The promise of 5G is unlocking significant change and sparking the 4th Industrial Revolution, driving use cases such as industrial IoT and improved healthcare, to augmented reality, autonomous vehicles and smart cities. But if 5G is to succeed in delivering these use cases, the industry needs access to an open disaggregated Radio Access Network (RAN) that gives operators the flexibility required to meet the network challenges of 5G cost effectively.
While much of the network has already benefited from a wave of disaggregation and virtualization in support of 4G/LTE, the RAN remains the last piece of the network to be disaggregated.