U.S.-based Open RAN company Parallel Wireless announced the opening of a research and development (R&D) lab and testing facility in Ottawa, Canada to further develop 5G radio access equipment and expand the firm’s global presence.
Maxime Dumas, general manager of Parallel Wireless in Canada said, “The vision for Parallel Wireless in Canada is to have a stellar R&D team in Ottawa, creating best-in-class Open RAN solutions for MNOs across Canada and beyond.”
Parallel Wireless noted the company is actively hiring in the Kanata, Ottawa region as well as in other regions throughout Canada with the possibility of remote work. Positions available are in all areas related to 4G and 5G radio access including massive MIMO, system architecture, radio design, physical layer, protocol stack and cloud-native environments.
Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson said, “Parallel Wireless is an excellent addition to Ottawa’s world-class telecom ecosystem and their arrival further strengthens our city’s position as Canada’s leading 5G hub. Through Invest Ottawa’s continued support of this exciting expansion I look forward to following the development of this world-class R&D facility over the coming months.”
Headquartered in Nashua, New Hampshire, Parallel Wireless was formed in 2012, and currently has R&D centers in India, Israel, the U.S., UK and now in Canada as well as Sweden. The company is growing fast, and has had many Open RAN mobile wireless network implementations with operators such as BTEE, Hotspot, Vodafone in Asia and Africa, MTN, IpT, Millicom and Axiata Group, among others.
Last year, Millicom has selected Parallel Wireless for the deployment of O-RAN-compliant Open Radio Access Network (Open RAN) architecture in Latin America.
The O-RAN network will be deployed by Millicom’s subsidiary Tigo Colombia, with the aim of delivering 4G service coverage in 362 rural sites across the country.
Parallel Wireless said that the O-RAN compliant Open RAN solutions will utilize 700 MHz spectrum.
Under the terms of the deal, Parallel Wireless will provide end-to-end solutions including installation and integration and network monitoring services.
The firm explained that the new sites in Colombia are being built on an O-RAN architecture with a Remote Radio Unit (RRU) provided by an ecosystem of partners and Parallel Wireless Distributed Unit (DU) and Central Unit (CU) software will be running on a vBBU (virtual Baseband Unit) provided by Parallel Wireless’ server partners such as Supermicro and deployed on site.
