Wind River Partners with Vodafone for Open RAN Deployment

Wind River, a provider of software solutions for mission-critical intelligent systems, has announced a partnership with Vodafone (News - Alert) to provide its Open RAN equipment as a replacement for the conventional legacy technology it had in place.

Open RAN, with its emphasis on openness and interoperability, offers greater flexibility and service agility and creates possibilities previously unattainable with the traditional infrastructure.

Key performance indicators (KPIs) derived from Vodafone's comprehensive trials and deployments have demonstrated that Open RAN's performance matches or even surpasses that of traditional legacy equipment.

Vodafone, in collaboration with Wind River (News - Alert) and other ecosystem partners, achieved a significant milestone in 2022 by deploying the first instance of Open RAN in urban European environments. Over time, they have continued to install additional sites, pushing the boundaries of what's achievable in the telecom industry.

“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 (News - Alert), chief technology officer, Wind River.

Wind River Studio, built upon the open-source StarlingX project, offers a fully cloud-native architecture based on Kubernetes and containers. It's designed for the development, deployment, and management of large-scale edge networks.

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.

“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.