Open RAN

Pilot in Wales scaling up to 2,600 Open RAN sites in Wales and England In August this year, Vodafone U.K. turned on its first Open RAN site at the Royal Welsh Showground in Powys, Wales. That particular project used software …

Japanese company NEC announced the establishment of its Global Open RAN Center of Excellence (CoE) in the U.K. to accelerate the global adoption of Open RAN. In a release, NEC also said that the new facility has the aim of …

The demo featured a commercial end-to-end Open Fronthaul interface based on O-RAN specifications In October, the O-RAN Alliance conducted its second Global O-RAN Alliance plugfest, an event that boasts the goal of testing and demonstrating “the growing maturity of the …

Rakuten Mobile CTO takes spot on O-RAN Alliance board Japanese operator Rakuten Mobile, a subsidiary of e-commerce giant Rakuten, announced it has joined the O-RAN Alliance, a worldwide community promoting open, fully interoperable radio access networks (RAN). Tareq Amin, representative …

  Intel has signed a partnership with U.S. operator Dish Nework to supply virtualized RAN (vRAN) equipment for a standalone 5G deployment, the chipmaker said in a release. As part of the deal, Intel’s 5G infrastructure technology will create the …

Qualcomm President: ‘5G requires infrastructure like we’ve never seen’ At Qualcomm’s annual 5G Summit, the company announced the expansion of its 5G RAN portfolio. The additions, which include the new Qualcomm Radio Unit, Distributed Unit and Distributed Radio Unit system-on-chip …

“The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop and factory to such concerns … illustrate the same process of industrial mutation–if I may use that biological term–that incessantly revolutionizes the economic …

  Japanese vendor NEC will play a role in the development of next-generation 5G wireless networks in the U.K., according to reports published by Japanese newspapers. In a Twitter post last week, Britain’s Department for International Trade said NEC is …

The Cloud RAN solution supports Ericsson Spectrum Sharing and 5G SA and NSA Ericsson has announced Cloud RAN (Radio Access Network), a new solution to be released in 2021, that the company said will add greater flexibility and versatility to …

  Japan’s NEC Corporation and global high-performance analog technology company Analog Devices (ADI) announced a partnership to design a 5G Network Massive MIMO Antenna Radio Unit for Japanese telco Rakuten Mobile. The radio unit adopts ADI’s fourth-generation wideband RF transceiver …

Earlier this week, Qualcomm announced new chipsets for Virtualized Radio Access Network (vRAN) and open networks, adding to its existing small cell chipset product line (Qualcomm 5G Radio Access Network (RAN) for small cells). Specifically, the announcement focused on the …

Building out a wireless network is expensive, and most of the CAPEX is related to the radio access network (RAN) segment, reaching as high as 80% of total network cost.  For decades, operators have been “locked in” to legacy RAN …

This trend of disaggregation, virtualization and commoditization has implications beyond just Open RAN. 5G was intentionally designed to be flexible and adaptable. As such, the networks have to mirror that as does the way services are developed and deployed.  “If …

Open RAN Policy Coalition In May this year, the Open RAN Policy Coalition was established to advocate for “vendor choice and flexibility in next-generation network deployments,” as Executive Director Diane Rinaldo put it at the time. This is necessary, she …

Like most things telecom, Open RAN brings with it a complex alphabet soup of acronyms and initialisms. Here we’re providing brief explanations of some key terminology. And, to be sure, this is a superficial description of the following terms and …

  Japanese carrier NTT DoCoMo and compatriot firm NEC announced that they have expanded multi-vendor interoperability by interconnecting a new 5G base station baseband unit (5G-CU/DU), developed by NEC and Samsung Electronics and compliant with O-RAN Alliance specifications, with 5G …

ip.access brings 2G, 3G support to Mavenir’s Open RAN offering Open RAN continues to gain momentum globally, although the primary proof points have been greenfield network builds like Rakuten Mobile’s in Japan, which is up and running LTE services, and …

While the benefits of Open RAN (advantageous network economics and deployment flexibility chief among them) are widely touted, there are also well-articulated issues associated with the technology. One question is whether operators are trading reduced capex related to RAN infrastructure …

Let’s frame the Open RAN value proposition to better understand the benefits of disaggregating radio hardware and software, trading single-purpose equipment for general-purpose hardware and moving vital network functions into the cloud. First and foremost, network economics need to change; …

The true benefits of 5G will be realized with massive scale, something that operators will have to pay mightily to achieve. In carrier-led effort to shift network economics in their favor, the open RAN ecosystem has flourished in recent years …

Last week the U.S. Federal Communications Commission brought together a variety of Open RAN stakeholders for its Forum on 5G Open Radio Access Networks. While greenfield operators like DISH and Rakuten Mobile seemed steadfast in their conviction that Open RAN …

Xilinx previously tapped by Telefónica in its push for massive Open RAN deployments This week San Jose-based Xilinx announced it’s shipping a T1 Telco Accelerator Card designed for 5G Open RAN networks with a specific focus on simplifying Open RAN …

Partnership includes Open RAN and a drive toward advanced network automation As it continues to pursue integration of Open RAN technologies into its multi-national network footprint, Telefónica Global CTIO Enrique Blanco and Rakuten Mobile CTO and CAO Tareq Amin discussed …

It’s said that necessity is the mother of invention. But it should not mean intervention. Such is potentially the case with the proposed effort called Open RAN or O-RAN, which offers software solutions to telecommunication networks but shouldn’t be considered …

Speaking during IFA, Qualcomm President discusses the company’s role in the RAN Open RAN is having a big impact on the telecom space with major operators around the world embracing disaggregation of radio access network (RAN) hardware and software. The …