By Ankur Sharma, Associate Vice President, Product Management and Strategy, Radisys
Shortly after LTE reached maturity, service providers started facing new challenges to meet customer demand for high capacity and “always-on” connectivity with quick set-up and transition time, spurred by diverse new applications and extremely high data usage by subscribers. To address some of these challenges, service providers began spending on new hardware and software for Radio Access Network (RAN) upgrades, spectrum refarming, and co-existence of licensed-unlicensed multi-mode deployments. While these approaches helped alleviated some of the issues, they also increased service providers’ CAPEX and OPEX and significantly reduced profitability. Service providers needed a software-controlled RAN with embedded intelligence on purpose-built hardware which could be deployed in multiple ways. To meet these requirements, 5G topology introduced a new mindset of creating and defining a “multi-split” architecture.
