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China Mobile, DoCoMo gear up to deploy C-RANs

  • Posted: Tuesday, July 23, 2013
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  • Author: pradhana



Cloud radio access networks (C-RANs) are moving quickly from theory to reality, as a handful of operators prepares to deploy the emerging technology in the next couple of years.

China Mobile will launch C-RANs as early as 2015 with Japan's NTT DoCoMo expected to follow in 2016, according to Gilad Garon, CEO of Asocs, which sells silicon cores for modems. Garon, who was interviewed by EE Times, said a third unnamed carrier is also preparing to launch C-RANs, which consolidate individual base station processing into a single or regional server farm using Intel x86 servers to eliminate the need for traditional wireless base stations.

In February, Asocs signed a strategic memorandum of understanding for the joint development, commercialization, testing and deployment of large-scale baseband processing units for China Mobile's C-RAN trials. "Korea Telecom (KT) is involved, and we see interest in Europe primarily from Deutsche Telekom," said Garon.
According to Intel, C-RANs use collaborative radio and real-time cloud infrastructure to reduce operator capex and opex by bringing intelligence to the edge of the network so it can respond dynamically on the fly. C-RAN architecture can enable a complete LTE base station to be implemented using general purpose core processors, with the workload being divided across multiple cores.Light Reading noted last year that KT's version of C-RAN, called "Cloud Communication Center" (CCC), was created in partnership with Samsung and Intel. (FierceBroadbandWireless)