Intel VRAN Podcast Transcript
Allyson Klein:
Welcome to the Tech Arena. My name's Allyson Klein and I am so excited about today's episode. We are delving into the world of edge, and I am, delighted to introduce my guest, Christina Rodriguez. She's Vice president and general manager of the Wireless Access Network Division at Intel and a friend of mine.
Welcome to the program, Christina. It's great to see you.
Cristina Rodriguez:
Thank you, Allyson. It's great to be here talking to you. Such a treat for me. Looking forward to it.
Allyson Klein:
So Christina, the topic for today is edge and everything [00:01:00] associated with edge. The TechArena has been trying to provide an update on edge computing where we are as an industry, as well as are our definitions holding about what edge is really all about. You spend your life on the edge. ,Why don't you just start with giving a vision for what you think about in terms of edge computing and what it comprises.
Cristina Rodriguez:
So, Allyson, generally edge refers to processing data as close as possible to the point of collection where the data is being generated to drive quicker, more efficient, both decision making, but also action based on that data. For the past decade, as you know, we've all been working together to transform the cloud and core networks to be more basically software define everything. Now the transformation is moving out to the edge to edge infrastructure and end points or far edge, like the radio access network. The reason for this is simple. There is so much data at the edge. If you put compute closer to it, you get fast insights from all these previously untapped information.
You can process it right there, all the data, and make a decision right there. And this will allow you to do everything that you can think of. So many use cases that are sensitive, for example, latency. It goes from improving production quality to delivering real time, personalized advertising or video content to automate in a warehouse.
You name it. And by the way, just to give you a data point, the edge has the highest CAGR of any compute location, even higher than the public cloud. Gartner, the analyst, for example, predicts that by 2025, more than 50% of the data will reside at the edge outside of a central data centers.
Allyson Klein:
You know, it's interesting. This is one of the things that I wanted to talk to you about, so I'm glad that you brought up that Gartner survey. Over the last couple of years, we've heard so much about the unprecedented growth in cloud because we were all in our homes ordering things on Amazon. No, just kidding. The cloud was so important to every aspect of our lives, but what happened to the edge in the same time period?
I wanted to catch up with you and what you've seen working with customers around adoption of Edge and where we are in 2023 as we consider this technology.
Cristina Rodriguez:
Continue being super important, right? And continue being critical to the future of the network, the future of society. If you think about it, the edge coming from every place from enterprise. From the public and private network, everything that goes around us, there is an opportunity there to have data, collect that data, analyze that data, and also to offer a service and monetize that service.
So if you think about it from the quality of life from the service to society to the business needs, there is an opportunity there that is getting more and more realistic at the real as we go by.
Allyson Klein:
When you think about, edge, it's very easy to start thinking about a time period that we're entering right now, which is Mobile World Congress season. This year, Mobile World Congress will be back in a big way. I know, it has been held during the pandemic, but in a smaller capacity. What are you most excited to see what the industry is delivering around Edge and what do you think are the technologies that we'll be talking about at Mobile World as the industry unveils their innovation?
Cristina Rodriguez: Yeah, no, mobile World Congress this year is gonna be fantastic. And within that, the area very close to me, the virtualization of the RAN. I think we're gonna hear a lot about it. And a few subtopics, I'm gonna say within that, 2023 in general is. Is a very important year for vRAN. We have gone from trials, lab trials and field trials to real deployment, and real commercial deployments at scale.
And this is important for the public cloud, but it's also very important for the entire edge space. I think we're gonna hear a lot about that. I think we're gonna hear a lot about sustainability. How do we make those networks more efficient, less consumption in of, of power and how do we bring, for example, things like artificial intelligence into it.
So just tremendous amount of technology associated to the Radio Access network, the virtual radio access network. And, and we are Intel, we have several things, multiple things going on that are going to accelerate all these built up around the edge, and the RAN, and the network in general.
And we're super excited about that. We have a few demos in our booth that, would love to show it to you and, and to your listeners.
Allyson Klein:
So, Christina, let's go back to vRAN for a second. This is an alphabet soup place in the industry like none other. You've got vRAN, you've got Open vRAN, you've got Mobile Edge computing. Help us make sense of the different technologies in this space and why vRAN is so important. You mentioned this, why it's so important for the Cloud, why it's important for edge proliferation.
Cristina Rodriguez:
Absolutely. And it's all related, right? They are all the different things, but they're all related. And at the center of it, there is the need for that technology that is gonna enable everything, and that we believe that Intel plays such a big role within, if you take the edge and capability to process, to collect and process data closer where to the data is generated. So that's one thing, but how did you do that in the best possible way?
Well, you need a network infrastructure that allows you to maximize flexibility, the scalability, and to bring. I'm gonna say software, global software community to inject innovation, develop those applications in every different vertical segment to then produce new or be able to offer new services and new experiences.
So it all come together, but if we go to Open Ran and vRAN , they're close related. Again, open Ran is about opening interfaces in the radio access network. vRAN is about virtualizing that network. It's about taking functions that before were done in fixed functioning, in purpose build in equipment or hardware, running all that in software.
And when you do that, you now have a open common platform that the whole world understand with a cloud architecture that allows you to just run that network as hyperscalers have done for, for many, for many years, very successful. Now you have all that infrastructure that allows you the flexibility, the scalability, all the innovation that exist, can be unleashed in the world. So that is very important.
Allyson Klein:
When I think about different things that different parts of the industry. Talk about like 5G, network slicing, like, fully distributed computing from edge to cloud based on cloud architecture. It seems like virtualizing the RAN is at the heart and at a foundational level of all of those things.
Cristina Rodriguez:
Absolutely.
Allyson Klein:
When you're talking about being in deployments, what does that look like today and where do you think it's gonna go? You talked about the CAGR of Edge, but how does, what's the CAGR vRAN look like?
Cristina Rodriguez:
Tremendous progress and tremendous momentum, I'm gonna say in the last couple, couple of years, right? We went from trials to deployment, commercial deployment, and then commercial deployment at a scale. I'll give you a few data points, and I think this is very telling, for example, we have, say Verizon, right here in the US announced in December, that they have now deployed more than 10,000 virtualized cell sites across United States.
And that's officially marks the crossing the halfway point to the 20,000 that they wanna do by 2025. So that's a tremendous accomplishment. You have this, for example, Greenfield. Mid-year, last year, they launched the first cloud native open ground base 5G network. And since then they have expanded service to more than 120 cities across the country, offering 5G broadband services to over 20% of the US population. You have, for example, Rakuten Mobile, the Japanese operator, they have been deploying for a while now, both 4G and 5g. Again, cloud native and cloud native end-to-end network. And proven again, that open RAN is ready for a scale.
I mentioned Vodafone and Telefonica in Europe. They have also deployed commercially, virtualize d and open RAN cell sites. So tremendous momentum. I think 2023 will see more of that. The industry's learning. It has been a process. This is not something that we knew that was gonna happen overnight, but the industry is learning. We are being very good about sharing and collaborating and sharing experience across the entire industry and ecosystem. So I think we'll continue seeing the acceleration of the virtualization of RAN.
Allyson Klein:
When you think the impetus for moving. Obviously anytime you move from a siloed proprietary technology to something that's open there's going to be a play of cost savings involved. The move to cloud native and the move to a cloud-based architecture obviously has some benefit from workload oversight and automated provisioning of, of services in the RAN. What else does at play here in terms of the benefits from a provider perspective to move to vRAN technology?
Cristina Rodriguez:
That's a very good point, Allyson, very good point. Because, it's multiple things that we get with the cloud native approach and the virtualization of the network.
Number one, there is the CapEx, right? And the economy of a scale that you get when you are using a server-based equipment. Right? So that's that. But then you also have the opex aspect of it. And you mentioned that how much do you save in operation? How much are capable of saving in operation when you have for example, the ability to do software upgrades much more easier.
You have the ability to have people, a bigger pool of developers, and skill sets that can come to that network, and offer new applications. You have things, for example, social power, efficiency and power management. I will mention again the couple of things that we're doing in that area.
Some of them were gonna show it in the Mobile world Congress, this year in Barcelona , you know there is capabilities there as part of that cloud virtualized environment that help Operators reduce the power consumption. There is , features such as you mentioned network slicing.
That's a sophisticated advanced feature that will enable use cases that [00:13:00] we are already have in mind at this point, for example, the ability to pull base station and digital units and radio units in smart ways.
The ability to bring artificial intelligence to manage. Uh, intelligently spectrum or again, upgrades the zero touch automation, right? Every operator would love to have a zero touch operation. I truly do not believe that you can get to all that fast enough unless you have a virtualized network all the way from layer one. By layer one, it's the most intense compute layer of the workload. And if you get all the way down to the layer where virtualize end to end, I think that's the way that we get there faster and with the more number of requirements met.
Allyson Klein:
You know, what's exciting about what you just described is the type of applications and capabilities that this technology will unleash for users as well as businesses. And you can just imagine what people can create when this kind of capability is put out there. I can't wait to see it. I do wanna talk to you about something that surprised and delighted me to see, which was the introduction of vRAN Acceleration into the Xeon scalable processor at your Sapphire Rapids launch.
Do you wanna talk about that and, and why Intel decided to bake vRAN acceleration into the mainstream processor lineup.
Cristina Rodriguez:
Yeah. Absolutely. That we're super excited about that. As you know, we're now rolling out already our Intel fourth generation of processors, code name Sapphire Rapid, and we announced it earlier in, in January.
One of the things that we're super excited about Saphire Rapids is that we can double the capacity for RAN workloads compared to the prior [00:15:00] generation. So double the capacity within the same power envelope. Wow. So super important in the RAN. And, and you say why we did that in the RAN performance per watts is critical, right? This equipment is gonna be on a cell tower, or it's gonna be on a place where there is a limited budget for power consumption. So the performance per watt is very important, and the capacity that you can get within the power envelope is very important.
So we're doubling that to what we did before. On top of that, we have a new feature in this fourth generation that is called vRAN Boost. This is an acceleration that we put inside this part of the cpu.
With that you don't need any external accelerator. You don't need to have any PCI card doing any additional accelerator. Everything is already on the CPU and that in addition to all the goodness of the simplified, uh, solution, you also save right off the bat 20% of power savings because you don't need any external accelerator. So performance per watt, additional power saving, and then the simplification of the supply chain, because now, you just need a server.
You don't need a PCI on the card in there. You have everything you need to process the RAN workload. And that's , lower BOM cost, lower board complexity, reduced TCO, simplified system integration, reduce supply chain complexity, all that comes together.
Allyson Klein:
Wow, that was a lot. I can't wait to see it when I get to Barcelona, Cristina. It was lovely having you on the show. I can't wait to hear more about what you and the Intel team will be doing with the industry at Mobile World and keep the conversation going. One final question for you. If folks want engage with you online or learn more about what you and the team are doing, where would you send them for more information?
Cristina Rodriguez:
Sure. And absolutely, I can't wait to see you at MWC and talk, catch up with you in person. To you and your listeners what is going on in our booth. But as far as connecting LinkedIn is always a great way. I try to, you and I are connected there. I try to share as much as possible without going overboard on LinkedIn. There's so much to share. Of course, I can't share it all but another good , source is follow in at Intel business. And then on Twitter you can follow at Intel 5G networks. And of course anybody on MWC will super happy to host them and show them what we are doing in our technology and our solutions.
Allyson Klein:
Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for your time today, Christina. It was a real pleasure.