Ericsson has expanded the 5G Cloud RAN platform that made its debut in November, with support for midband 5G and Massive MIMO added to the initially sub-1 GHz platform. The Swedish giant was cautious in its first launch of 5G virtualized RAN, sticking to low-band 5G spectrum, which supports only limited capacity and traffic compared to higher frequencies, and is therefore less demanding in computation terms. Ericsson pointed out at the time that, if functions such as beamforming are moved from the radio unit to the cloud-based distributed unit, they may stretch the definition of ‘COTS’ (common off the shelf) hardware and require sophisticated (and possibly expensive) acceleration. Now, Ericsson says it has worked closely with Intel to develop suitable…