Canonical’s Charmed OSM is helping VMO2 to rapidly onboard new telco cloud network functions
Ubuntu maker Canonical announced Thursday that U.K. Communication Service Provider (CSP) Virgin Media O2 (VMO2) has chosen Canonical’s Charmed OSM as the telco’s orchestrator for hybrid workload deployments. Charmed OSM eases CSPs’ transition from traditional, legacy networking services to cloud-native network functions, Canonical said.
Alex Boyd, VMO2’s Head of Telco Cloud, described the company’s telco cloud implementation as a “strategic, on-premise platform that hosts core network functions, like 5G.”
Boyd noted that Charmed OSM will help VMO2’s product teams to onboard new applications. “OSM plays a key role in allowing us to play at pace for our customers,” he added.
Charmed OSM is an open-source management and orchestration (MANO) distribution, developed by Canonical. It’s an implementation of the ETSI Network Function Virtualization (NFV) MANO stack. Designed to complement the work of ETSI’s Industry Specification Group (ISG), Open-Source MANO (OSM) is a collaborative open-source project created to provide a generic approach to network functions management and orchestration, aligned with ETSI NFV information models and APIs. OSM code is released under open-source licenses and follows a regular cadence of novel and Long-Term Support (LTS) releases.
Canonical said that VMO2 has already onboarded telco workloads using Charmed OSM and is using it to manage telco cloud app lifecycles, including virtualized and containerized app deployments from third-party vendors including Mavenir and Oracle. Mavenir has used Charmed OS to deploy their signaling firewall, for example, and is also readying their virtualized IP Multimedia System (IMS) for fixed deployment via Charmed, Canonical noted.
Canonical said it worked with ITC consultancy Minsait to successfully deploy Charmed OSM. “Minsait successfully completed the integration between multiple Charmed OSM sites and then onboarded network services from different vendors,” said Canonical.
Earlier this year, VMO2 announced a collaboration with VMware to modernize its network and continue its planned rollout of 5G services. VMO2 said it was leveraging VMWare’s telco cloud infrastructure to design, build, test and deploy virtualized network functions. VMO2 described its telco cloud implementation as a single, horizontal platform that enabled it to simplify, scale, and protect its core cloud networks. VMO2 also announced that it would leverage VMware’s Tanzu for Telco to build Containers as a Service (CaaS).
VMO2 activated its first Open RAN deployment this past August. Working with NEC and Rakuten Symphony, VMO2 deployed Open RAN in the U.K.’s Northamptonshire region. The commercial deployment followed an Open RAN lab trial VMO2 conducted with its partners in 2021.
VMO2 launched services in June 2021 as a joint venture between Liberty Global and Telefónica in the U.K. Liberty Global and Telefonica had reached an agreement to merge their U.K. operations in a 50-50 joint venture in May 2020. VMO2’s 5G network reached 800 towns and cities across the U.K. by the end of the third calendar quarter of 2022, the CSP confirmed during an earnings call in early November. The company indicated that it had upgraded 4G LTE capacity in more than 190,000 U.K. post codes by the end of the third quarter as well. VMO2 said at that time that it remained on track to deliver 5G to half the U.K.’s population in 2023.
