Paris, France. 14 February 2024. United by a common goal to advance open source software in telecommunications, Firecell and Canonical will demonstrate at this year’s Mobile Wireless Congress (MWC) event in Barcelona, 5G private mobile network (PMN) solutions running on Canonical’s Ubuntu operating system.

Recognising the future of Open RAN in telecommunications, particularly in 5G private mobile networks, Canonical joined the OpenAirInterface (OAI) Community in December 2023. As a member of OAI, Canonical is expanding its telecommunication software portfolio, adding mobile networking software to the set of open source tools and solutions that the company offers to the industry. Canonical also now collaborates with companies such as Firecell to bring secure, trusted and production-grade open source to the Open RAN ecosystem. Firecell offers PMN solutions based on the open source software distributed by OAI for both indoor and outdoor connectivity.

Ubuntu is the de facto industry standard worldwide when running telecom networking software and business application workloads. It provides exactly what the telecom industry needs: production-grade performance and security for telecom software and infrastructure. 

“Canonical’s integration with the OpenAirInterface Community and collaboration with Firecell are set to transform the telecommunications landscape”, said Cédric Gégout, VP of Product Management at Canonical. “Our commitment to deliver robust, secure open source solutions with more than 10-years of support with Ubuntu Pro guarantees production-grade performance and security to all the 5G industries.”

These 10 years of support are available through Ubuntu Pro, the most comprehensive subscription service for software security and compliance in the industry. The Ubuntu Pro subscription also brings real-time processing capabilities to telecom networking software and business applications. With its support for a wide range of enhanced platform awareness (EPA) features, operators can get the performance they need when delivering their services with Ubuntu running across their entire telecom infrastructure, covering devices and radio access networks (RAN) as well as edge and core clouds.

“As the leading provider of integrated and affordable private 5G solutions, Firecell is excited to announce our partnership with Canonical”, declared Claude Seyrat, CEO of Firecell. “This collaboration underscores our dedication to open-source innovation and our belief in its critical role in shaping the future of telecommunications. By pooling our resources together and supporting the OpenAirInterface initiative, we are setting a new standard in the industry. We are not just advocating for change on how telecommunication software must be developed; we are actively driving it, ensuring that open-source becomes the cornerstone of 5G development”.

The OpenAirInterface (OAI) Community is dedicated to developing and distributing software for open radio access networks (Open RAN) and core networks. Their work adheres to the mobile telecommunications networking specifications set by 3GPP, as well as the software interfaces defined by the O-RAN Alliance for Open RAN. The production-grade PMN solutions offered by Firecell and empowered by Ubuntu are another example of the capabilities of open source software on Ubuntu within the telecommunications sector.

Contact us for your telco deployment needs and your transition to open source.

About Canonical

Canonical, the publisher of Ubuntu, provides open source security, support and services. Our portfolio covers critical systems, from the smallest devices to the largest clouds, from the kernel to containers, from databases to AI. With customers that include top tech brands, emerging startups, governments and home users, Canonical delivers trusted open source for everyone. Learn more at https://canonical.com/

About Firecell

Firecell accelerates companies’ digital transformation by providing seamless and robust connectivity both indoors and outdoors, with a turn-key private 5G network solution. Firecell eliminates the complexity of deploying private 5G networks and reduces the overall network cost to achieve faster ROI for enterprises. Firecell has customers in Europe, the US and Asia. Learn more at https://firecell.io/

Press Contacts

Canonical

Lelanie de Roubaix, Communications Manager
pr@canonical.com

Firecell

Olivier Dhotel, Co-founder
olivier.dhotel@firecell.io

The world’s largest and most influential telecommunications exhibition event, Mobile World Congress (MWC), is taking place in Barcelona on 26-29 February 2024. Canonical is excited to join this important annual event once again and meet the telecom industry. 

Telecommunications is a key sector for Canonical. We offer solutions for private, public and hybrid/multi cloud environments, with a consistent experience across the entire telecom spectrum, from core clouds to the edge, with a single set of tooling. Built with the same philosophy as Ubuntu – secure, trusted and production-grade open source backed by full operations support – our solutions are fully upstream and integrate the latest technology advancements that telco leaders require to deliver best-in-class services to their customers. 

We are looking forward to meeting you at MWC 2024. Come and speak with our experts to learn how we can help you in your journey to cost-effective, secure and trusted open source telecom solutions for your infrastructure.

Hot topics in telco

To meet today’s customer expectations, telecom operators require flexible, scalable and agile operations across the many service types that make up a modern mobile network.

At this year’s MWC event in Barcelona, Canonical’s team will explain how you can elevate your telecom infrastructure with the latest innovations in cloud-native technologies and modernise your telco clouds with open source. These strategies will empower you to meet and exceed customer expectations with repeatable and reliable deployments.

Automation at scale for telco edge clouds with CNEP

We have been listening to our telco customers to understand their needs in delivering cost-effective modern edge clouds for their infrastructure that they can rely on. Canonical is proud to offer a new holistic solution, Cloud Native Execution Platform (CNEP) to meet these needs precisely at telco edge clouds.

With CNEP, we deliver the ideal software stack for telco edge clouds with automation in place, based on fully upstream and CNCF certified Kubernetes running on bare metal hardware for best performance. It brings all essential open source components together, with the aim of achieving high performance in data processing and delivery, whilst ensuring platform security and efficiency with Ubuntu Pro.

At MWC, our team will explain how operators can achieve scalable and repeatable deployment of edge clouds with CNEP. For Open Radio Access Network (RAN) readiness, CNEP is the ideal RAN platform, bringing all the technology features that cloud-native Open RAN components require. CNEP is also tailored for best performance and security assurance for distributed compute and multi-access edge computing (MEC) applications, enabling businesses to run their telco workloads on 5G edge networks.

Real-time Ubuntu for ultra-reliable and low-latency communications

Canonical has been working with all major silicon hardware vendors, such as Intel, to deliver the highest levels of performance and security to telco networks and applications. 

We have been running advanced engineering programs with the aim of enabling the latest innovations in silicon hardware in telco software infrastructure at a rapid pace, with quick software release cycles. As part of our collaboration with Intel, we have integrated Intel FlexRAN in Ubuntu real-time kernel for telco applications and networking software, which has enabled real-time processing at both operating system and silicon levels.

At this year’s MWC, we will explain how Ubuntu Pro brings real-time data processing capabilities to the telco edge for mission-critical operations and also ensures confidential computing for the most-sensitive telco workloads.

Sustainable telco edge infrastructure with an energy-efficient system stack

Telecom networks will increasingly deploy edge cloud sites in the journey to distributed and flexible cloud-native operations. This requires support for several features across the hardware and software stack to make sure that platforms are energy and cost efficient. From container images to bare metal hardware automation, Canonical’s edge cloud stack is equipped with features that ensure sustainable operations.

In Barcelona, we will explain how our open source software stack can deliver optimal deployments on telco edge clouds and help operators meet their sustainability goals.

Demos

At MWC 2024, you will get the chance to see our technical team demonstrate Canonical’s CNEP solution. This is a great opportunity for all players in the telco ecosystem to see how we meet sector requirements on cloud-native operations at the telco edge with automation. In our demo, the Canonical team will run CNEP on Intel’s 4^th Generation Xeon Scalable Processor, bringing the acceleration capabilities provided by Xeon to large-scale edge network rollout for cost-efficient Open RAN deployments.

CNEP’s open and upstream APIs along with Canonical’s observability stack and telemetry solutions enable machine learning algorithms to assist edge cloud operations. The Canonical team will demonstrate how our AI/ML platform solutions can be used to boost the effectiveness of distributed computing applications running on telco edge clouds. We will show how a multi-cloud data platform can be formed for various data types collected from a telecom network. We will also show ML-based anomaly detection and LLM to summarise and explain collected data from the network. 

Come and meet us at MWC 2024

If you are interested in building your own modern telecom infrastructure and migrating to open source with cost-effective, secure and trusted solutions, Canonical can help you. We provide a full stack for your telecom infrastructure, enabling secure, trusted, flexible, optimised, automated and low-touch operations.

To learn more about our telco solutions, meet us to discuss your telecom needs at MWC Barcelona 2024, and visit our webpage at ubuntu.com/telco.

If you’re unable to find a suitable time, please reach out to Mariam Tawakol <mariam.tawakol@canonical.com> or Jacob Boe <jacob.boe@canonical.com>. Let them know your availability and what you’re interested in, and they will set up a meeting for you.

Further reading

Canonical joins Open Networking Foundation

Fast and reliable telco edge clouds with Intel FlexRAN and Real-time Ubuntu

Bringing automation to telco edge clouds at scale

How telcos are building carrier-grade infrastructure using open source