The portfolio, released at the end of last year, has been enhanced following collaborations between the Swedish equipment maker, Verizon, Intel and HPE.
The development means CSPs can evolve towards cloud-native technologies and open network architectures to meet the demand for more flexibility in deployments. The new mid-band capabilities will create further performance gains when combined with the reach of the seven million 5G-ready Ericsson Radio System radios that are already in the field globally.
Joe Madden, chief analyst, Mobile Experts, explained: “What Ericsson is doing goes beyond stacking new technologies above existing radio access. Instead, Ericsson raises innovative possibilities for performance gains by combining cloud RAN mid-band with seven million Ericsson Radio System radios in the field.
"The coordinated use of virtualised RAN and pre-integrated radios involves optimisation and interoperability between generations, which should reduce overall lifetime cost for operators," Madden added.
On the customer side Ericsson named Verizon as one of its collaborators during development, alongside Intel. With cloud seen as the "feasible option" for mid-band deployments, the enhanced portfolio leverages Intel’s compute – across multiple product generations of Intel Xeon Scalable processors and accelerator technology – to enable high-density capacity solutions.
Navin Shenoy, EVP and GM of the data platforms group at Intel, said: "Intel’s technologies such as Xeon processors have fuelled the massive growth of the cloud and are now playing a pivotal role in vRAN momentum. Our long-standing partnership with Ericsson is entering an exciting new phase with the shared goal of unleashing richer user experiences with 5G.”
Building on the Intel collaboration, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) also got a look in with Ericsson customers now given the option to select HPE workload optimised edge compute based on HPE ProLiant servers and any cloud platform to deploy their cloud RAN networks.
Ericsson's cloud RAN portfolio was introduced at the end of last year and is cloud agnostic with supplementary cloud integration services to facilitate the onboarding to a CSP's cloud infrastructure of choice, bringing "additional flexibility" to cloud RAN deployments, Ericsson said.
Fredrik Jejdling (pictured), EVP and head of business area networks, Ericsson, said: “We aim to constantly develop the best technologies by working closely with our customers. We continue investing in technology to stay ahead and deliver a high-performing and cost-effective portfolio, as evidenced by our latest releases. Now we are bringing this high performance to Cloud RAN with the vision that our customers can deploy cloud-native networks, virtually everywhere, on any cloud, and server platform.“
