BROWSING: Open Ran Fundamentals

Open RAN is much more than just an opportunity to diversify vendor supply chains and introduce open standards into networks. It is an opportunity to innovate within what has always been a very hardware-centric and fixed part of the network. Part of that innovation...

xApps and rApps are network automation tools to maximize radio network efficiency, and they're part of an Open RAN architecture.

A RAN Intelligent Controller is cloud software responsible for controlling and optimizing baseband communication functions on the RAN.

vRAN and Open RAN help operators improve flexibility, reduce costs and meet growing demand by disaggregating Radio Access Network functions.

While 6G is still many years off, industry experts see more resilient, critical, unified, distributed, and automated networks What exactly will 6G be? Given that current research is taking place among academics and technology partners in the private sector well ahead of formalized discussions within...

A Virtualized Radio Access Network (vRAN) is an agile approach to RAN deployment and management that offers carriers the promise of improved operational efficiency and better flexibility to meet the myriad demands of 5G enterprise customers. vRAN and OpenRAN are often discussed in the...

As Open RAN momentum grows, Altiostar is focused on the transition from greenfield to brownfield, ecosystem development, and private enterprise 5G BARCELONA--Most any business problem (or opportunity) is, at its core, a problem of scale--balancing customization with replicability, cost control with growth, maintaining the appropriate...

An Open RAN conversation with Eng Wei Koo, Director of Technology, 5G Solutions, Keysight Technologies With greenfield builds in Japan and the U.S., and a major commitment from European operators, Open RAN is poised to have a meaningful impact on the way networks are bought...

This trend of disaggregation, virtualization and commoditization has implications beyond just Open RAN. 5G was intentionally designed to be flexible and adaptable. As such, the networks have to mirror that as does the way services are developed and deployed.  “If you really want to deliver...

Open RAN Policy Coalition In May this year, the Open RAN Policy Coalition was established to advocate for “vendor choice and flexibility in next-generation network deployments,” as Executive Director Diane Rinaldo put it at the time. This is necessary, she said, “from a security and...

Like most things telecom, Open RAN brings with it a complex alphabet soup of acronyms and initialisms. Here we’re providing brief explanations of some key terminology. And, to be sure, this is a superficial description of the following terms and a fraction of the...

While the benefits of Open RAN (advantageous network economics and deployment flexibility chief among them) are widely touted, there are also well-articulated issues associated with the technology. One question is whether operators are trading reduced capex related to RAN infrastructure for increased integration costs as someone...

Let’s frame the Open RAN value proposition to better understand the benefits of disaggregating radio hardware and software, trading single-purpose equipment for general-purpose hardware and moving vital network functions into the cloud. First and foremost, network economics need to change; for 5G, and LTE,...

History The DevOps movement inspired large, enterprise organizations with agile practices to allow developers to make quick changes, but it was very difficult to get full benefit, as their legacy development process was not designed for supporting short software development delivery cycles and frequent production...

History Most of the CAPEX required to build a wireless network is related to the RAN segment, reaching as high as 80% of the total network cost. Any reduction in the RAN equipment cost will significantly help the bottom line of wireless operators as they...

History In 2G and 3G, the mobile architectures had controllers that were responsible for RAN orchestration and management. With 4G, overall network architecture became flatter and the expectation was that, to enable optimal subscriber experience, base stations would use the X2 interface to communicate with...

History Software has been “eating the world” for a while now: from consumer, then enterprise and now the telecom value chains. Open RAN is a great example of how software is “eating” telco. What we have learned from the data center approach is that after...

History Some estimates put the telecom industry, especially the RAN segment, between seven and ten years behind a normal innovation curve due to the lack of competition in the market. This is a similar situation to the state of the data center industry in the...

History Functional splits are nothing new. They were initially outlined in 3GPP Release 14 and defined in 3GPP release 15 and where new terminology, interfaces and functional modules were introduced. But why is this RU, DU, CU functional split concept becoming so fundamental in Open...

History The entire telecom industry is going through a dramatic change that can be only compared to the change that data centers went through in the 2000s, all driven by Moore’s Law. This is driving the need to move from costly, proprietary RAN solutions to...