In conjunction with MWC Barcelona 2022 which will be taking place this week, Tara Neal, Executive Editor of The Fast Mode spoke to Paul Miller, CTO of Wind River on the company's plans and showcases for this year's event.
Tara: What do youthink MWC 2022 will be all about? And what are your MWC 2022 plans?
Paul: A key concept we’ll see throughout MWC 2022 will be about the acceptance of virtualization as the de facto approach for deploying 5G via vRAN and O-RAN methods. The industry is looking ahead at ways to grow revenue with innovative applications at the edge of the network (autonomous vehicles/mobility, telemedicine, drones, etc.). In order to fully realize these use cases, which can’t be done using legacy approaches, you will need virtualization.
As a leader in the early 5G landscape, powering the majority of 5G RAN deployments, Wind River is delivering mature production-ready offerings on proven Wind River Studio technology that is live in deployment with operators such as Verizon, Vodafone and KDDI. Heading into MWC, we’re excited to show how our technologies are addressing key operator challenges by providing fully cloud-native, Kubernetes- and container-based architecture for the development, deployment, operations, and servicing of distributed edge networks at scale.
Tara: How has the pandemic impacted the operational and business landscape of the tech segment you are operating in?
Paul: The pandemic has affected the way that companies work with respect to the increase of remote workers and how to successfully support software development across, in some cases, very dispersed teams around the globe. Fortunately, modern tools are helping to bridge some of this gap in this sort of work. However, there is still an impact of not being able to work physically together through especially complex problems or architectural work. At the same time, in the industry overall, you have the increasing costs that are happening as a result of the pandemic. Industries are looking at the effect on customers and whether they're willing to purchase and deploy goods and software during a time when the process has become more challenging. In looking at the global supply chain, the impact of things like silicon chip availability, which ultimately is what our software will run on, must be considered too. If the customers are having problems obtaining hardware systems that can affect the adoption of software products. So, it's a complex interaction of many factors: the changing nature of work, software development in the pandemic environment, and global supply chain. On top of that, we must look at the customer and see if they are willing to or can adopt new software and deploy it in the face of the pandemic.
Additionally, in some ways, the pandemic has had the effect of slowing some 5G deployments. However, in parallel, we’re seeing an enabling of advanced methods for deploying and operating 5G networks to become perfected – from using container as a service enabled infrastructure, through analytics and AI/MLOps, to software automation and CI/CD methods. This will help the industry accelerate the use of these new technologies for the deployment of mobile infrastructure and services.With all of these elements, it is a complex environment right now. Wind River understands the evolving nature of work and a shifting technology landscape heading towards a more intelligent future and has developed solutions to address these challenges. Wind River Studio is a cloud native platform for the development, deployment, operations, and servicing of mission-critical intelligent systems from devices to cloud. Wind River Studio creates a highly automated environment that's cloud based for teams to develop software. The ability to collaborate more easily across dispersed teams and team members by working in the cloud will continue to be key during and well after the pandemic.
Tara: What emerging trends/technologies have you observed in your tech segment in recent months?
Paul: We’re seeing tremendous advancements in the industry. A few that are particularly noteworthy are:
2022 will see Open RAN transform from vision to practical reality
Throughout the course of 2020 and 2021, we’ve seen a number of vendors and operators commit to embracing an Open RAN approach, one where openness, collaboration and virtualization is at its heart. But while a few operators have begun trialing or deploying Open RAN solutions and networks, Open RAN uptake is still in its infancy. 2022 will be a real tipping point as we see the hard work from operators and vendors yielding fruit and bringing Open RAN solutions into the mix. In 2022, Open RAN will no longer be a “nice idea” or vision for the future, it will be deployed and become operators’ preferred method of procuring and operating RAN networks.
The software-defined mobile operator is embracing operational toolsets
As carriers have embraced virtualization and the software-defined radio network in actual deployment, learnings from those deployments are being folded back into operational toolsets. These include AI, ML and analytics digital feedback loops which enable advanced capabilities such as predictive outage avoidance, event correlation and high levels of operations automation for oversight of these massive, distributed topologies. Additionally, learnings from the software-defined network adds the need for modern Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD and automated deployment, monitoring and upgrade of these software systems. In effect, we’ve moved beyond the use of modern CaaS infrastructure to also embrace the use of software for operational ease of use and reductions in OPEX.
The trend to adopt virtualization becomes permanent
Networking/telecommunications is undergoing major changes and evolving to a software environment. Going back 10 or 15 years, networking and telecommunications was all bespoke appliances and custom hardware to solve different problems in the network. We’re now moving to a software-based paradigm. At the edge of the network, with 5G and virtualized RAN, we're starting to embrace virtualization, which is also laying the groundwork for applications such as autonomous vehicle control, drone control, and factory automation as software applications. So, the future of networking telecommunications is that service providers end up with a fully virtualized environment from core to edge that's heavily software-defined and automated. It has embedded AI and machine learning throughout it to automate the management and oversight of that, and one that supports the deployment of new applications rapidly and a pure software-based domain. At the end of this transformation, where everything that was previously bespoke hardware-based just 15- 20 years ago, is now ending up in a fully software cloud-oriented architecture going forward.
As Chief Technology Officer at Wind River, Paul Miller is responsible for the company’s technology strategy. With nearly three decades of telecommunications and advanced technology leadership at both large companies and successful startups, he is currently focused on Wind River’s edge virtualization and AI solutions, including Wind River’s market-leading 5G Cloud offering based on StarlingX.
