When we made our little Open RAN explainer, couple of years back, we never imagined this day when so many people in the industry will be talking about Open RAN. I have lost track of the virtual events taking place and Open RAN whitepapers that have been made available just in the last month.
One of the whitepapers just released was from NTT Docomo, just in time for MWC 2021. You can see the link in the Tweet
NTT Docomo has published 5G Open RAN Ecosystem (OREC) Whitepaper - https://t.co/17CJZuGnTT#Free5Gtraining #3G4G5G #4G #5G #NTT #NTTDocomo #OpenRAN #ORAN #OpenNetworks #Interfaces #Virtualization #Intelligence #TCO #IOT #Integration #RIC #Security #Performance #Deployment pic.twitter.com/1niHXnWr1v
— Free 5G Training (@5Gtraining) June 29, 2021
Even after so much information being available, many people still have basic questions about Open RAN and O-RAN. I helped make an Open RAN explainer series and blogged about it here. Just last week, I blogged about the O-RAN explainer series that I am currently working on, here.
There were some other topics that I couldn't cover elsewhere so made some short videos on them for the 3G4G YouTube channel. The first video/presentation explains Open RAN terminology that different people, companies and organizations use. It starts with open interfaces and then looks at radio hardware disaggregation and compute disaggregation. Moving from 2G/3G/4G to 5G, it also explains the Open RAN approach to a decomposed architecture with RAN functional splits.
If you look at the Telecom Infra Project (TIP) OpenRAN group or O-RAN Alliance, the organizations driving the Open RAN vision and mission, you will notice many new small RAN players are joining one or both of them. In addition, you hear about other Open RAN consortiums that again include small innovative vendors that may not be very well known.
The second video is an opinion piece looking at what is driving these companies to invest in Open RAN and what can they expect as return in future.
As always, all 3G4G videos' slides are available on our SlideShare channel.
Related Posts:
- The 3G4G Blog: A quick tutorial on Open RAN, vRAN & White Box RAN
- The 3G4G Blog: Open RAN Explanation, Videos, White papers and Other Resources
- The 3G4G Blog: O-RAN Introduction for Beginners
- Telecoms Infrastructure Blog: NTT Docomo's 5G Network is based on 'Open RAN' Principles
- Telecoms Infrastructure Blog: NTT Docomo's 5G RAN Infrastructure
- The 3G4G Blog: 5G RAN Functional Splits
- The 3G4G Blog: From traditional RAN to Open RAN - O-RAN: Goals and Challenges
- 3G4G: Open RAN, OpenRAN and O-RAN
