I can promise 100% that in LARGE US 5G carriers this is exactly what is happening. Virtual CU’s and DU’s, running on traditional virtualization platforms and in containers.

An entire multi-vendor containerized 5G which replaces the 4G EPC is also in testing, and close to production deployment.

The only non-virtualized devices in the RAN network would be the Radio Units (RU).



On Aug 7, 2020, at 5:15 AM, Mark Tinka <mark.tinka@seacom.com> wrote:



On 7/Aug/20 09:35, Etienne-Victor Depasquale wrote:

5G introduced a number of functional units (RU, DU and CU) in the radio access network and disaggregation is flexible. Service intelligence doesn't need to come from the core; it may be far out in the edge. At the RU, there is packetized data ready for transmission over eCPRI to the DU. In this webinar (@6:07), there's a bit of a projection about use of service intelligence.

In my old, the plan is what happens :-).

Mark.