Verizon deploys its first Ericsson VRAN cell site

Verizon activated its first Ericsson virtualized cell site (also referred to as Ericsson Cloud RAN), with support from Intel and RedHat providing the processing and cloud-native orchestration functions. 

Ericsson provided its commercial 5G Cloud RAN solution, consisting of a virtualized Central Unit (vCU), a virtualized Distributed Unit (vDU), and radio units. This software-based 5G Cloud RAN solution spans across all of Verizon’s frequency bands, utilizing both FDD and TDD 5G spectrum assets, including Massive MIMO support for C-band and interconnecting previously deployed equipment to enable Ericsson Spectrum Sharing between LTE and NR carriers. The Ericsson Cloud RAN solution offers Verizon efficiency and in network deployment and operational management transformation.

Intel provided its 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processor, Intel vRAN Dedicated Accelerator ACC100 and Intel Ethernet Network Adapter E810 to deliver the processing, acceleration and connectivity requirements.

Red Hat provided Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes to manage their fleet at scale in collaboration with Red Hat Consulting. As part of the solution, Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management delivers cloud-scale manageability by configuring the 5G RAN using a Distributed Unit (DU) profile, which deploys real-time OS kernel optimizations to run vRAN and other cloud-native application workloads from a single console. Red Hat OpenShift also incorporates zero-touch provisioning to enable distributed deployment at scale required to operate a large scale RAN.

Verizon said Radio Access Network virtualization enables it to rapidly respond to customers’ varied latency and computing needs. 

Virtualizing the far edge of the RAN – the cell sites closest to the customer - is a function of decoupling the hardware and software associated with a cell tower and transitioning the software so that it’s not just stored in the cloud, but is designed for a cloud-native architecture and operation.

Verizon recently confirmed that irecently it has 8,000 cell sites already virtualized in its network with an eye towards virtualizing 20,000 sites.

https://www.verizon.com/about/news/verizon-expands-vran-leadership-position

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