Wide Area Networks (WANs) — or the wireless that connects your mobile devices when away from Wifi — have been slow to evolve due to the high costs of upgrading the physical network. That’s all because there are 100s of thousands of hardware towers (and/or supporting local infrastructure) that need to be swapped out when technology or use-cases change (e.g. video streaming).

With 5G, we’re seeing more and more of that move to software like so many other infrastructure services have on the wired Internet. This is a big deal. If wireless networks can adapt to new use-cases without having to upgrade the hardware, we’ll see much more rapid evolution of services over the coming years.

vRAN is about 5G becoming software-defined and programmable. By definition, vRAN involves disaggregation of software and hardware. There is an expectation that an operator will be able to run the same 5G software stack on a variety of servers and evolve capacity by swapping out the hardware, as we do with our PCs. There’s a cost to this: a lower degree of system integration implying lower performance per watt of power. But there is also an upside where Ericsson is taking the lead: greatly improving the pace of new network features and the adaptability of 5G to emerging use-cases.

https://www.ericsson.com/en/blog/2020/4/hardware-acceleration-5g-vran

In this highly technical Ericsson write-up, they describe their approach. Hopefully, standards take hold here so we don’t have balkanization at the SW level allowing all companies in the space to innovation vs. just those controlling the software infrastructure.