Ethernity Networks Sees Growing Demand from Chinese Telcos for 5G Solution

Ethernity Networks has seen a growing demand from Chinese telecom companies for its solutions based on FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array).

The increased demand marks a shift away from software-only User Plane Functionality (UPF) solutions and demonstrates a growing movement towards disaggregation within the Chinese market.

The announcement reflects the methodical approach Chinese telcos have taken to rolling out 5G, eschewing software-only solutions in favor of programmable FPGAs optimized for networking and security functions. These complement software-only solutions with increased performance and lower latency while maintaining the flexibility of CPUs.

The FPGA-based acceleration solution offered by Ethernity Networks enables operators to reach these higher speeds and lower latencies, while reducing power consumption and server-based CAPEX, by reducing the amount of required CPU cores.

The building and roll-out of new 5G virtualized networks that use NFV technologies has created a need for FPGA SmartNICs to accelerate 5G packet processing at the network edge, where high bandwidth and low latency are a must.

Currently, it is anticipated that 5G NFV roll-out for field testing by operators will occur during 2020 followed by mass deployment during 2021, with the majority of that deployment planned for the China market, which is driving deployment of 5G.

Ethernity Networks is actively working with several major Chinese OEMs that currently deliver products and solutions for mobile networks and are investing time and effort in integrating their software networking offering on top of Ethernity’s ACE-NIC100, embedding its patented ENET Flow Processor to deliver accelerated 5G UPF and SD-WAN solutions.

David Levi, Ethernity Networks, CEO, noted that “With customers such as FiberHome and others developing their solutions based on our ACE-NIC, it shows that they have selected our solution and will market their software offering with our FPGA data plane acceleration code and software. Ethernity is in active project engagements with customers who are deploying substantial resources and investment on their side to build an offering with our ACE-NIC that embeds our FPGA data plane acceleration.”