Private LTE delivers a controllable, cost-effective network that bolsters security while providing a wider and more reliable coverage area to enhance productivity and foster innovation. Service providers are using Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) to replace last-mile fiber access and deliver fixed wireless services to end customers while augmenting existing capacity. Enterprises and managed service providers are utilizing the 3.5 GHz band to deploy private LTE for IoT connectivity and deliver a quality of experience that Wi-Fi cannot guarantee.

Mobile operators face an increasingly competitive and demanding business environment in which technology is changing more rapidly than ever, which makes it imperative to implement future proof, end-to-end open network solutions to innovate and compete. The Software-Defined Mobile Network (SDMN) solution is a multi-vendor, software-based end-to-end 4G/5G mobile network that includes Virtualized RAN (Open vRAN), telco cloud infrastructure, transport and mobile core solutions -- each virtualized and residing on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware. This briefing -- available for both the Option 2 and Option 7-2x Split RAN architectures-- provides a blueprint for a disaggregated, virtualized, best-of-breed and fully open 4G/5G mobile network. A Cisco transport network is placed in between these data centers to connect these applications together to achieve end-to-end voice and data connectivity for subscribers.

As modern networks have grown in complexity and scale, they require more stringent tolerances and demanding services, which has spawned the need for a more straightforward and optimized method of transmitting data. And as 5G becomes more widely adopted, such latency standards will only become more desirable. Moving to a next-generation Network Transport based on Segment Routing enables organizational agility and unprecedented control over network path optimization and end-to-end Service Level Agreements (SLA). This briefing is intended to be used for architecture validation, proofs of concepts (POCs), demonstrations, and functional and interoperability testing.

The VMware Telco Cloud Platform Radio Access Network (TCP RAN) lab is designed to provide customers and OEMs the ability to demo and validate workloads operating in the VMware TCP RAN reference architecture.