Under the terms of the partnership, an exclusive global licensing agreement with Netsia, a subsidiary of Türk Telekom Group company Argela in the USA, has be made to transfer its leading-edge Radio Intelligent Controller (RIC) technology to Juniper, including related source code and patents plus exclusive rights to develop and sell products and solutions that integrate with RIC.
In addition, there has also been the permanent transfer of technical domain experts from Netsia to Juniper in support of the RIC’s integration into Juniper’s product portfolio.
“We have been working for a long time on cutting-edge RIC technologies that will play an active role in setting global 5G standards. The software developed by Netsia provides high capacity, scalable, flexible, personalised network and service solutions for the mobile communication needs of the future,” said Ümit Önal, chief executive officer, Türk Telekom.
“We have achieved a strong synergy with the combination of Netsia's know-how and productisation capacity with Juniper's customer network and geographic reach. As Türk Telekom Group, we are incredibly happy to offer our products, which are the achievements of Turkish engineering, to the world.”
Lastly, Türk Telekom has pledged to purchase Juniper products and solutions to support its next generation Open RAN and 5G deployment. This will include an initial proof-of-concept project expected in late 2021, which will incorporate RIC technology and Juniper’s broader portfolio.
Combined with Juniper’s existing domain orchestration portfolio such as NorthStar in the transport space and Contrail in the data centre space, the agreement will further extend Juniper’s network slicing capabilities across the radio, transport and telco cloud space.
Both companies are dedicated to the evolution of vRAN architectures in the Open RAN ecosystem. Juniper and Netsia are both members of the O-RAN Alliance and through the partnership deliver open, intelligent and secure RAN solutions.
“Juniper believes that assuring the right service experience is key for monetising the next decade of 5G applications. Development and integration of world-class RIC technology brings this vision another step closer by enabling the combination of end-to-end network slicing and the power of AI-driven service experience,” added Rami Rahim (pictured), chief executive officer, Juniper Networks
“Our dynamic collaboration with Türk Telekom and Netsia is founded on shared principles of an open approach to technology development, the fundamental importance of disaggregation and programmability and the drive toward a cloud native infrastructure from the telco cloud into the services edge and radio networks. In short, our organisations agree that the cloud is the network and the network is the cloud.”
