Akihabara News (Tokyo) — NEC Corporation and Fujitsu have been tapped to develop new technologies for interoperability testing between 5G base station equipment employing O-RAN specifications, in the next step meant to open up radio access networks to a wider variety of possible vendors.
Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) aims to compete with the radio access networks operated by a handful of international mobile industry giants (Huawei, Nokia, and Ericsson) by not relying on the proprietary technology of a single firm throughout the network, but instead based on a set of agreed standards, specifications, and interfaces by which multiple vendors may provide base station equipment.
One of the key challenges, however, is to create confidence that the equipment provided by a plethora of different vendors will actually be interoperable once they are assembled within a given network.
The New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) has asked NEC and Fujitsu to address this challenge as part of its Post 5G Infrastructure Enhancement R&D Project.
These two firms are tasked with building an environment and developing technologies to assess and verify interoperability between different vendors’ equipment, including the establishment of a verification process and developing tools that can be used in common.
NEC and Fujitsu have already launched these activities at their respective facilities in the United Kingdom and in the United States. Specifically, NEC is conducting trials at its Open RAN laboratory in London, while Fujitsu is doing so at its laboratory hosted at Fujitsu Network Communications, a Fujitsu group company based in Richardson, Texas.
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