TIP, ORAN ALLIANCE POISED TO JOIN FORCES ON OPEN RAN

Vodafone and Telefónica have today announced the selection of vendors as “leading candidates” to produce these interoperable RAN solutions. The companies in question are Altiostar, Mavenir and Parallel Wireless Inc. (See TIP Offers Progress Report at Summit.)

Open RAN RFI: Back in June, Vodafone and Telefónica announced RFIs to investigate and explore the existing market opportunities for RAN technologies built to be software-centric on commoditized hardware. Since then, Vodafone and Telefonica have contributed the joint specification to the Open RAN Project Group and, today, they are announcing the vendors they’ve selected as the leading candidates to produce interoperable RAN solutions. The recognized vendors with the most compliant end-to-end platforms: Altiostar, Mavenir, and Parallel Wireless. Next stages involve deployments in the field, with trials of Open RAN platforms with Facebook alongside Vodafone in Turkey and Telefónica in Latin America.

Both Altiostar and Mavenir were already listed as members of the xRAN Forum and Mavenir has previously highlighted the importance of the xRAN specification. “The specification exists and is fully defined in terms of protocols, and the O&M [operations and maintenance] piece is being added,” said John Baker, a senior vice president with Mavenir, during Informa’s 5G World Summit in London in May. “It is based on IP transport instead of expensive proprietary hardware.”