The rollout of the next generation telecom network—more commonly known as 5G—is quickly moving from theoretical to reality. With 5G comes the opportunity for communications service providers (CSPs) to deliver fast connectivity and cutting-edge services to consumers and businesses.
The delivery of 5G-enabled services will have a tremendous impact on every industry. Let’s take healthcare as an example. For remote surgery to become a reality, healthcare organizations require total reliability, high bandwidth, low latency and absolute security from their service provider. In this scenario, the stakes could not be higher for both the healthcare provider and the telco serving that organization.
To deliver these types of services with confidence, CSPs are undertaking significant transformation of nearly every part of their network—from the telco core, edge, to the radio access network.
VMware plays a critical role in this digital transformation and today made several announcements showcasing how we are collaborating with customers and partners to move from a hardware-based to a software-defined telco infrastructure.
VMware NFV Customers Share Their Stories
Telcos around the globe are choosing VMware to drive their digital transformation forward. In fact, VMware’s Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) platform is relied upon by more than 100 operators to deliver their telecom services to 800 million subscribers globally.
Today, several customers highlighted why they chose VMware’s Telco Cloud platform as the foundation for their digital transformation.
VMware Telco Cloud Automation is Now Generally Available
Increasingly, CSPs are delivering services using myriad network function formats—virtual, cloud-native, etc.—from multiple providers across multiple clouds. This pushes orchestration and management challenges exponentially. CSPs are looking for modern orchestration tools to tackle this complexity.
This is precisely the challenge we are setting out to solve with VMware Telco Cloud Automation. Previously announced at VMworld 2019 Europe as Project Maestro, Telco Cloud Automation is a cloud-first orchestration solution that will accelerate service time-to-revenue with a simplified vendor-neutral and standard-compliant approach for designing and onboarding virtual network functions, cloud native network functions or network services.
Today, VMware is announcing the general availability of Telco Cloud Automation.
Learn more about Telco Cloud Automation.
Cloud and Edge Networking for Today and Tomorrow
VMware is at the forefront of helping service providers evolve their cloud and network service portfolios, create new revenue streams and accelerate their customers’ wide area network (WAN) transformation.
Today, several customers shared how SD-WAN by VeloCloud plays a critical role in their network transformation journey. Read the full press release here.
Learn more about VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud.
VMware and Deutsche Telekom Collaborate on Open vRAN Platform
While the majority of network modernization efforts start with virtualization of the core network, service providers are beginning to set their sights on realizing the benefits of end-to-end network transformation and are working to virtualize all parts of their network, including the radio access network (RAN).
Traditionally, CSPs are forced to use hardware from a single vendor across all parts of the RAN. By moving to an open, disaggregated and software-defined RAN, CSPs can create a more innovative RAN environment that introduces cloud economics in the radio access network environment—an essential component to delivering apps and services over a 5G network.
VMware is at the center of this exciting transformation and today announced with Deutsche Telekom that the companies are collaborating on an open and intelligent virtual RAN (vRAN) platform, based on O-RAN standards, to bring agility to radio access networks (RANs) for both existing LTE and future 5G networks.
Currently undergoing testing and validation at Deutsche Telekom’s headquarters in Bonn, Germany, this RAN leverages standards-based Intel processors and FlexRAN, a vRAN software reference platform, to run vRAN workloads on top of VMware’s telco cloud platform, optimized for real-time and low latency workloads. Read more about this collaboration here.
It’s certainly an exciting time for telcos as they prepare their infrastructure to support 5G. To learn more about how VMware is helping service providers modernize their networks at telco.vmware.com.