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The private 5G network built for broadcasters and journalists at this year's Paris Olympics came from not Ericsson or Nokia but a tiny French startup, Amarisoft.
For sports fans who watched this year's Paris Olympics opening ceremony on TV, close visual encounters with favorite athletes, conveyed in a stately procession of boats on the Seine, were an unusual 5G treat. Smartphone cameras installed on deck shot the footage, but it was a dedicated 5G network, cordoned off from public consumption, that ferried the data for broadcasters. Such technology normally comes from a giant kit vendor like Ericsson, Nokia or – where politically acceptable – Huawei. But the provision of Orange's private 5G network, reserved for broadcasters and journalists, was more of a team event, and some of the participants were unfamiliar faces.
The best known, already disclosed by Orange in press briefings to reporters, were Cisco and Intel. Still famous as the world's biggest maker of Internet routers and switches, Cisco provided the "core," the control center, of this private 5G network. Intel, unsurprisingly, stumped up the chips for network equipment. Yet much of the radio access network (RAN) expertise came from smaller and more obscure companies whose names and roles have been less clear. They include AW2S, a French maker of radios, and Neutral Wireless, a UK vendor of RAN technology. Perhaps most interesting of all, though, is another French company called Amarisoft.
Franck Spinelli, Amarisoft's co-founder and boss, showed up at an Orange event way back in 2017 – ancient history in the world of technology – when the startup was being courted by the French telco and Facebook (now Meta) as a potentially disruptive network innovator. Even then, Amarisoft claimed to have developed a complete set of basestation software akin to what Orange would normally buy from Ericsson or Nokia. But there was a big difference. The Nordic vendors married their software to custom hardware, an approach mirroring that of Apple with its iPhone. Amarisoft's code ran on standard PC-type equipment.
This "virtualization" of the RAN was later demonstrated by a different telco. In February last year at its London office, Vodafone showed off a "network in a box" that combined Amarisoft's code with a Raspberry Pi, a small, single-board computer. At the Paris Olympics, the same concept was applied in a commercial setting to support the 5G services used by local broadcasters and international press.
Team effort
It is significant, and not just as a real-world example of virtualization. In a traditional RAN, a single vendor like Ericsson or Nokia provides a fully integrated set of all the products needed for a given mobile site. Open RAN, a concept championed by Orange and other telcos, joins together parts from different vendors. Amarisoft remains obscure largely because it does not always deal directly with telcos, instead licensing its technology to other vendors. In the case of the Olympics, its software was taken by Neutral Wireless and built into a product that could be linked to AW2S radios.
Following chatter on social media, and the direct sharing of some details with Light Reading by people involved in the project, Orange's press office confirmed in a short statement Amarisoft's role as the RAN software provider. Cisco, it also pointed out, acted as the main systems integrator, charged with stitching together all the various technologies for the core and RAN. Importantly, the private 5G network was fully compliant with the interfaces developed by the O-RAN Alliance, a telco-led specifications group, said Orange.
For any neutral observer, perhaps the biggest surprise is that Orange – while choosing Cisco for its 5G core – preferred Amarisoft and other small RAN players to the likes of Ericsson. Uploading video footage and high-resolution images places a significant demand on the network, and any disruption to the opening ceremony or the international press could have been devastating to Orange.
The main complaint usually aired about RAN virtualization is that PC-type equipment and general-purpose platforms aren't up to the job. For a basic network in a rural area, they might do. But for high-performance needs, the technologies must supposedly be as purpose-built and dedicated to the task as an Olympian. Ericsson, despite now offering its own virtual RAN products, insists purpose-built hardware will continue to finish first in the performance race.
What has not helped the cheerleaders for virtual RAN is their reliance on "accelerators" – essentially more optimized silicon – for the hardest tasks. Layer 1, a super-demanding category of RAN functions, is hosted entirely on a separate custom chip made by Marvell Technology in Nokia's virtual RAN product. Even Intel, with its vested interest in promoting general-purpose processors, offers an accelerator and the software to go with it for some Layer 1 functionality. Both Ericsson and Samsung are customers. These various compromises seem to prove the point about the inadequacies of standard PC-type equipment.
They'll never take our freedom
Yet Amarisoft says it has no need for accelerators, and Spinelli has criticized deployments that use them for hardware dependency. "We are free," he told Light Reading on a recent call. "We are open to consider any kind of architecture." At the Olympics, his software was running on an Intel chip. But it was not one of the more advanced products, replete with accelerators, that Intel usually talks up for use in virtual RAN. Amarisoft simply relied on a more basic, off-the-shelf processor, said Marouan Benabdellah-Chaouni, Amarisoft's senior vice president of sales and marketing.
Because most other RAN software developers have some form of acceleration, this will naturally provoke a degree of skepticism. Amarisoft, though, started work in this area long before many other developers. Its software-only credentials clearly gave it an incentive to keep pushing when some companies might have instinctively reverted to hardware. Spinelli says his doubters have been there since much earlier days, when Amarisoft was working with eNodeB, a 4G technology.
"In 2013, when we came up with our first version of eNodeB running on a PC without any acceleration, people though we were lying," he said. "Then they said 'you'll never be able to do 5G,' and we made it. They always try to convince themselves there is a barrier somewhere. It's impossible to imagine there's not."
So far, Amarisoft says it has not seen any demand for 5G products that incorporate the most advanced technologies or use higher spectrum bands. "No one is asking us directly for beamforming or millimeter wave," said Benabdellah-Chaouni. "This is the reality today." Its ability to meet those needs without accelerators will be in doubt until Amarisoft proves otherwise, as Spinelli is only too aware.
There is also not an example that has been made public of Amarisoft using Arm-based processors, as opposed to the x86 platform of Intel and AMD, on the scale of the Paris Olympics private network deployment, which covered a 6 kilometer stretch of the Seine and several venues, including the Stade de France, Arena Bercy and and Paris La Défense Arena.
But Raspberry Pi computers use Arm-based chips, and Spinelli says the only real constraint in a commercial deployment is capacity. "Our stuff is working on Arm, but you will not have the same capacity on Arm that you have on x86," he said. "We are still taking into account those two architectures." Between 90% and 95% of the code would not have to change in moving from x86 to Arm, according to Spinelli, and the remainder is already written. "It's very minimal effort," he said.
Amarisoft is not the only developer boasting hardware-agnostic virtual RAN software. Parallel Wireless, which also now builds radios, claimed a similar breakthrough last year, as reported by Light Reading in December, after a trip to the company's research facility in the UK city of Bristol. Earlier this month, it advertised a tie-up with Ampere Computing, an Oracle-backed developer of Arm-based chips. Yet unlike Amarisoft, it has had little to say about any commercial 5G activities.
The Paris Olympics is a rare case of Amarisoft being publicly outed. It claims to feature in other deployments it cannot discuss, too. But its known involvement with a major European telco at such a high-profile event, alongside various other small RAN suppliers, offers a much better example of open and virtual RAN in a live production network than Ericsson's $14 billion single-vendor deal with AT&T, or the disaster zone of Dish. Questions about extending Amarisoft and its partners into the realm of public 5G remain. But open RAN's idealists suddenly have something to cheer.
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