DISH and Intel on Monday announced they are partnering on the buildout of the nation’s first virtualized, open-radio access network (O-RAN) 5G deployment. Intel’s 5G infrastructure technology will create the foundation for DISH’s greenfield 5G network for increased flexibility and agility.
Architecting the network from the ground up, DISH selected for its deployments the Intel Xeon Scalable processor, the Intel Ethernet 800 Series network adapter, the Intel vRAN Dedicated Accelerator ACC100 and Intel FlexRAN software reference architecture.
Intel brings more than a decade of experience working with the communications industry and a full suite of silicon, software and tools to transform the network with a software-defined, agile and scalable infrastructure. Through close collaboration with Intel, DISH is able to consolidate and optimize multiple workloads at locations across its network for increased efficiency.
In addition to working together on the fully virtualized RAN, the two companies are also collaborating to enable edge applications for enterprises and driving O-RAN standards, and are cooperating in the areas of data optimization and machine learning for future phases of the network buildout.
Dan Rodriguez, Corporate VP and GM of Intel’s Network Platforms Group
Fully virtualized, cloud-native networks, like the one DISH is building, bring the same server economics that transformed the datacenter.
