Ericsson and Intel are pooling R&D excellence to create high-performing Cloud RAN solutions.
The companies have launched a tech hub in California, USA. It focuses on the benefits of Ericsson Cloud RAN and Intel technology to improve energy efficiency and network performance, reduce time to market, and monetise new business opportunities such as enterprise applications.
Called Ericsson-Intel Tech Hub, the centre is based in Ericsson’s D-15 facility in Santa Clara and is already operational. The current focus includes activities in power management and performance planned this year as well as joint work on Cloud RAN containerised network function (CNF) applications on upcoming generations of processing platforms.
“The transformation to fully virtualised, cloud-native-based networks brings tremendous innovation and agility and is now extending to the RAN. The Tech Hub will allow Ericsson and Intel to extend our collaboration and showcase how a virtualised RAN can deliver greater automation, agility and sustainability levels,” said Dan Rodriguez, Corporate Vice President and General Manager, Network Platforms Group Intel.
The Tech Hub is the latest of several Ericsson Cloud-RAN focused initiatives and portfolio additions. The company introduced its Cloud-RAN offering in October 2020 and established the Ericsson Open Lab, aimed at driving virtualised 5G RAN technologies with Ericsson Cloud RAN customers and ecosystem partners, in March 2021.
Ericsson already supports service providers with the most robust and high-performing 5G RAN solutions while planning future network topologies and ideologies. Intel has been helping the industry transform communications networks for more than a decade and offers an extensive portfolio of processing, acceleration and software solutions deployed today, including Intel Xeon processors.
The Tech Hub will augment existing R&D work for both companies with multi-year product design efforts, enabling communications service providers to plan their future roadmaps and offerings better.
