San Francisco, Aug 5 (IANS): In a bid to accelerate the rollout of both existing 4G and the future 5G networks, global chip giant Intel and enterprise software major VMware on Wednesday announced a collaboration on an integrated software platform for virtualized radio access networks (RAN).

Intel and VMware will work with a rich ecosystem, including telecom equipment manufacturers, original equipment manufacturers and RAN software vendors, to help communications service providers easily build on top of the vRAN platform to address specific use cases, the companies said in a statement.

As communications service providers (CoSPs) evolve their networks to support the rollout of future 5G networks, they are increasingly adopting a software-defined, virtualized infrastructure.

Many CoSPs are choosing to extend the benefits of network virtualization into the RAN for increased agility as they roll out new 5G services, but the software integration can be rather complex.

"With the integrated vRAN platform, combined with leading technology and expertise from Intel and VMware, CoSPs are positioned to benefit from accelerated time to deployment of innovative services at the edge of their network," said Dan Rodriguez, corporate vice president and general manager of the Network Platforms Group at Intel.

Virtualization of the core network will enable the communications service providers to improve operational costs and bring services to market faster.

"As CoSPs look to extend their software-defined infrastructure out to the RAN, there are tremendous benefits to delivering all network functions on a single platform," said Shekar Ayyar, executive vice president and general manager, Telco and Edge Cloud, VMware.

With an integrated platform, CoSPs will be able to deploy new network functions across the same Telco Cloud architecture, from core to RAN, enabling the scale and agility needed to deliver services across a 5G network more efficiently, he explained.