The radio access network is a foundational technology for the world’s wireless telecommunications providers, and two major tech players want to open that network architecture.

Wind River Systems Inc. and Dell Technologies Inc. are collaborating on a set of Open RAN initiatives designed to reduce complexity and accelerate cloud-native network deployments. The partnership received an additional boost in February when Wind River joined the Dell Open Telecom Ecosystem Community.

“When you buy a traditional radio access network solution from a single supplier, it’s very easy, it works, it’s been tested, and when you break these components apart and disaggregate them, it creates integration points and support issues,” said Scott Walker (pictured, left), vice president of the global telco ecosystem and Americas CSPs at Wind River. “Dell and Wind River together have created a cloud infrastructure solution that could host a variety of RAN workloads. What we’re trying to do is create a traditional RAN experience with the innovation agility and flexibility of Open RAN.”

Walker spoke with theCUBE industry analysts Dave Vellante and Lisa Martin at MWC 2023, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. He was joined by Gautam Bhagra (right), vice president of strategic partnerships at Dell, and they discussed recent developments in the Open RAN field. (* Disclosure below.)

Appealing to developers

Wind River provides de facto infrastructure for Open RAN, and Dell launched a co-engineered system last fall to host telecom workloads. Through new offerings in Open RAN, Dell is seeking to attract interest within the developer community.

“Everybody understands the benefits of being open; there’s the agility piece, the innovation piece, and that’s a no brainer,” Bhagra said. “The question is how to get there, and that’s where partnerships become critical. One of the purposes in building this community is to bring in like-minded developers. We want them to come and work with customers to create new solutions and come up with something creative which no one has even thought about.”

This scenario is playing out among several major telcos, including DISH Network Corp.

“Advanced carriers like DISH, who has one of the true Open RAN networks, is publishing APIs for programmers to build in their 5G networks as part of the application,” Walker said. “There is a real recognition that in order for networks to monetize new use cases, they need to be programmable.”

RAN is a compute-intensive environment and Dell has been working with silicon vendors like Broadcom to accelerate performance and reduce costs for next generation infrastructure for telecom providers. Silicon is becoming an increasingly diverse landscape as the epicenter of system architectures moves beyond the CPU to emphasize connectivity of various components within a server.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the MWC 2023 event:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for MWC 2023. Neither Dell Technologies Inc., the primary sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE