Boost Mobile ditched Broadcom’s VMware division’s container-as-a-service (CaaS) platform for a similar platform from Wind River, making good on a hinted move tied to performance and cost concerns and highlighting a new reality for vendors participating in the open networking environment.

The operator, which recently changed its official market-facing brand from Dish Wireless, pulled VMware’s platform that had been core to its unique open network architecture since its inception for Wind River’s Studio Operator platform. The Wind River product will now manage all of Boost Mobile’s containerized edge-to-cloud application needs.

The Wind River Studio Operator platform is a cloud-native 5G edge network middleware based on Kubernetes and containers that provides operators with a platform to develop, deploy, operate, and manage 5G distributed edge clouds. It’s based on the open source StarlingX project, which is part of the Open Infrastructure Foundation, and integrates OpenStack, Kubernetes, and Ceph to support network edge computing use cases.

Wind River does have a history of supporting operator open network initiatives. This includes work with Verizon, Telus, and Vodafone. It also works to support other vendor systems, including Dell Technologies.

Boost Mobile had been working with VMware on the CaaS layer of its unique open network architecture. It initially announced work with VMware in mid-2020, using that vendor’s Telco Cloud platform to provide the underlying cloud platform and infrastructure to power its open RAN-based 5G network.

The VMware platform provides an abstraction layer running across multiple network domains that allows operators to tap into hyperscale public cloud capacity while maintaining core control points. Boost Mobile management had previously stated they had tested and onboarded “dozens” of cloud-native 5G network functions from “multiple software vendors” on top of the VMware Telco Cloud platform that used its embedded Kubernetes container orchestration capabilities and cloud-native principles to “dynamically move and scale workloads within the cloud, based on consumer demand.”

Boost Mobile CTO Eben Albertyn in an earlier interview with SDxCentral hinted at the vendor swap and touted the advantage of its unique network architecture in allowing the carrier to make such a deep core change “in a way that our customers won’t even know it’s happening.”

“Boost Mobile is beyond proving open RAN technology works and is now applying component interchangeability through our new engagement with Wind River,” Albertyn said of the move in a statement. “We continue to evaluate performance and the cost effectiveness of our network components and can rapidly pivot to new and different solutions. We aim to ensure our network remains cutting-edge and customers continue to enjoy the benefits of a cloud-native 5G network, including greater reliability, higher speeds and cost-effective services.”

Why did Boost ditch VMware? Albertyn’s statement backed his previous comments to SDxCentral that the carrier made the swap based on what he termed “cost effectiveness” or a combination of “operational performance, strategic roadmap, and overall cost.”

“Performance combined with price combined with strategic roadmap going forward, the combination of those, we are able to evaluate with open RAN, decide whether the disposition that we have right now and the vendor landscape that we have right now is at the most optimal inflection point, and if it’s not – as in this case is the matter – so where we consider those three factors combined, and we compare it against what the market is able to offer us, we can see that we can make a better decision when it comes to those three components,” Albertyn said.

Albertyn at that time did not mention VMware specifically, but he did point to a current issue larger rival AT&T was having with a vendor. AT&T is currently locked in a high-profile support dispute with Broadcom over licensing and billing changes it has made to its VMware services.

“It’s public information, but you’ve seen that AT&T has a problem with a software vendor where that software vendor is deeply entrenched in their systems and so fiddling with that is dangerous,” Albertyn said. “Obviously the recourse that AT&T needs to take is to take other forms of steps because changing those things are hard. I’m naming AT&T because they’re in telecom, but I can probably quote somebody from banking or a lot of other places where there are pieces of software that it’s operationally very risky for them to touch it, and therefore you have a disproportionate relationship in that engagement.”

Boost Mobile was able to make the swap due to its open 5G network core. This architecture relies on components based on open standards that if followed allow the seamless exchange of those platforms.

“We’ve seen that we can actually do something better for our customers, and being able to deliver a better piece of software at a better price point with a more robust strategic roadmap that will serve us better in the coming years, and not only can we see that, but we actually have the ability to take something that’s a very important part of our architecture, but we can now go and change it. We don’t have a gun to our head,” Albertyn said.

Analysts have noted that operators are increasingly interested in this level of flexibility, however many of those operators remain tied to legacy mindsets that have prevented them from fully embracing the radical shift toward open architectures.

Gorkem Yigit, research director at Analysys Mason, told SDxCental in an interview earlier this year that buy-in is a generational challenge for telecom operators that often have high-level engineers with extensive industry history and knowledge, but a legacy view that could inhibit an ability to trust and adopt new platforms.

“It’s really difficult to execute something like this with 50-, 60-year-old network engineers who just know traditional telecom,” Yigit said. “It’s a massive mindset change because it’s not about telco network technologies anymore, it’s about the cloud, which is really overtaking the networks.”

Some of these challenges can be surmounted by operators selecting the right vendor partners to help down this transition. This can be especially important for operators that might lack the technical expertise in house to deal with these complex architectural initiatives.

Yigit said this could apply to some tier-2 operators “that might be more interested in giving control to someone else because it just makes more sense for them to outsource rather than trying to build everything in house themselves.”

Larger operators are more likely to take on a bigger role in these projects, which builds on their already established history of designing, building and running telecom networks.

“We are seeing operators still considering themselves as engineering companies, and for them network is still their business. They’re not going to relinquish the control over the networks and operations,” Yigit said. “But we are seeing some that still want to be in charge, but they need someone from outside to come and plug those gaps, and they want to learn from them.”