Telefonica announced that its corporate venture vehicle Telefonica Innovation Ventures (TIV) has become the latest investor in US-based mobile technology company Altiostar Networks. Under the terms of a strategic agreement, Telefonica will invest an undisclosed sum in Altiostar’s open virtualised RAN (open vRAN) technology and become a full member of the US company's newly-created Technology Advisory Committee alongside other investors, including Japan’s Rakuten.
Both Telefonica and Altiostar were early members of the O-RAN Alliance, an industry consortium set up in 2018 to foster open architecture and standardised interfaces that are critical for building and deploying next-generation wireless infrastructure. In a statement, Telefonica said it selected Altiostar as its open RAN partner of choice to pave the way for both established and new telecom operators to adopt open, cloud technologies and deploy web-scale networks in the future.
Altiostar provides a 5G-ready virtualised open RAN software platform that supports open interfaces and disaggregates the hardware from the software to build an open multi-vendor web-scale network. “Our investment in Altiostar… will help us innovate in order to build the next generation of networks, improving efficiencies and leveraging network flexibility to develop potential new services to our customers,” said Telefonica’s chief innovation officer Gonzalo Martin-Villa.
