Economic advantages of virtualizing the RAN in mobile operators' infrastructures

Communications service providers (CSPs) are engaged in a strategic evolution of their infrastructures using virtualized and cloud-native designs. In developing their evolution plans, they must address several key architectural and economic considerations. Findings from ACG Research indicate that distributed virtual infrastructures for CSPs will benefit materially from the use of elastic, horizontal cloud designs.

Red Hat has been a leader in evolving the open source operating system and cloud software distributions it includes in its portfolio to support network functions virtualization (NFV) and cloud-native designs in operators' networks, according to this analyst paper. Additional key insights include the following:

• Virtualized system infrastructures will be increasingly critical in CSPs' deployments from core to edge as mobile networks grow and 5G implementations begin.

• Horizontally integrated telco clouds enable a 30% lower total cost of ownership (TCO) than silo-based deployments in 4G core applications.

• Centralized virtualized radio access network (vRAN) architectures enable up to 44% lower TCO than conventional distributed RANs.

• Compared with do-it-yourself approaches, Red Hat's supported open source solutions for telco cloud deployments have shown improved TCO advantages of up to 35%.

• Next-generation 5G will rely on virtualized cloud-native distributed infrastructures using containerized networking apps and modular microservices, increasing the value of open horizontal cloud platforms.

Find out why ACG Research says that Red Hat is well-positioned to enable the elastic, horizontal clouds for vRAN and edge computing deployments at the scale and with the economic benefits the industry is expecting. Download the full analyst paper to learn more.