According to ABI Research, the vRAN market is forecast to reach U$20 billion by 2020 as the technology emerges as an important technique allowing operators to meet the demands of their networks today and to prepare them for future evolution to 5G. The technology which leverages SDN / NFV to virtualize a portion of the RAN onto standard IT or COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) hardware in a central location or in the cloud, is gaining increasing acceptance as MNOs and vendors that are able to build on C-RAN (Centralized or Cloud RAN) architectures and evolve to vRAN will stand to benefit.
ABI said that segments of the market which have been deploying C-RAN architectures for some time now are among the first to virtualize the RAN.
According to ABI research, RAN Virtualization offers advantages such as smaller footprint and reductions in energy consumption, the elimination of overprovisioning, TCO savings, improvements in QoE, scalability and advanced feature support. The research firm has listed Alcatel-Lucent, Cobham Wireless, Corning, Dali Wireless, Ericsson, Freescale, Intel, JMA Wireless, NEC, Nokia Networks, TE Connectivity, and Zinwave as the vRAN pioneers.
Nick Marshall, Research Director at ABI Research
Network virtualization is one of the ways an MNO can respond to the exploding growth in data traffic and the proliferation of wireless connections to subscribers and Internet of Things devices. vRAN densifies a network to meet these challenges while lowering TCO and improving performance.
