Written by Stephan Broszio of Deutsche Telekom
Deutsche Telekom has put its key learnings gained from the O-RAN Town project into a white paper. The primary objective of O-RAN Town was to achieve the deployment of truly multi-vendor open RAN solution based on O-RAN ALLIANCE specifications. And based there upon get operational experience via a friendly user trial.
Deutsche Telekom has been at the forefront of the open RAN movement from the start. Intuitively, the opening of the RAN to enable an intelligent and interoperable system makes a lot of sense. It will create a more robust ecosystem that offers MNOs more choice to mix and match components from different vendors, greater deployment automation and flexibility, as well as opportunities to increase service innovation. Open RAN has made great progress since then and continues to mature. Unsurprisingly, the overall design also comes with its own complexities. To have the greatest impact on open RAN solution development, Deutsche Telekom is prioritizing the development of multi-vendor open RAN for a scaled, high-performance deployment in a brownfield operator network environment.
To assess the technology, deployment, and operational challenges, we piloted a multi-vendor open RAN solution in our live environment in Germany. The pilot, which we named O-RAN Town, was established in Neubrandenburg. In June 2021, the first site went live at O-RAN Town, providing 5G services with massive MIMO integrated into the live network. Together with our technology partners, Mavenir, Dell Technologies, Intel, NEC and Fujitsu we successfully integrated an open RAN solution into the live network of Telekom Deutschland.
The results and experience gained during the O-RAN Town trial deployment reaffirm our commitment at Deutsche Telekom to make open RAN the technology of choice for future networks - and bring its benefits to our customers across Europe. The learnings from O-RAN Town have helped to shape our contribution to the activities of the open RAN MoU group of European operators, who are advancing various aspects of the open RAN ecosystem through a set of actions, topics spanning from maturity to security and energy efficiency. Last but not least, it has informed our requirement setting and decision making as we prepare for the next stage of our open RAN journey at Deutsche Telekom. As said in December, Deutsche Telekom has been qualifying vendors in preparation for an initial commercial rollout of open RAN from 2023/24.
Read the orignal article here
