IBM Corp.’s Red Hat unit and Intel Corp. today announced an “evolution” of their partnership aimed at more closely aligning their product development activities in the 5G market.

Carriers are spending billions of dollars to upgrade their networks to the 5G standard, which enables connections up to 100 times faster than LTE. The spending spree is creating new revenue opportunities for information technology suppliers such as Red Hat and Intel.

The new collaboration, the companies said, will have several focus areas. One is to bring 5G features faster to key open-source technologies such as Kubernetes. Kubernetes eases the management of software container-based workloads, which can make it useful for carriers that are using containers to build the software powering their 5G networks.

Red Hat and Intel said today that they will also work together to more quickly incorporate 5G capabilities into their commercial products. One element of the plan is to provide a reference architecture, or blueprint, to help carriers implement the 5G vRAN model. That’s the term for an approach wherein some of the data processing traditionally done by base stations is shifted to standard servers, which can perform the processing more cost-efficiently.

Red Hat and Intel’s vRAN reference architecture uses the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, which is based on Kubernetes. The blueprint also incorporates a technology called OpenNESS that makes it easier to write software for 5G networks. The companies said that they will work to certify the reference architecture for use with partner-developed hardware products and vRAN applications.

Red Hat, the maker of one of the most popular enterprise-grade Linux distributions, has collaborated with Intel for decades. The IBM unit and the chipmaker expanded their partnership in the carrier market last year by introducing a cloud service for testing new 5G products aimed at carriers. The new collaboration is poised to add yet more depth to their alliance. 

Intel and Red Hat are among the many IT industry players taking steps to address the shift to 5G. Last June, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. introduced a platform that enables telecommunications firms to use their networks to provide edge computing services for corporate subscribers. Microsoft Corp., in turn, has acquired two major makers of 5G software to draw more carriers to its Azure public cloud, while rivaling cloud providers offer carrier-specific solutions as well. 

Further up the IT supply chain, the telecommunications sector’s 5G-related spending is boosting demand for processors. Intel Corp. last year debuted a series of specialized chips for 5G base stations to address the trend. 

Over in the software market, Red Hat is partnering with key players such as Intel and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. while supporting the efforts of parent IBM to develop new 5G solutions. 

Photo: Red Hat/Flickr