Intel and Google Cloud today announced a collaboration to develop telco cloud reference architectures and integrated solutions for communication service providers to accelerate 5G deployment across multiple network and edge locations.

"Communications service providers can adopt cloud-native technologies to harness the potential of 5G both as a connectivity solution and as a business services platform to deliver applications to the network edge," said Shailesh Shukla, vice president and general manager of networking at Google Cloud. "Expanding on our work with the telecommunications industry, we are excited to work with Intel to help customers plan, test and deploy the technology and infrastructure needed to accelerate the delivery of cloud-native 5G for consumer and enterprise use cases."The partnership spans three main areas focused on:

• Accelerating the ability of communications service providers to deploy their virtualized radio access network (RAN) and open RAN solutions with next-generation infrastructure and hardware.
• Launching new lab environments to help communications service providers innovate for cloud native-based 5G networks.
• Making it easier for communications service providers to deliver business applications to the network edge.

This collaboration marks another important step forward in Intel's journey to help transform the 5G network with a software-defined, agile and scalable infrastructure. The telco cloud reference architectures and integrated solutions from Intel and Google will help communications service providers further accelerate scalable network and edge deployment as they implement multicloud architectures. This is critical to achieving the full potential of 5G, edge and artificial intelligence across a range of industries, including retail, manufacturing and healthcare.

"The next wave of network transformation is fueled by 5G and is driving a rapid transition to cloud-native technologies. As communications service providers build out their 5G network infrastructure, our efforts with Google and the broader ecosystem will help them deliver agile, scalable solutions for emerging 5G and edge use cases," said Dan Rodriguez, corporate vice president and general manager of the Network Platforms Group at Intel.