The Telecom Infra Project (TIP) is streamlining its OpenRAN and OpenRAN 5G NR Project Groups into an overarching OpenRAN Project Group under a revised charter.
The new Project Group will be chaired by Vodafone and T-Mobile USA, and different work streams will be co-led by BT, China Unicom, Ooredoo, Smartfren, TPG, Intel and Vodafone Idea.
Various new subgroups have also been formed:
- RU: Defining Radio Unit (RU) whitebox hardware (HW) platforms for 4G/5G
- DU/CU: Defining Distributed Unit (DU) & Centralized Unit (CU) whitebox HW for 4G/5G
- RAN Intelligence & Automation (RIA): Productization of AI/ML Use Cases for Massive MIMO (MaMIMO), e.g., beam optimization, Radio Resource Management (RRM) and Self Organizing Network (SON)
Segment subgroups: Focused on integrated RAN solutions for specific network use cases to improve deployment business cases:
- Outdoor: Addressing coverage and capacity requirements, performance and features for outdoor macro base stations
- Indoor: Defining requirements, performance and features for indoor 5G NR small cells
“We are excited to lead this transition towards flexible and open RAN with a richer ecosystem. Vodafone has been expanding OpenRAN footprint via ongoing pilot deployments in Europe and Africa. The streamlined OpenRAN structure is a significant opportunity to drive scale and support vendors to more quickly deliver products to the market. We look forward to the Project Group delivering harmonised requirements and proven commercial solutions to support our network deployment objectives,” stated Andy Dunkin, Senior Manager Mobile Access Centre of Excellence at Vodafone Group Networks and TIP Technical Committee delegate.