The company, tipped as a future acquisition by Digital 9 Infrastructure, the company that owns Aqua Comms, said it will deploy a Mavenir open RAN platform at its London data centre while installing small cell units at an Ontix customer building.
Patrick Bradd (pictured), the newly appointed CEO of Ontix, said: “Open RAN is changing the dynamics of how cellular solutions are designed and delivered, and this deployment is at the cutting edge of the technology in the UK.” Neither Mavenir nor Ontix have named the building that will be used for the trial.
Mavenir said the solution will enable Ontix to provide indoor mobile connectivity to areas such as “multi-tenanted offices, shopping malls, stadiums, hospitals, enterprise buildings and hot spots, delivering contiguous coverage and high-speed mobile connectivity to its enterprise customers and end consumers”.
Ontix will use Mavenir’s open virtualised radio access network (open vRAN) to test enhanced connectivity inside a building as a neutral host. That would typically indicate that Ontix offers coverage via a wholesale agreement to the major mobile carriers in the area.
“This includes the delivery and integration of open RAN-compatible, software upgradable small cells for enhanced in-building coverage and capacity,” said Mavenir.
Mavenir is an open RAN and small-cell specialist that is working with large mobile carriers such as Deutsche Telekom, Orange and Vodafone in a number of projects.
Stefano Cantarelli, chief marketing officer at Mavenir, said of the Ontix project: “We are confident that using this innovative vRAN solution Ontix will be able to deliver a cost effective and a higher quality network to meet this growing demand.”
Bradd said it will be a “ground-breaking open RAN pilot to deploy a neutral host architecture to demonstrate its flexibility and how the use of commoditised hardware, can help to create the next generation of in-building networks”.
