Inland Cellular Picks Parallel Wireless’ OpenRAN for 4G, 5G

At a Glance: Inland Cellular

• Serving area: 2 states in the inland Northwest
• Number of roaming customers: Between 10,000 and 20,000
• Roaming partners: 24

Introduction

Inland Cellular is a regional mobile network operator (MNO) that has established a reputation for delivering great network services and customer support. To maintain its network services edge, Inland Cellular is planning on updating its 4G/LTE network to provide better coverage and enable new services. The network is based on an OpenRAN architecture from Parallel Wireless consisting of OpenRAN hardware: software-defined remote radio head (RRH) and virtualized BBUs (vBBUs) enabled by Parallel Wireless OpenRAN controller. With this addition to its network, Inland Cellular will be able to meet its customer goal of better coverage and service, improve operations of its legacy network equipment, and lay a foundation for future 5G services.

Facing Demand for Seamless Network Service & New Connectivity Needs

Inland Cellular serves communities in the inland Pacific Northwest, encompassing north central Idaho and southeastern Washington. Inland Cellular has more than 36,000 subscribers throughout its serving area as well as thousands of other users from its 24 roaming partners.

Improving Coverage and Preparing for 5G with OpenRAN from Parallel Wireless

The company also wanted to expand its ability to meet new connectivity needs in the community, including smart homes, connected farms, smart enterprises, private LTE, and other services. In addition, the MNO wanted a smart and cost-effective migration path to 5G services that reused as much of the network as possible to extend the original investment. As a regional MNO, Inland Cellular wanted to leverage virtualized, cloud-native, and software-defined solutions that could meet its criteria for network service quality cost effectively.

The business challenge facing Inland Cellular is to ensure its network provides its customers with the best possible experience, including a seamless roaming experience for its large number of roaming customers—many who come from tier-one MNOs and have high expectations for coverage and services.

Introduction to OpenRAN

OpenRAN is an open standard managed by the Telecom Infra Project (TIP) that implements RAN on general purpose computing platforms to lower the cost of building a network and improve interoperability. TIP members are developing a modular base station software stack with open north- and south-bound interfaces for better interoperability.

This architecture allows an MNO to combine baseband units, radio units, and remote radio heads from any vendor into a single network, replacing the end-to-end vendor lock in that occurs with today’s proprietary networks.

Parallel Wireless’ OpenRAN controller software delivers orchestration and policy features that manage the radio connection, mobility management, quality of service (QoS) management, edge services, and end user equipment interference management. For controller scalability and performance, Parallel Wireless has de-coupled the control plane and user plane so that each of the components can be located in servers in different parts of the network.

Inland Cellular New RAN Runs on Intel® Xeon® D Processor-Based Servers

The choice of servers used in the RAN depends on the size of the served area as measured by the number of sectors it covers. A RAN covering three sectors might be able to utilize a server powered by an Intel® Xeon® D-2100 processor. A RAN implementation serving six sectors or more will need the additional performance of an Intel Xeon Scalable processor to run vBBU functionality.

To power its OpenRAN implementation, Inland Cellular chose servers that utilize the Intel Xeon D-2100 processors. Intel Xeon D-2100 processors deliver the performance of the Intel Xeon Scalable processor architecture for applications that have space and power constraints, including intelligent edge applications.

Conclusion

Inland Cellular successfully improved its network and set a foundation for future 5G services with its new software-based 4G/LTE macrocell OpenRAN solution. With a solution provided by Parallel Wireless, the MNO was able to improve its network coverage and quality, and add interoperability to its existing network equipment. The software-defined RRH that is a part of the new network can be software updated to support 5G without a hardware change. The vBBUs are Intel architecture-based and can deliver significant capacity and throughout. The network helped the regional MNO to fulfill its commitment to high-quality network services now and in the future.