BROWSING: Open RAN

U.K. operator O2, owned by Spanish telco Telefonica, said it has successfully piloted the integration and operation of Vilicom’s Open RAN (O-RAN) infrastructure, enhancing indoor mobile connectivity for O2 business customers over Vilicom’s Connectivity-as-a-Service (CaaS) network platform. O2 said it plans to connect the pilot...

Once seen as an “emerging” technology, Open RAN is evolving and maturing. Open RAN, which has been touted as one of the most significant trends to transform the telecom industry, took off in ways no one ever expected in 2020. The consolidation of the...

Japanese company Fujitsu announced that its O-RAN-compatible 5G radio unit was selected by compatriot carrier KDDI for the construction of virtualized base stations for 5G commercial services in Japan. The base stations will be delivered in the second half of fiscal year 2021, Fujitsu said. The...

With topics ranging from the basic components of Cloud RAN, management and orchestration and the relationship between Ericsson Spectrum Sharing and Cloud RAN, this e-book will keep you hooked until the last page.

U.K. mobile operators must stop installing any Huawei equipment in 5G networks, as of the end of September 2021, the Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport said in a release. The government expects to release today a roadmap for the complete removal of high...

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 from the U.S.-based vendor Mavenir...

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 further strengthening the company’s structure...

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 O-RAN ecosystem.” This week, Altiostar...

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 director, EVP and CTO of Rakuten...

  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 foundation for Dish’s greenfield 5G network. 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 platforms, are all part of...

“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 structure from within, incessantly...

  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 expected "to support roll out of...

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 operator’s network buildouts, as well...

  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 solution to achieve high-precision Massive MIMO...

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 following domains: The Qualcomm...

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 vendors, like Huawei, Ericsson and...

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 you really want to deliver...

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 said, “from a security and...

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 a fraction of the...

  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 base station remote radio units...

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 DISH's under construction 5G standalone...

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 for increased integration costs as someone...

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; for 5G, and LTE,...