reliability. That is upwards of five nines. There is a lot that goes on in the cloud platform design at the edge. Now, compared to that, we believe that the implementation and the design of the core network is a bit simpler. Okay, I might compare it to a standard data center, which is more, the requirements are more related to scalability, large compute, dual redundancy, which we believe is simpler to implement than the edge. Since Wind River came from the edge, it was an easy transition for us to adapt to the core requirements.

Clarence Reynolds, TelecomTV (07:46):
Prakash Open RAN networks have been carrying commercial traffic for several years. How would you assess their performance and success?

Prakash Desai, Wind River (07:55):
So a few years ago when we were talking about open RAN or even virtualised RAN for that matter, there was a lot of concerns from the carriers. I would like to respond to your question on performance and requirements by giving you some live commercial examples of what's happening out there. First, there was a concern that Open RAN is more suited for rural deployment with a simple four by four radio. I can share that we have a virtual RAN network running on Wind River Cloud platform today in New York, Manhattan area on a 64 P 64 R radio with a 200 megahertz wideband NR deployment with advanced features such as multi-user MIMO dynamic beam forming. And these sites have been carrying commercial traffic for the last two or three years. How dense and how complex can a network get than New York, Manhattan? Right. So we can definitely say that the New York network is successful in another public forum.

(09:04):
Vodafone has clearly said that their network performance KPIs, their open RAN network performance KPIs exceed or meet that traditional RAN requirements. In fact, Vodafone shared some of the KPIs as it relates to call success rate called drop rate throughput handover rate. And those numbers were much, much better or the same when they compared to traditional RAN recently. TELUS, who has also deployed on a radio cloud platform shared that their open RAN network has full feature parity with traditional RAN. Their KPIs are also meeting or exceeding their traditional RAN. So all in all, I would like to quote one quote from Bernard from TELUS. He said, we are in an era where carriers can offer RAN business on merits and not on incumbency. I think this quote from Bernard sums up the success of Open RAN today.

Clarence Reynolds, TelecomTV (10:10):
What key areas of innovation is Wind River focusing on to deliver significant benefits to communication service providers?

Prakash Desai, Wind River (10:19):
So when open RAN standards were being developed, some of the critical requirements were lowering TCO, making the networks more scalable, the ability to deploy new services quickly. And the only way to achieve some of these tenets is by innovating, going beyond the traditional design aspects. Wind River is in a unique position sitting in between the COTS platform and the telco OEMs and we have to work with both our northbound partners and southbound partners in innovation in some of these key areas. So let's start with the chip set. We have a strategic partner with Intel and we get access to their latest chip set months ahead in advance. So when we start working and integrating with that chip set, we can deliver a solution much faster so that when Intel comes up with their chip set as ga, we already have a solution ready to onboard workloads.

(11:17):
Correct. Then we are working with hardware and telco OEMs to offer multiple energy saving features, especially with the recent energy crisis that we had in Europe. Making sure that the platform and the solution consumes as less energy as possible was the, another key area that we are working in terms of innovation is onboarding new applications. We are onboarding virtual cell set router. The physical cell set router that was deployed at the edge is now virtualised, and we are those virtual cell site router to reduce the footprint poor consumption and optimize the TCO at the edge.

(12:02):
Another renovation that I see is as the carriers deploy tens of thousands of these nodes, day two operations of upgrade and update becomes a challenge. We have a lot of features that basically make the operation the day two operations easier. The whole, you can upgrade like 10, 20, 30,000 nodes in a single maintenance window. And finally, mobile World Congress is coming up and I would like to take this opportunity to invite the audience to our Wind River booth and you'll get to have an exclusive look at some of the exciting innovation that we're doing at Wind River.

Clarence Reynolds, TelecomTV (12:41):
I will stop by and say hello, Prakash. Thank you very much for sharing your expertise with us today.

Prakash Desai, Wind River (12:46):
Thank you, Clarence. It was my pleasure.