At the third annual the Telecom Infra Project (TIP) Summit underway this week in London, Deutsche Telekom, Telefónica and Vodafone announced a request for information (RFI) to investigate how they can adopt TIP technologies, which are supported by a growing ecosystem of vendors and manufacturers.
The five TIP Project Groups — mmWave Networks, Open Optical Packet Transport, OpenCellular, OpenRAN and vRAN Fronthaul — are presenting their progress in bringing their technologies to market.
Axel Clauberg, TIP Chairman and Vice President, Technology Innovation, Deutsche Telekom AG, posted the following highlights:
Radio Access Networks (RANs)
OpenRAN RFI: Vodafone and Telefonica have contributed a joint specification to the OpenRAN Project Group and are now announcing the vendors they’ve selected as the leading candidates to produce interoperable RAN solutions: Altiostar, Mavenir, and Parallel Wireless. Next stages involve deployments in the field, with trials of OpenRAN platforms with Facebook alongside Vodafone in Turkey and Telefónica in Latin America.
vRAN Fronthaul Trials: The vRAN Fronthaul project group is now actively driven by more than 10 operators, including Vodafone, CableLabs, BT, Telecom Italia (TIM), Orange, Bharti Airtel and Reliance Jio. The lead operators, CableLabs, BT, TIM and Airtel are all testing a range of vRAN solutions in our TIP Community Labs, including G.Fast (BT), ethernet (TIM) microwave (Airtel) and DOCSIS (CableLabs).
Crowdcell Project Group RFI: In August, Vodafone and Telefónica released a second set of RFIs, this time for CrowdCell technology to boost indoor 4G coverage. Today, they released the results of their RFI processes, selecting Lime Microsystems and Alpha Networks for providing an e2e Crowdcell platform. Through these RFIs the operators have created a consolidated view on the state of the open ecosystem for Crowdcell platforms, including key vendors, integrators, and innovators.
OpenCellularTrials: In addition to ongoing OpenCellular trials, the OpenCellular project group announced that the TIP Community Lab is using software from TIP members Nokia and Accelleran. Accelleran is combining the OpenCellular standard platform with its Carrier Grade LTE software and support services, integrating with Nokia’s Kuha Community Management system. The resulting solution will be incorporated into the UK’s 5G RuralFirst initiative and move from lab test to field trial deployment.
Other areas
mmWave RFI and Trials: numerous members are piloting mmWave technologies in global trials and sub-groups focused on solving deployment challenges associated with mmWave frequencies. Deutsche Telekom, co-chair of the project group, intends to publish an RFI for 60 GHz Fixed Wireless technology to provide gigabit connectivity. In addition, Deutsche Telekom subsidiary Magyar Telekom contributed a case study about its trial deployment using Facebook’s mmWave technology, Terragraph. The case study highlights some of the results and key learnings coming out of the trial.
Open Optical Packet Transport: Voyager, an industry-first open and disaggregated transport device has just become generally available from ADVA Optical. The success of the collaboration model served as a base for a new sub-group: Disaggregated Cell Site Gateways, where four tier-1 operators – Vodafone, Telefónica, Orange, and TIM Brazil – have worked together to define their technical needs for 5G cell site routers, and with the initial two partners, ADVA Optical and Edgecore Networks, announcing their commitment to produce “Odyssey-DCSG”, the first implementation of technology that meets those needs.
End-to-End Network Slicing White Paper and Trials: The End-to-End Network Slicing Project Group is sharing a white paper “Creating a Network Slicing Ecosystem through TIP” defining various applications for network slicing in 4G and 5G networks. The Project Group, led by BT and HPE, is currently testing and evaluating 4G proof of concepts with a roadmap to extend these efforts to 5G use cases.
Edge Computing Trials: The Edge Computing Project Group entered into two new trials in the BT Community Lab testing two edge computing use cases: mission critical drone control and high bandwidth content caching. The Project Group is also continuing the Telefonica lab trials with the goal of sharing learnings by the end of the year.
Welcoming Edge Application Developers Project Group to TIP: This group, led by Deutsche Telekom and Intel, will focus on developing public APIs and software tools that make it easy for developers to build the next generation of mobile applications on operators edge infrastructure.
Full blog posting:
https://telecominfraproject.com/accelerating-the-future-of-telecom-tech/
