Equipment vendor Rricsson has announced an open laboratory for collaboration and innovation with Ericsson Cloud Radio Access Network (RAN) customers and partners. It said Ericsson Open Lab is located at its R&D site in Ottawa but accessible to customers globally by virtual means. Ericsson will support these activities from its locations around the world.
At the Ottawa site, 100 MHz of indoor mid-band spectrum and 60 MHz of indoor/outdoor mid-band spectrum is available for testing and co-creation. Customers and partners can test Cloud RAN capabilities based on their own spectral holdings and use requirements on indoor and outdoor networks.
Ericsson Open Lab enables innovation to complement existing RAN products, aims to pursue and realise new deployments and 5G uses, and create opportunities to increase automation and cut manual intervention. The laboratory offers space to explore Open RAN technologies, including aspects such as virtualisation, management and orchestration.
Ericsson Open Lab collaboration will use Ericsson cloud-native infrastructure technology and RAN software advancements on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) servers and acceleration hardware. It will also seek to foster cooperation in machine learning, network automation and optimisation with communications service providers and industry partners. These include KDDI, Ooredoo, Orange, Softbank Corp, Turkcell, Intel, Nvidia, Red Hat and Wind River.
