Saturday School : Virtualisation 101 Sometimes there are easier ways to explain things. A fellow panellist this week reminded me that the modern smart-phone is a great illustrator of Virtualisation, but not necessarily Openness. 20 Years ago, if you travelled on business, you might take a Laptop, a Mobile, a Desk Diary/Notebook, and either a Walkman or an iPod with headphones for music. If you were renting a car, you might take SatNav and 12V adapter. The mobile had a proprietary headphone jack, so you’d need separate headset and charger for both. You might put a DVD in your laptop to watch a film on the plane, and to connect to the internet or LAN at your destination. Maybe you’d take a Digital Compact Camera or DSLR. All separate ‘single-purpose’ pieces of HW, vertically integrated with their own SW and OS. Appliances. Today you take your smartphone: Mail and Calendar: App, Music : App(s), SatNav: App(s), Video: App(s), Internet: App(s), Camera: App. Desk, Portable and possibly Car USB-C chargers. You also have a torch and many other capabilities that you wouldn't typically travel with. We use a few standard pieces of HW, a couple of Operating systems and this gives us access to thousands of Apps. We don’t actively maintain them – or the OS beyond accepting or deferring updates – we just use the power of CI/CD to keep them updated. For many people it’s ‘their entire life’, but running apps on SW and HW that for many comes from different companies is just implicitly trusted.? We also do the same with almost all parts of the mobile network, except the RAN. So yes, next time someone says that vRAN is scary, consider that it’s pretty much the last appliance standing! #EveryDaysaSchoolDay #Telecommunications #5ginnovation Previous Post: https://lnkd.in/d4S22mnH
Thanks Paul Rhodes for sharing your thoughts. Interesting & timely as I was only this morning in a brief reference vRAN architecture & which server (providers) would host the VCU/VDUs & cloud dimensioning for CNFs, as in pods & initiation times...all very interesting????
Great article Paul.
CEO at RANsemi
1 年A great analogy, Paul Rhodes. I note that many of the smartphone "apps" that you list rely on special-purpose hardware, which is sometimes part of the apps processor chip and sometimes separate. These include: - Satnav: GNSS receiver. - Camera app: a physical camera. - Internet app: cellular and WiFi modems, along with crypto and other hardware accelerators. - Fitness apps: Accelerometers and other sensors. - Music: probably a Bluetooth modem for connection to earbuds, etc. Some people like to think the vRAN is entirely software, but like smartphone apps, it requires both general and special purpose hardware accelerators.