by James E. Carroll
The governments of the United States, Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom issued a joint statement expressing their commitment to ensuring the security and resilience of telecommunications networks, including by fostering a diverse supply chain and influencing the development of future telecommunications technologies such as 6G.
The four nations further announced the endorsement of the Open RAN Principles, published by the United Kingdom in April 2022.
The Open RAN Principles are consistent with the 2021 Prague Proposals and seek to help guide industry towards the characteristics that governments want Open RAN to deliver in order to maximise the benefits that it will bring. The four principles are:
- Open disaggregation, allowing elements of the RAN to be sourced from different suppliers and implemented in new ways.
- Standards-based compliance, allowing all suppliers to test solutions against standards in an open, neutral environment.
- Demonstrated interoperability, ensuring disaggregated elements work together as a fully functional system – at a minimum matching the performance and security of current solutions.
- Implementation neutrality, allowing suppliers to innovate and differentiate on the features and performance of their products.
The U.S. government plans to invest $1.5 billion to enable carriers to replace Huawei equipment and boost the adoption of Open RAN.
Kristian Toivo, executive director, Telecom Infra Project, states “Operators and vendors are already deploying Open RAN equipment across the States, and this investment will incentivise wider scale deployments. Open RAN gives carriers more choice, innovation opportunities and improved economics, and will be vital for rural operators as they look to close the digital divide.”
“This funding helps tackle one of the hurdles of ripping out and replacing equipment. The next step is to provide MNOs with blueprints for how Open RAN can be deployed in different scenarios and use cases, to ensure that effective investments are made. TIP is already seeing significant demand and encouraging signs of collaboration within the industry to support MNOs across regions to realise the benefits of Open RAN.”
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