7 International Telcos Join RAN Research Group in Shanghai

Radio Access Network research collective, The O-RAN Group, has held its first board meeting and welcomed seven new members to its fold, in the run up to Mobile World Congress in Shanghai.

Founding members AT&T, China Mobile, Deutsche Telekom, NTT Docomo and Orange welcomed the new members to the team on Thursday. Bharti Airtel, China Telecom, KT, Singtel Telefonica and Telstra joined the Radio Access Network collaborative, to bring the total number of operators to 12.

In its first board meeting since its foundation at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this year, the O-RAN Group has been working closely with the 3GPP to push the development of standards for 5G rollout.

“The O-RAN activity complements the standards developed by the 3GPP to facilitate 5G specification and deployment by pushing for open interfaces and APIs for the radio subsystem, which needs to evolve towards virtualisation as it is in the networks systems. The importance of such standards to be implemented by the industry to speed up 5G deployments and to reach large economies is crucial if we are to deliver a 5G world where connectivity should be ubiquitous in an affordable manner.” Emmanuel Lugagne Delpon, senior vice president, Orange Labs Networks.

At the meeting in Shanghai, Andre Fuetsch, president of AT&T Labs was elected as chair of the Board and Alex Jinsung Choi, SVP Strategy & Technology Innovation at Deutsche Telekom, was appointed as Operations Officer.

The group continues to promote openness and collaboration in Radio Access Network development for 5G. – Total Telecom