An apparatus for providing multi-cell support in a telecommunications network is described. The apparatus includes a modem board and a multi-core processor having a plurality of processor cores attached to the modem board. A single partition is defined with all of the processor cores included in it. The single partition is used to execute all control plane functions and all data plane functions. Typically, the multi-core processor is configured to include a core abstraction layer that hides any core specific details from application software running on the processor cores in the single partition and to serve at least three cells in the telecommunications network, each cell having a corresponding uplink scheduler and a corresponding downlink scheduler. In this configuration there is no need to use a hypervisor, since there is only one OS instance running (a potential cost saving).