Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefónica, TIM and Vodafone, which want to launch their first open radio access network (open RAN) services in 2022, have released the comprehensive data on two sites.
“When you think about turning open RAN standards into commercial realities, it is clear that we need to avoid fragmentation,” said Yago Tenorio (pictured), chairman of the board of directors of the Telecom Infra Project (TIP), one of the two organisations to carry the document on their websites.
Tenorio, who is also known as Santiago Tenorio Sanz, is head of network architecture at the Vodafone group. He said the document “will enable a diverse set of suppliers to develop products more effectively, thereby increasing resilience and providing operators with what they need to build their networks based on a minimum set of variants that address the same needs in different regions, and simplifying significantly the subsequent system integration”.
The document is available — as an Excel spreadsheet — on TIP’s site as well as on that of the O-RAN Alliance, a cross-industry body supporting open RAN.
The document includes the main scenarios and radio configurations targeted for operators’ deployment, providing hardware and software requirements for each of the building blocks of a disaggregated RAN, said the five operators in their document.
“The overall system relies on open interfaces to allow multi-vendor deployment in a fully interoperable manner, and intelligent radio controllers and orchestration in a cloud-native environment to unleash the potential of a fully automated network.”
They said: “The overall objective is to promote a fast pace for the development of open, virtualised and programmable RAN solutions, and support a timely roll-out of open RAN networks in Europe.”
