Elisa Deploys Fully Automated Edge Cloud with Wind River for 5G in Urban Locations at Scale in European First

Elisa is a market leader in telecommunications in Finland and a pioneer in 5G and digital services. Elisa operates in an industry where the services of the future are built through continuous development, innovation, and cooperation among stakeholders in different fields.

Wind River Studio serves as the cloud infrastructure technology providing a distributed cloud-native platform hosting mission-critical network functions and applications for advanced 5G use cases where low latency and high throughput are required. Wind River also supplies the automation and analytics capabilities needed to run such a distributed network at scale.

Sami Komulainen, Executive Vice President, Production at Elisa, said, “We are delighted to partner with Wind River on this important milestone for the first distributed and fully automated 5G edge commercial deployment in Europe. Edge cloud capability with Wind River Studio has the potential to further improve our customer satisfaction in the form of new services and enhanced customer experience, as well as strengthen Elisa’s position as the leading digital service provider in automating operations.”

A Distributed Cloud to Advance Future 5G Success

To effectively capture business opportunities with new 5G services such as private mobile networking, Elisa needs agility, scalability, low latency, high performance, and capacity, as well as new operational models that include a high degree of automation and monitoring. Therefore, a critical area of investment will be an edge cloud infrastructure technology, as data must be processed with ultra-low latency near the customer to deliver 5G services with an edge infrastructure.

Through native edge cloud infrastructure, Elisa’s objectives will be to follow its distinguishing factor of true “zero-touch deployment, configuration, and enablement with no operator involvement” with the ability to define, commission, and manage edge clouds from a centralized cloud. Elisa selected Wind River as its distributed cloud partner through its proof-of-concept–led selection process.

First Commercial Deployment from Elisa and Wind River

Elisa’s edge cloud infrastructure for 5G is now under commercial production and is beginning to be deployed at scale with the scope to support a fully containerized 5G UPF network function from Elisa’s current leading 5G core vendor as a first application. In addition, a series of technology assessments has been performed with a leading radio vendor for O-RAN introduction requiring deterministic real-time processing at the far edge of the network. Wind River Studio is used as a common distributed cloud platform (CaaS) to host multiple vendors’ applications and multiple technologies to further extend cloudification of distributed core and radio functionalities.

“We are proud to be a leader in the 5G landscape, powering the majority of 5G vRAN/O-RAN deployments with global operators such as Verizon, Vodafone, KDDI, and Elisa, among others. Our Studio capabilities address service providers’ complex challenge of deploying and managing a physically distributed, ultra-low latency cloud-native infrastructure,” said Avijit Sinha, Chief Product Officer, Wind River.

Studio provides a cloud-native platform for the development, deployment, operations, and servicing of mission-critical intelligent systems. Its cloud infrastructure capabilities include a fully cloud-native, Kubernetes- and container-based architecture, based on the StarlingX open source project, for distributed edge networks at scale. Addressing the complexities of deploying and managing cloud native vRAN/O-RAN infrastructure, Studio delivers a foundation for a geographically distributed managed solution able to simplify Day 1 and Day 2 operations by providing single-pane-of-glass, zero-touch automated management of thousands of nodes, no matter where their physical location.

Source: Wind River media announcement