Parallel Wireless co-founder and chairman, in what he called the first public discussion of the company’s work in virtualizing the Long Term Evolution (LTE) access and core networks, described virtualization for the LTE RAN (Radio Access Network) in terms of both a step forward and a step back.
“We’re really re-imagining, in one sense, how to build out the LTE access network,” said Steve Papa at a Telecom Council Carrier Connections event at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley. “But in many ways, what we’re doing is bringing back what we had in the 2G and 3G networks, which is the radio network controller. With LTE, we got rid of it, when instead we should’ve been expanding its role.”
Parallel Wireless has been around since 2012 and has $20 million in initial investor funding. The company is particularly interested in supporting virtualized LTE public safety networks. Papa said that the company’s LTE access controller allows real-time network orchestration and supports new services, with “some of the elements of [self-organizing networks, or SON], but it’s a lot more than that. … It’s really radio resource management. And in fact we think a lot of the efforts to build things like cloud RAN, most of that is unnecessary if you have this part of the architecture in LTE.”
Watch Papa’s presentation on virtualizing the LTE RAN below and see more of RCR’s video coverage from the TC3 event on our YouTube channel:
