Dish Network, Viavi Solutions and several universities win funding to develop various aspects of wireless testing
The Biden administration yesterday announced $80 million in awards as part of the third wave of funding from the Wireless Innovation Fund, which is aimed at supporting domestic wireless technology development and the advancement of Open RAN.
Dish Network garnered most of the attention by landing the lion’s share of that funding, in the form of $50 million for an Open RAN testing center in Wyoming which will permit companies to validate their tech against Dish’s commercial-grade Open RAN network. (Read more about that in this story.)
But Dish wasn’t the only funding recipient. Test company Viavi Solutions was awarded $21.7 million to put together a hybrid physical lab infrastructure plus a cloud-based testing lab-as-a-service (LaaS). That service is called Viavi Automated Lab-as-a-Service for Open RAN, or VALOR. VALOR aims to create a “fully automated, cooperative, open and impartial testing-as-a-service (TaaS) offering that is dedicated to Open RAN interoperability, performance and security.”
Viavi said in a release that VALOR, which is based on its Nitro wireless test portfolio, is aimed at helping companies manage and support 5G and Open RAN projects that would “benefit from access to tools and expert staff with a minimal ramp-up time.” Viavi added that as part of VALOR, it provides automated test processes, access to comprehensive testing capabilities, tools, libraries and expertise—including dedicated on-site or off-site engineers—as well as assistance with demonstrations. VALOR is designed to give Open RAN component providers a LaaS option that they can use in a “structurally cost-effective way that the NTIA grant will further augment, regardless of the scale of a component provider’s operation,” Viavi said.
The rest of the awards were smaller, about $1.9-$2 million each. Those winners and projects included:
-$2 million to Virginia Tech University, to develop a holistic cybersecurity testing framework for 5G Open RAN.
-$1.9 million to Cirrus360, for a “new test method that uses a digital twin of integrated RAN components to model their implementation.”
-A $1.9 million award to Northeastern University for “AutoRAN,” a continuous and automated end-to-end testing approach for open and disaggregated cellular systems.
-A $1.9 award to Rice University to focus on multi-dimension testing of stability, performance and energy efficiency in the RAN, in the context of the computing environment and affects of machine learning on RAN software performance.
“The Wireless Innovation Fund’s historic investments will lay a foundation for the next generation of wireless technology to be built by the U.S. and its global partners,” said Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information and NTIA Administrator Alan Davidson. “The new facilities we fund with this round of grants will help move open technologies from the lab to the field.”
NTIA said that it has so far awarded more than $98 million from the Wireless Innovation Fund, which was established as part of the CHIPS and Science Act.
