Network vendors need something far more real than ‘5G’

Base stations and hardware

Of course, the new software-centric Ericsson could not resist a good old-fashioned base station launch. It said the latest Radio System was its biggest such launch since the RBS 6000 – still the basis of its core range – in 2008. The Radio System builds on those multilayer, multiband foundations but comes with an upgraded baseband, the 2016, and an overall upgrade which promises to deliver 20 per cent lower total cost of ownership.

Arun Bansal, head of the radio business unit, said the firm had “slashed the size and weight in half across the product line only after we secured performance” and, echoing similar statements from Nokia and ALU (and no doubt Huawei when it offers its MWC preview on Tuesday), said this hardware was “laying the foundation for 5G”.

And the firm has got over its old aversion to small cells, and offered a new way to build and mount these mini-base stations to improve the economics. There is also a new router, the 100GE Router 6000, which is designed to support the capacity carriers will require in future to support rising quantities of mobile devices, data and internet of things services.

The vendor has also included SDN protocol support on the 6000 Series’s three routers (access, edge aggregation and metro aggregation), and was particularly stressing the tight level of integration between these products and the new Radio System architecture.

Once again, that none-too-subtly touted the benefits of an allEricsson end-to-end network (even if it can no longer stretch out to the device or modem as Huawei can) – and also took a swipe at ALU, with its own router power.

Ericsson has also announced a virtual router offering for smaller data centres, while emphasizing (as all router makers do of course) that once a certain level of traffic processing is achieved, there is no substitute for dedicated hardware.

The real value that Ericsson claims to offer is not in individual products, but the integration and consulting services, and the software frameworks, to tie them all together. Last year, the Swedish company’s big announcement was its huge, integrated software release, Network Software 14B, which created a single framework incorporating over 200 new or upgraded elements, and spanning virtualization, IMS, self-optimizing networks and many other important aspects of the software platform. The aim was to support "industrialised upgradability" to ease the path to LTE-Advanced, software-defined networking and, eventually, "5G".

This year, Ericsson has upgraded this with Network Software 15B, which aims to simplify and accelerate operator moves towards new architectures. It facilitates Network functions-based virtualisation (NFV) and provides “system software releases in coherent software packages, synchronized and tested across nodes in networks, end-to-end, to maximize performance and efficiency,” according to Håkan Djuphammar, head of technology in the Cloud & IP business unit.

Copyright © 2015, Wireless Watch

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