The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) recently announced an award to an AT&T and Verizon lead consortium, with Jio and DoCoMo consultants, supporting Open RAN testing and evaluation. Ericsson is one of the leading vendors in that consortium. The award will result in the creation of a neutral certification lab wherein Ericsson will provide hardware, software and technical support personnel to test and verify interoperability between third party Open RAN radios and Ericsson’s virtualized Distributed Unit (vDU) and virtualized Control Unit (vCU). Tests are to be based on O-RAN Alliance specifications, and notably, the higher performance Uplink Performance Improvement (ULPI) variant for Massive MIMO radios. Upon successful completion, a certificate will be issued that can be utilized by suppliers in their dialogue with customers.
Doing this in a neutral facility vs per customer will accelerate Open RAN interoperability by virtue of tests being done once vs many times. In addition, by adhering to strict, consortium-agreed test scenarios, vendor bias will be eliminated. These were the shared goals of the consortium and NTIA, which Ericsson fully supports.
The award announcement and forthcoming lab represent one of an ongoing series of steps taken by Ericsson demonstrating support and leadership in driving Open RAN at industrial scale. For example, in September of this year, Ericsson announced that over one million of its existing radios deployed today are software upgradable to Open RAN fronthaul specifications. That was followed by a joint press release with Telefonica, wherein Ericsson will play a key role in their development of Cloud-based Open RAN solutions, as well as our recent AT&T announcement and continued work with Verizon. We also published a new paper titled “Driving Open RAN forward” and there is more to come.
While the lab is being set up, Ericsson will continue with other activities to further the industrialization of Open RAN and foster the RAN ecosystem, especially with US-based partners. Our activities focus on the three pillars of Open RAN: cloudification, open fronthaul and open management for network programmability.
Supporting all three pillars is our work in the O-RAN Alliance, Ericsson continues to be the No.1 or No.2 overall contributor to O-RAN specifications since the Alliance’s inception in 2018 and holds three co-chair positions (the most allowed for a vendor).
In the area of Cloudification, Ericsson has announced many partnerships over the last 24 months. With Intel, that resulted in the establishment of a joint tech hub in Santa Clara, California. These are materially significant in the joint pursuit of optimized silicon and server solutions for Cloud RAN and Open RAN systems; something of value for all equipment vendors and the ecosystem at large.
Regarding RAN programmability, this capability is poised to take significant steps forward with the introduction of the RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) and new interfaces including the R1, A1, O1 and O2. To that end, Ericsson announced a multi-vendor, multi-technology Ericsson Intelligent Automation Platform in 2021. That platform has evolved and now includes an Ericsson Intelligent Controller (EIC) subset that instantiates a non-real-time RIC. With a public Software Development Kit (SDK), and over 16 rApp candidate solutions in various stages of development, the EIAP and EIC will help advance network automation and performance and reduce barriers to entry for third party solutions.
Finally, with the new testing center supported by the NTIA, we are taking a giant step forward in the third pillar of open interfaces. The certificates provided in the lab will give operators and other customers confidence that solutions tested will have passed an initial level of interoperability.
Ericsson is honored to be part of this important NTIA award. We look forward to supporting the US Government and leading customers in accelerating an Open RAN ecosystem in 2024 and beyond.
