KDDI has commercial, 5G Standalone network using Open RAN equipment
Wind River, a specialist in software for mission-critical intelligent systems, announced that Japanese carrier KDDI has used Wind River Studio for its O-RAN–compliant 5G Standalone virtualized base station technology, which has recently launched on its commercial network.
“5G opens up new opportunities, with greater intelligence and compute moving toward the edges of the network. Much of our future will be run on a virtualized, distributed cloud with low-latency, far edge cloud architecture to support new use cases in the new intelligent machine economy,” said Paul Miller, CTO at Wind River. “We are able to provide solutions to help prepare for a cloud-native future and deliver on high-reliability, ultra-low-latency, and highly efficient solutions for next-generation networks.”
Wind River noted that the firm is currently powering the majority of 5G RAN deployments with operators such as Verizon and Vodafone, as its Wind River Studio capabilities address service providers’ complex challenge of deploying and managing a physically distributed, ultra-low-latency cloud-native infrastructure.
“We are pleased to announce that we have developed a 5G virtualized base station that complies with the O-RAN standard and has launched on our commercial network. KDDI aims to provide customers advanced communication services with flexibility and speed that meet usage needs with open and virtualize base stations,” said Kazuyuki Yoshimura, CTO at KDDI Corporation.
Chisa Nakata, President of Wind RiverJapan said that the firm has built a domestic support structure to serve the diverse needs of the telecommunications industry in the country.
Wind River Studio provides a cloud-native platform for the development, deployment, operations, and servicing of mission-critical intelligent systems. Its cloud infrastructure capabilities include a fully cloud-native, Kubernetes- and container-based architecture, based on the StarlingX open source project, for distributed edge networks at scale.
Earlier this month, KDDI claimed to have turned on the world’s first commercial 5G Standalone (SA) Open Radio Access Network (Open RAN) site in partnership with Samsung and Fujitsu. Powered by virtualized Radio Access Network (vRAN), the first network site went live in Kawasaki, Kanagawa.
The network site uses Samsung’s Open RAN compliant 5G virtualized CU (vCU) and virtualized DU (vDU), as well as Fujitsu’s Massive MIMO radio units, also Open RAN compliant.
By replacing dedicated hardware with software elements, virtualization and Open RAN technology brings a new level of flexibility and agility to KDDI’s network, which the operator said will allow it to offer enhanced mobile services. Additionally, KDDI said this architecture will leverage system automation, providing more reliability, while accelerating deployment of Open RAN throughout Japan, including in rural areas.
The companies said that other parts of Japan will receive Open RAN sites during 2022.
