Breaking Down vRAN and Its Role in the 5G Future

Virtualized RAN, or vRAN, is a highly complex topic, and there’s a lot of confusion about what it means in the context of 5G. On this episode of Recalibrate, we break it all down, highlighting vRAN’s use cases, benefits, and role in our collective 5G future. vRAN is a virtualized radio access network and is seen as the next step in the evolution of cellular networks and specifically advancing 5G. Essentially, it’s taking previously hardware-driven functions and making them virtualized or software-based. Think about the transition that took place in IT networks. Like those shifts, many operators are looking to move toward a more software-based network to become more flexible in management, services and feature introduction. vRAN moves the controller functions of today’s hardware base stations to centralized servers or closer to the edge of a network, allowing Mobile Network Operators, or MNOs, to pool and adjust radio resources to better accommodate for user traffic. vRAN can effectively support low-latency and new, highly available services, works on options other than expanding fiber connections where necessary, and brings along fewer operational and maintenance headaches than you might realize. Today’s future-proof, 4G vRAN solutions are ready to deliver in the 5G world and provide the connectivity and performance users will come to expect from ever-evolving networks, and host Tyler Kern and guest Derek Johnston took this opportunity to dive into exactly how that rollout will occur.Networks TechTalk podcast was previously named Recalibrate with Samsung Networks.