Wind River, a global leader in delivering software for mission-critical intelligent systems, announced that Wind River Studio is being used by Vodafone for its Open RAN deployment across Wales and South West England. With this latest deployment, Vodafone is replacing traditional, legacy technology and installing Open RAN equipment for 2,500 sites.
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“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,” said 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 successfully 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,” said James Grayling, head of Open RAN Product Integration, Vodafone.
Through comprehensive trials and now multiple deployments across Europe, the Vodafone program’s key performance indicators (KPIs) demonstrate that the performance of Open RAN matches or exceeds that of traditional, legacy equipment.
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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 significant 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 transform 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 world’s first successful 5G data session, building commercial vRAN/Open RAN programs, and launching the first fully automated edge data center for commercial service. Wind River continues to be a leader in the telecom landscape with its large-scale commercial vRAN/Open RAN deployments.
Based on the open source StarlingX project, Wind River Studio provides a fully 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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