Wind River has announced that Vodafone has chosen the Wind River Cloud Platform as the containers-as-a-service (CaaS) layer for its Open Radio Access Network (Open RAN) deployments across Germany and additional European countries. Wind River reports this collaboration will expand Vodafone’s Open RAN footprint across thousands of sites in its regional operating companies.

The Wind River Cloud Platform is based on the StarlingX open source project and provides a Kubernetes- and container-based distributed cloud architecture. It is designed to support the development, deployment, operation, and management of distributed edge networks at scale. Wind River claims the platform addresses the challenge service providers face in deploying and managing cloud-native infrastructure for distributed cloud networks stretching from the core to the edge, while meeting or surpassing traditional radio access network (RAN) performance in virtualized RAN (vRAN) and Open RAN deployments.

According to Wind River, Open RAN enables a more cloud-based architecture, offering service providers alternative operational models that can potentially reduce operating expenses (OpEx) and increase energy efficiency. Wind River technology is reported to be in use for several global telecom milestones, including the first successful 5G data session on a fully virtualized network, the first commercial Open RAN deployment in Canada, a major 5G Open RAN CaaS platform migration, and the first fully automated commercial edge data center.

Paul Miller, Chief Technology Officer at Wind River, said, “Vodafone continues to advance and collaborate with the industry in realizing the promise of Open RAN. We’re proud to extend our partnership to enable the next wave of large-scale deployments.” He added, “Wind River Cloud Platform delivers the scalable, distributed cloud infrastructure service providers need to run next-generation networks efficiently.”

Source: Wind River