Verizon has worked with Samsung, Intel and Wind River to initiate what it claims to be the world’s first fully virtualized 5G data session from the core to the RAN and the network edge. This used Samsung’s virtualized central unit, distributed unit and radio units, integrated with Wind River’s container-based middleware, and Intel’s Xeon Scalable processors, FPGA-based accelerators and FlexRAN reference architecture. “It was a combination of selecting the best-in-class vendors that supplied the necessary components, having them develop to our requirements, then bringing them together in the lab environment to conduct integration testing, bringing that into our own Verizon lab environment, and then moving into field tests, all of which came together for the main production into the live network,”…