The telcos had previously inked a MoU to boost the adoption of O-RAN across Europe
European operators Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefónica, TIM and Vodafone have published further documents on technical priorities for Open RAN (O-RAN).
In a release, the carriers said that the Open RAN Technical Priorities Release 3 is an update of the two previous releases from June 2021 and March 2022, all of which are the result of the work carried out under the MoU on O-RAN signed by these European operators.
While Release 1 focused on the main scenarios and technical requirements for each of the building blocks of a multi-vendor Radio Access Network, Release 2 focused on intelligence, orchestration, transport and cloud infrastructure, addressing also the energy efficiency goals and targets to support sustainable O-RAN, the carriers said.
Now, Release 3 “has primarily focused on developing further requirements on SMO and RIC while other areas have been significantly enhanced such as Cloud Infrastructure, O-CU/O-DU and O-RU. Moreover, this new release focuses in more detail on security topics and various challenges introduced by the disaggregation promoted by the O-RAN architecture. In particular, the security requirements are now contained within a dedicated section of the MoU Technical Priorities document,” the release reads. The telcos also highlighted that energy efficiency topics were also analyzed in more detail, with new requirements identified in various streams; for example, cloud infrastructure, O-CU/O-DU, RIC use cases and RAN features.
The telcos also explained that these technical priorities serve as guidance to the RAN supplier industry on where they can focus to accelerate market deployments in Europe, focusing on commercial product availability in the short term, and solution development in the medium term.
“The overall objective is to promote a fast pace for the development of competitive O-RAN solutions in Europe, across other regions and ultimately accelerate the global adoption of the technology,” the partners said. “The Open RAN MoU Group technical priorities, as with any industry-driven requirements developed through TIP, will evolve over time following the progress of Open RAN standardization, in the respective standardization bodies, and market development of Open RAN solutions.”
In February 2023, these European carriers issued a report demonstrating the essential progress being made in improving the maturity, security and energy efficiency of O-RAN.
Entitled “Open RAN MoU Progress Update on Maturity, Security and Energy Efficiency,” the report also outlines the key areas of focus for the operators in 2023. These include assisting with the development of O-RAN technologies to allow for wider deployment in highly populated towns and cities than is currently possible, strengthening cooperation with national authorities on security, including the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA), and enhancing energy efficiency of all components, with particular focus on the radio transmitters and cloud infrastructure.
