Ericsson announced its entrance into the O-RAN Alliance, a group of leading telecom service providers and suppliers with the commitment to evolving radio access network (RAN) architecture and orchestration built on openness, intelligence, flexibility and performance.
As a member of O-RAN, Ericsson plans to focus on the open interworking between RAN and network orchestration and automation, with emphasis on AI-enabled closed-loop automation and end-to-end optimization. Ericsson will also focus on the upper-layer function as specified in 3GPP to provide interoperable multivendor profiles for specified interfaces between central RAN functions, resulting in faster deployment of 5G networks on a global scale.
Reliance Jio, TIM, and Verizon join O-RAN board
The O-RAN Alliance, which is a carrier-led effort to open the radio access network of next-generation wireless systems, released its inaugural white paper, “O-RAN: Towards an Open and Smart RAN,” which is available on the O-RAN website. The white paper describes the O-RAN architecture, which drives a more cost-effective, intelligent RAN with open interoperable interfaces for next-generation 5G networks and beyond.
The O-RAN Alliance also announced that Reliance Jio, TIM, and Verizon have joined the O-RAN board.
O-RAN approves architecture, elects AT&T’s Andre Fuetsch as chair
The O-RAN Alliance has approved its overall O-RAN architecture plan and established an initial set of seven working groups to drive the work forward. These are:
WG1: Use Cases & Overall Architecture
WG2: Radio Intelligent Controller (RIC) (non-Real Time) & A1 Interface
WG3: RIC (near-Real Time) & E2 Interface
WG4: Open Fronthaul (FH) Interface
WG5: Stack Reference Design and F1/V1/E1/X2
WG6: Cloudification and orchestration
WG7: White Box Hardware
At its recent meeting at Mobile World Congress Shanghai, the O-RAN Alliance also elected Andre Fuetsch, president of AT&T Labs, as chair of the Board. In addition, Alex Jinsung Choi, SVP Strategy & Technology Innovation at Deutsche Telekom, was appointed as Operations Officer; and Bharti Airtel, China Telecom, KT, Singtel, SK telecom, Telefonica, and Telstra were approved as new Board members. This expands the number of Board Directors to 12.