Fujitsu’s 5G O-RAN Interoperability Lab in Richardson, Texas, will be connected to the Dell Open Telecom Ecosystem Lab in Round Rock, Texas, as part of the collaboration
Dell Technologies and Fujitsu announced a joint collaboration with the aim of helping communications service providers (CSPs) to accelerate the adoption and simplify the deployment of O-RAN solutions globally.
As part of the joint work, the companies said they will pave the path for CSPs to design open networks with the technologies of their choice by collaborating on O-RAN solutions and initiatives, including the integration of Fujitsu’s carrier-grade O-RAN compliant radio units (RUs) with the Dell O-RAN Accelerator Card.
Operators will also be able to implement a solution including multi-band RUs, virtualized RAN and lifecycle management software from Fujitsu and virtualized RAN and O-RAN Accelerator Cards from Dell.
Also, Fujitsu’s 5G O-RAN Interoperability Lab in Richardson, Texas, will be connected to the Dell Open Telecom Ecosystem Lab in Round Rock, Texas, providing an extended O-RAN test environment for CSPs, ecosystem partners and new O-RAN technology entrants, the firms said.
The Dell O-RAN Accelerator Card is an inline Layer 1 processing card that increases a server’s performance by processing all Layer 1 computations, allowing the server CPU to focus only on Layer 2 computations, the partners said, adding that offloading the Layer 1 computations from the server CPU reduces the overall CPU requirements, power consumption and overall costs.
“With Fujitsu’s O-RAN technology, we’re bringing more value to communication service providers with access to a broad choice of ecosystem partners and price performant technology for their open network deployments,” said Andrew Vaz, VP of product management at Dell Technologies Telecom Systems Business. “We’re expanding our partner ecosystem to drive faster innovation and a less costly and more efficient path to O-RAN, so network operators can deploy open, 5G networks with confidence.”
“Our collaboration with Dell will broaden the growing O-RAN ecosystem, giving operators more power to choose the best components for their network, regardless of manufacturer,” said Greg Manganello, vice head of the mobile systems business unit at Fujitsu.
In April, Fujitsu Network Communications had announced plans to support the Evenstar Open RAN program. Fujitsu said it will contribute 5G massive MIMO (Multiple Input, Multiple Output) Radio Units (RUs). Fujitsu said the RUs will be tested, validated and listed on the TIP Exchange Marketplace in the second half of 2022.
Evenstar is the Telecom Infra Project (TIP) and Meta’s initiative to accelerate Radio Access Networks (RAN) disaggregation using Open RAN technology.
